My Ambivalent Relationship with the Nation

By my title, you might expect to read something deep about my vexed relationship with the American nation. In the midst of end-of-semester grading, something as interesting as that will have to wait. Instead, I briefly offer you an example of why this long-time subscriber to the Nation magazine has what might be termed a love-apathy relationship with that bastion of American left-liberalism. On the one hand, as the last left-ish weekly newsmagazine, it's an important institution. On the other, I've grown tired of the stale predictability of its editorials, which critique the Democrats from the left until it comes to election time, when the specter of Republican rule disciplines Katrina vanden Heuvel's editorial board to step into line. I've become weary of most of the Nation columnists, who harp on the same issues over and over and over: Naomi Klein on the immorality of corporate rule, Katha Pollitt on the constant threat to women, Gary Younge on how weird American racism seems to a black Brit, Eric Alterman on the lack of liberalism among the so-called liberal media punditry. It's not that these writers are always or even often wrong, it's just that dead horses can only be beaten so many times. The only Nation columnist whom I still enjoy reading is that eclectic old Marxist Alexander Cockburn, which speaks to my own interests, but also to the fact that he mixes up his topics enough to keep me coming back. And because he slays conservative and liberal orthodoxies. He even makes counterintuitive, almost deranged arguments denying human-made global warming that I can't help but laugh at.

Keeping such ambivalence and apathy in mind, I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, but decided to re-up based on four wonderful essays that appeared in recent issues. I guess my faith has been restored, for now. Here are links and very brief synopses to these four essays. Enjoy! (I can access the entire articles at the Nation website, but I am unsure if this is because they are free to everyone or if I can get behind the pay wall due to being a subscriber).

1. Corey Robin, "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom." In this essay, CUNY political scientists Corey Robin criticizes how liberals misidentify the source of conservatism's appeal. The article is generated from his forthcoming book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He writes: "Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right's economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion." Instead, he argues that conservatism is appealing because it has best tapped into the deep well of American rhetoric on freedom. He wishes the left would follow suit, and make the case that big business thwarts freedom, not government. We should argue for an empowered government to enlarge freedom, instead of as a source for security and equality, which endorses a passive conception of politics.

2. Joshua Clover, "Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism's Permanent Contradiction." This is a highly entertaining review of two books on neoliberalism. I quote Clover's concluding sentences: "The current catastrophe is a rare creature, to be sure. But it is not a black swan; it is a zombie. It is the last crisis come calling, and the one before that and before that again—not just returned but fortified by the intervening years and the deferral of a reckoning. This crisis that keeps returning, now dressed in finery, now in rags, is evidently not a monster sprung from one particular deviation. Global crisis is, increasingly, the unnatural natural state of modern capital. It will not be laid to rest by fiddling with the alignment of parts, much less returning to a previous mode—these parts, these modes, are what set it shambling forward, hungry, blindly grasping, in the first place."

3. Martha Nussbaum, "What Makes Life Good?" Nussbaum, University of Chicago philosopher, uses empirical, on-the-ground evidence from her studies of women in south Asia to make the case that "measurements of economic growth fail to capture many facets of well-being." It's not a novel argument, but the essay puts it in line with what she describes as a new theory of social justice: the "Capabilities Approach." She describes this approach: "Unlike the dominant approaches, it begins with a commitment to the equal dignity of all people, whatever their class, religion, caste, race or gender, and it is committed to the attainment, for all, of lives that are worthy of that equal dignity. Both a comparative account of the quality of life and a theory of basic social justice, it remedies the major deficiencies of the dominant approaches. It is sensitive to distribution, focusing particularly on the struggles of traditionally excluded or marginalized groups. It is sensitive to the complexity and the qualitative diversity of the goals that people pursue. Rather than trying to squeeze all these diverse goals into a single box, it carefully examines the relationships among them, thinking about how they support and complement one another. It also takes into account that people may need different quantities of resources if they are to come up to the same level of ability to choose and act, particularly if they begin from different social positions."

4. Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak." This is a review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg that is beautifully written and will be of interest to anyone who even remotely agrees with Luxemburg's basic philosophy: "From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace."

My Ambivalent Relationship with the Nation

By my title, you might expect to read something deep about my vexed relationship with the American nation. In the midst of end-of-semester grading, something as interesting as that will have to wait. Instead, I briefly offer you an example of why this long-time subscriber to the Nation magazine has what might be termed a love-apathy relationship with that bastion of American left-liberalism. On the one hand, as the last left-ish weekly newsmagazine, it's an important institution. On the other, I've grown tired of the stale predictability of its editorials, which critique the Democrats from the left until it comes to election time, when the specter of Republican rule disciplines Katrina vanden Heuvel's editorial board to step into line. I've become weary of most of the Nation columnists, who harp on the same issues over and over and over: Naomi Klein on the immorality of corporate rule, Katha Pollitt on the constant threat to women, Gary Younge on how weird American racism seems to a black Brit, Eric Alterman on the lack of liberalism among the so-called liberal media punditry. It's not that these writers are always or even often wrong, it's just that dead horses can only be beaten so many times. The only Nation columnist whom I still enjoy reading is that eclectic old Marxist Alexander Cockburn, which speaks to my own interests, but also to the fact that he mixes up his topics enough to keep me coming back. And because he slays conservative and liberal orthodoxies. He even makes counterintuitive, almost deranged arguments denying human-made global warming that I can't help but laugh at.

