May 15, 2009

Book: “How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse"

Quotes that struck me from "How We Got Here – The 70s: The Decades That Brought You Modern Life – For Better or Worse,” by David Frum, resident scholar at AEI and former Bush43 speechwriter.

  • “The social transformation of the 1970s was real and was permanent. It left behind a country that was more dynamic, more competitive, more tolerant; less deferential, less self-confident, less united; more socially-equal, less economically equal; more expressive, more risk-averse, more sexual; less literate, less polite, less reticent.”
  • “37 million American – meaning one household out of four – had suffered a rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny or auto theft in 1973. In cities of more than 100,000 population, the victimization rate was one household out of every three.”
  • [Eisenstadt v. Baird] “Every era tacitly places one liberty ahead of all others; one that must always prevail when values conflict. For late 18th-century Americans, that liberty was freedom of religion. For late 19th-century Americans, it was the right to own and dispose of property. For the 20th-century Americans it was sexual freedom.”
  • “The 1879 Connecticut statue overturned by Griswold had not been enforced in decades. The birth-control pill appeared on the market in 1961, a decade before the birth rate plunged. It was women’s preferences, not contraceptive techniques, that changed in the 1970s. The women of the 1970s wanted small families – often, they wanted no family at all.”
  • “The dumbing down of the curriculum was encouraged by changes within the teaching progression. The 1970s were the decade in which teaching was transformed from a low-paying, relatively prestigious profession to a relatively well-paid, unprestigious occupation.”
  • “What divides left-wing social activism from traditionalist is the locus of the sin to be stamped out. The left has usually been drawn to collective problem (segregation, poverty, sexism, the war in Vietnam); the traditionalists, to individual vices and weakness (drunkenness, drug addiction, abortion.)”
  • “More than two-thirds of the women who turned eighteen between the end of the Korean War and the Kennedy inauguration acknowledged sleeping with only one man as of their thirtieth birthday – their fiancé or husband, presumably. Only 2 percent of the women who turned eighteen between 1971 and 1980 could say the same thing on their thirtieth birthdays.”
  • “If nonmarital sex between consenting adults was okay, as a majority of American was coming to believe, how did it become wrong if those adults happened both to be women or both to be men?”
  • “It is telling that of the thirty-five states that ultimately ratified the ERA, twenty-two did so in the ten months before Roe v. Wade, and only thirteen in the ten years after.”
  • “Between 1972 and 1980, the proportion of Americans who…paid attention to public affairs “most of the time” dropped from 36 percent to 26 percent…But was it really so surprising? For a decade, power had been massively and systematically transferred from the elective branches of government, where it could be controlled, to no-elective branches, where it could not…Was it surprising that a country whose government had decided to treat its people like subjects should find that those same people no longer felt themselves to be citizens?”
  • “In 1980, there were 27 million poor people in America, or about 12.4 percent of the population, approximately the same proportion as in 1965. The level of poverty [after LBJ’s “Great Society” efforts] in the United States had not much changed over those fifteen years, but its character had. Poverty, before 1960 mostly rural and white, became urban and nonwhite. Almost 70 percent of America’s poor lived in metropolitan areas in 1980.”
  • “[After the 70s,] Americans were not retuning to the era of laissez faire. Rugged individualism no longer swayed them, Neither, however, did the social-democratic ethos of the middle years of the century. Americans were moving on to something new, a creed that blended the antique ideal of self-reliance with a soft sense of entitlement for those who made some minimal effort on their own behalf,. It was a fuzzy political idea – perfect for the fuzzy era to come – and the struggle to imbue it with meaning would define the politics of the post-Cold War era.”
  • “The parents’ myth [of the “Greatest Generation”] is much more appealing than the other: Who would not be prouder of having fought through he mud of Guadalcanal than having fornicated in the mud at Woodstock? But…it is as foolish to idealize the past as to condescend to it…Like them or loathe them, the middle decades of the twentieth century were an entirely anomalous period in American history. Never had the state been so strong, ever had people submitted as uncomplainingly, never had the county been more economically equal, never had it bee more ethically homogenous, seldom was its political consensus more overpowering.”
  • “The Vietnam war did not merely discredit the government that chose to wage it; it discredited the habits of mind that made the war possible; it discredited the very style and sensibility of mid-century America, from Bob Hope’s entertainment of the troops to the coats and ties in college dining lounges. It taught an entire generation the oppositional style that to this day so often substitutes for real politics.

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