Posted on 09/20/2013 5:03:14 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Happy times are all alike, nestled in the comfortable batting of peace, growth, and stability. Every unhappy time is unhappy in its own way.
America has been blessed because, since the end of the Great Depression, our nation has experienced only two periods of deep discontent that lasted a decade or more. The first was the 1970s. We are living through the second today. Which was worse?
The popular mind often misremembers the past. For instance, these days the 1950s are held out as a time deserving special scorn. Stories set in the Eisenhower era are often shot through with contempt for the racism, sexism, hypocrisy, and dissatisfaction of American life. But this is revisionism; by many measures—wages, unemployment, home sales, marital stability, births, savings rates, upward mobility—the ’50s were an idyll.
What’s more, the happy times of the 1950s stretched into the 1960s. So long that “The ’60s” as we remember them—Woodstock, long hair, free love—didn’t really get underway until 1967 and continued well into the 1970s. That’s one of the central insights of David Frum’s wonderful book about the ’70s, How We Got Here. His other insight is that whatever people want to believe about the ’50s and ’60s, the stretch from 1967 to 1979 was a rarely mitigated disaster.
Many people remember the headlines from the 1970s: the shooting war in Vietnam and the quiet but existential threat of the larger Cold War; a president nearly impeached; oil shocks that forced people to stand in line for gasoline. But the problems in America were both broader and deeper.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
I’ve always found how people feel about “the 60s” to be a remarkably good indicator of liberal/conservative attitude.
Liberals think the 60s were just wonderful and pine to relive them, conservatives think, correctly IMO, they were a disaster we still haven’t recovered from.
This is wayyyyy worse than the 70’s....and no end in sight.
As with most all societies ... we've experienced our share of good and bad ... and it is just the way things go.
Our task, as thinking men and women, is to induce the ability to gather information (knowledge) and teach the use of it (wisdom)
Then we sit back, pray .. and hope we were correct.
Have to say I was ACDU in the USN in the ‘70s and from my perspective, those were pretty good times esp. considering the two MAJOR raises we received under Jimmah Carter - yes, Jimmah, not RR. That said, 1980 was a GREAT year!
No other time in our modern history compares to today.
Dissension, argument, disagreement, economic ups and downs are always with us.
But in no other time have we had a president and an administration dedicated to doing away with the US constitution and “fundamentally changing” America into a muslim idolizing, anti-Christian, anti-white, racist, socialist, Big Government utopia.
"Insight" and "Wonderful" are not two things I associate with David Frum.
I think every decade of the 20th century had its warts. As they reached individuals some decades were worse or better than others. One thing about the sixties we have not and will never recover from is the foundations of society were shaken. Some of those like segregation needed to be shaken up, others like respect for the country did not. The 60’s also spawned the rise of the liberal democrat party we have today. The old guard conservative dems who supported the military and patriotism were kicked aside. Lastly, the great lust for possessions began in earnest and the explosion of consumer debt began in earnest along with the explosion in government spending.
But the overall conclusion seems to be that we've lost our middle class, and it's not coming back. I agree with that assessment. The educational base, the work ethic, the moral foundations that made America exceptional have all been wiped away and these things are extremely hard to get back. I don't see it happening. So, yeah, we will be a stratified society.
The author seems to conclude the technical entrepreneurs will do well and occupy the top rungs. Perhaps. I think it is more accurate to say that the politically connected will do well and occupy the top rungs. Technical entrepreneurs may be politically connected. If not, then they will be consumed by their competitors: the politics is more important than the technology.
We're heading for a feudal society. The government will be all that matters. The peasants will labor in the fields on behalf of their betters.
I'm amazed that it has come to this, but I see only a couple ways it could be stopped.
Indeed. The proof being that Carter didn’t get re-elected whereas the muslim did.
Thanks for mentioning this, which is often considered, even by conservatives, to be a conservative viewpoint. Isn't, IMO.
The late ‘60s is when the maybe irreversible decline started. Viet Nam intervention, the government getting more involved in people’s lives, excuses instead of accountability, lowered standards and the drug culture (legal and illegal) are all part of it. Another thing is that the US grew too much. We were better as a less populated, self-sufficient, more isolated country. JMHO
Now us worse. The treasury has been looted.
RE: Now us worse. The treasury has been looted.
What we actually have are the chickens of the late 60’s and the 70’s coming home to roost.
Having done college and the military in the 70’s I recall when all the bus drivers were high, the police couldn’t control society and we were as decadent as it gets. The unions almost wrecked the economy, the military was useless and on drugs and Reagan appeared to make us all behave as we knew we should have been all along. Thatcher did the same in GB. We’re at the tipping point now, where is Thatcher ? Where is Reagan ? When they burst onto the world, there was still enough left to work with that they could have such massive impact. We have one more shot to turn this thing around or its time to find a new place and start over. 48% of first time births to unwed mothers? For real ? We’re the new Sodom and Gomorrah.
Although good jobs were hard to find, I recall the 1970’s as an era in which the economy continued to expand, at least in California. For example, it was during the 1970’s that housing tracts began to replace vineyards in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties and the cow pastures of Irvine were transformed into a city. I don’t recall seeing padlocked factories and warehouses, abandoned car dealerships, or in every strip mall seeing signs in front of shuttered businesses that read “for sale,” “for lease,” or “available.”
What has happened to the culture is far worse today than just a decade of really bad disco music.
Whether he is wrong or right is beside the point. What made an impression on me was that this fellow—a young man of copious wealth and ambition, who was one of the few winners from the Great Recession—believed that, as bad as things were in America today, we hadn’t yet touched bottom.
This is the real problem - for the increasingly "former" middle class, there is no road back. The international finance cartel has gamed the system to skim off so much productive capacity that Main Street can't possibly come back, short of a serious government failure and subsequent inability to collect taxes or regulate. That this rake-off will eventually kill Wall Street, too, doesn't seem to matter to them - stranglers of Golden Geese never look beyond the next meal.
The dark years remain ahead of us.
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