Keeping such ambivalence and apathy in mind, I was on the verge of letting my subscription lapse, but decided to re-up based on four wonderful essays that appeared in recent issues. I guess my faith has been restored, for now. Here are links and very brief synopses to these four essays. Enjoy! (I can access the entire articles at the Nation website, but I am unsure if this is because they are free to everyone or if I can get behind the pay wall due to being a subscriber).

1. Corey Robin, "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom." In this essay, CUNY political scientists Corey Robin criticizes how liberals misidentify the source of conservatism's appeal. The article is generated from his forthcoming book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. He writes: "Confident that no one short of a millionaire could endorse the right's economic ideology, everyone from Clintonite centrists to radical populists has treated conservatism as essentially a politics of distraction and delusion." Instead, he argues that conservatism is appealing because it has best tapped into the deep well of American rhetoric on freedom. He wishes the left would follow suit, and make the case that big business thwarts freedom, not government. We should argue for an empowered government to enlarge freedom, instead of as a source for security and equality, which endorses a passive conception of politics.

2. Joshua Clover, "Swans and Zombies: Neoliberalism's Permanent Contradiction." This is a highly entertaining review of two books on neoliberalism. I quote Clover's concluding sentences: "The current catastrophe is a rare creature, to be sure. But it is not a black swan; it is a zombie. It is the last crisis come calling, and the one before that and before that again—not just returned but fortified by the intervening years and the deferral of a reckoning. This crisis that keeps returning, now dressed in finery, now in rags, is evidently not a monster sprung from one particular deviation. Global crisis is, increasingly, the unnatural natural state of modern capital. It will not be laid to rest by fiddling with the alignment of parts, much less returning to a previous mode—these parts, these modes, are what set it shambling forward, hungry, blindly grasping, in the first place."

3. Martha Nussbaum, "What Makes Life Good?" Nussbaum, University of Chicago philosopher, uses empirical, on-the-ground evidence from her studies of women in south Asia to make the case that "measurements of economic growth fail to capture many facets of well-being." It's not a novel argument, but the essay puts it in line with what she describes as a new theory of social justice: the "Capabilities Approach." She describes this approach: "Unlike the dominant approaches, it begins with a commitment to the equal dignity of all people, whatever their class, religion, caste, race or gender, and it is committed to the attainment, for all, of lives that are worthy of that equal dignity. Both a comparative account of the quality of life and a theory of basic social justice, it remedies the major deficiencies of the dominant approaches. It is sensitive to distribution, focusing particularly on the struggles of traditionally excluded or marginalized groups. It is sensitive to the complexity and the qualitative diversity of the goals that people pursue. Rather than trying to squeeze all these diverse goals into a single box, it carefully examines the relationships among them, thinking about how they support and complement one another. It also takes into account that people may need different quantities of resources if they are to come up to the same level of ability to choose and act, particularly if they begin from different social positions."

4. Vivian Gornick, "History and Heartbreak." This is a review of The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg that is beautifully written and will be of interest to anyone who even remotely agrees with Luxemburg's basic philosophy: "From earliest youth, Rosa had looked upon radical politics as a means of living life fully. She wanted everything: marriage and children, books and music, walks on a summer evening and the revolution. Personal happiness and the struggle for social justice, she said, shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. If people gave up sex and art while making the revolution, they’d produce a world more heartless than the one they were setting out to replace."

Off-Topic Methodology Bleg: Teaching History Backwards

For about a month I have been pondering a radical revision to the way I teach U.S. survey courses. After witnessing students becoming more interested in the subject matter as we move closer and closer to the present, I have been wondering about getting this material to them earlier. For awhile I thought about a substantial introductory teaser unit. Perhaps by showing a solid documentary (e.g. *The Weather Underground* or *Fog of War*) and working over material from the 1960s to the present, for a few weeks, I might get them sufficiently excited to understand the virtue of working from the distant past to recent times. But I'm not happy about the potential for an abrupt content change in moving from the 1990s to, say, the 1890s. This has led me to think about conducting an entire twentieth-century survey, next year, in reverse chronological order. Yes, I may teach a survey backwards.

There are two reasons for this. First, something internal and theoretical. I am intensely interested in the notion of an "archaeology of the present." To me, this is real, relevant (I see you wincing), and a radical change from the way most history is taught. It's fun to work from the news backwards.

