After a few years off, here is another year in review via books I've read.
This year I read a lot about the 1970s and the cultural changes that took us from the radicalism of the 60s to the conservatism of the 80s. Bruce Schulman in his succinctly titled book, The Seventies, suggests the decade's changes were as momentous as those of the 1930's, but without nearly the same recognition.
In Schulman's view, the combination of turning inward away from radicalism and toward counterculturalism on the left, intersected with the growth of the Sun Belt. Older cities in the north spiraled as whites and jobs left. Political power shifted to the Sun Belt with their suburban development patterns and mindset.
As Lisa McGirr describes in Suburban Warriors, those sun belt cultural values were distinct. Focusing on Orange County, CA, McGirr describes the basic attributes:
- Sun Belt cities in the early years at least were substantially impacted by federal spending on military manufacturing, R&D, and direct spending on bases.
- Sun Belt cities were dependent on that spending, but it wasn't an overt subsidy. Residents tended to think of themselves as pioneers, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. The traditional fear and distrust of wall street bankers was projected onto Washington DC.
- At the same time, there was an implicit understanding that the local economy depended on America's posture in the cold war. That encouraged extreme anti-communism, it fit their cultural values and the arms race was good for their business.
- The sun belt grew through in-migration, and new residents living in suburban development had limited organic social interactions, there was no public square or central downtown. That left people hungry for opportunities where they could interact and build common ground with each other. Churches, especially evangelical churches, were happy to oblige. And as people learned with the 1964 Goldwater campaign, so too could a political party.
In Rule and Ruin, Geoffrey Kabaservice writes about the impact that largely Sun Belt conservatives had on the Republican Party. They actively contested northern liberals for control of the party, not hesitating to "primary" them or withhold support in general elections. Conservatives preferred Democrats to liberal Republicans, the notion of a "big tent" was anathema to them. Liberal Republicans understood what was happening and fought back as best they could, but lost. A major factor was the lack of funding for a liberal Republican movement, there was no equivalent to the Koch Brothers. Nelson Rockefeller could have played that role, but he chose instead to spend his money on his own campaigns for president. By the time Reagan took office liberals had been reduced to a negligible presence in the Republican Party. Reagan could talk about a "big tent" then because party control was conservative and no longer contested.
Finally, with Haynes Johnson's In the Absence of Power I read about Jimmy Carter. Here was a guy who nominally could have offered an alternative for the Sun Belt, an infusion of liberalism. The trouble was, he was a really bad leader.
He made decisions in isolation, he would listen to people but nobody knew if they were getting through to him or not. When he made decisions on his own, he was left with sole ownership of them. Nobody else was invested in making his plans work out. He just assumed everyone understood what was right like he did, and that everyone would then do the right thing because that's what he would have done. Carter should have been a judge, not a president.
The story of how we got where we are is big and tangled, but I think it worth learning.