My second reason for considering a reverse-chronological presentation is external. For students, meaning first-years and uninterested upperclass folks, I am convinced that the best way to show the 'relevance' (again, that dreaded word---for some) of history is to demonstrate that remnants of the past exist in everyday life. When I say everyday I mean materially and intellectually. I really do think that tracing ideas and topics backwards will give students a firm, personal, and empirical anchor for thinking about the past. I believe, or hope (depending on my mood), that this will excite those not previously enthused. Perhaps this is where I'm riding the line of gimmickry. My feeling is that this approach gives the students an anchor in things they know---never a bad idea when trying to stimulate skeptics. Anecdotally, I asked students in one of my upper-division courses for their reaction to this idea. Around 90 percent thought it could work, though one said she had a high school teacher who tried this and failed miserably.

Methodologically, I am aware of the pros (and here) and cons (and here). By following the links, particularly number two of my 'pros', you'll see that what I am proposing is not new; the idea dates to around 1971, and probably earlier. As for the cons, of course I don't believe I will get fired for this---or else I would not consider the change. Fears of traditionalists history professors and methodologically conservative skeptics also won't dissuade me.

I understand, however, the fears of presentism. In the study by Misco and Paterson, titled " An Old Fad of Great Promise: Reverse Chronology History Teaching in Social Studies Classes" (again, link #2 in the pros above), I think that some of their proposals border on the fallacy of presentism. You can't simply study history in its full breadth and contextual uncertainty by working backwards from the interests of students. I think the draw in teaching history backwards is viewing causation as something of a mystery, as an inductive process, which linear (i.e. textbookish) presentations avoid---to their detriment.

If I don't do this, it will be because I decide either (a) it won't work or (b) I don't have the time, this coming year, to institute the change with the necessary energy. I suspect (b) will rule my decision, but am curious to hear from others who have either done this or thought about it.

So here are my questions for USIH folks: How will this fail? What are the philosophical problems with teaching history inductively? What are the methodological issues? What am I downplaying or not considering? - TL

Off-Topic Methodology Bleg: Teaching History Backwards

For about a month I have been pondering a radical revision to the way I teach U.S. survey courses. After witnessing students becoming more interested in the subject matter as we move closer and closer to the present, I have been wondering about getting this material to them earlier. For awhile I thought about a substantial introductory teaser unit. Perhaps by showing a solid documentary (e.g. *The Weather Underground* or *Fog of War*) and working over material from the 1960s to the present, for a few weeks, I might get them sufficiently excited to understand the virtue of working from the distant past to recent times. But I'm not happy about the potential for an abrupt content change in moving from the 1990s to, say, the 1890s. This has led me to think about conducting an entire twentieth-century survey, next year, in reverse chronological order. Yes, I may teach a survey backwards.

There are two reasons for this. First, something internal and theoretical. I am intensely interested in the notion of an "archaeology of the present." To me, this is real, relevant (I see you wincing), and a radical change from the way most history is taught. It's fun to work from the news backwards.

My second reason for considering a reverse-chronological presentation is external. For students, meaning first-years and uninterested upperclass folks, I am convinced that the best way to show the 'relevance' (again, that dreaded word---for some) of history is to demonstrate that remnants of the past exist in everyday life. When I say everyday I mean materially and intellectually. I really do think that tracing ideas and topics backwards will give students a firm, personal, and empirical anchor for thinking about the past. I believe, or hope (depending on my mood), that this will excite those not previously enthused. Perhaps this is where I'm riding the line of gimmickry. My feeling is that this approach gives the students an anchor in things they know---never a bad idea when trying to stimulate skeptics. Anecdotally, I asked students in one of my upper-division courses for their reaction to this idea. Around 90 percent thought it could work, though one said she had a high school teacher who tried this and failed miserably.

Methodologically, I am aware of the pros (and here) and cons (and here). By following the links, particularly number two of my 'pros', you'll see that what I am proposing is not new; the idea dates to around 1971, and probably earlier. As for the cons, of course I don't believe I will get fired for this---or else I would not consider the change. Fears of traditionalists history professors and methodologically conservative skeptics also won't dissuade me.

I understand, however, the fears of presentism. In the study by Misco and Paterson, titled " An Old Fad of Great Promise: Reverse Chronology History Teaching in Social Studies Classes" (again, link #2 in the pros above), I think that some of their proposals border on the fallacy of presentism. You can't simply study history in its full breadth and contextual uncertainty by working backwards from the interests of students. I think the draw in teaching history backwards is viewing causation as something of a mystery, as an inductive process, which linear (i.e. textbookish) presentations avoid---to their detriment.

If I don't do this, it will be because I decide either (a) it won't work or (b) I don't have the time, this coming year, to institute the change with the necessary energy. I suspect (b) will rule my decision, but am curious to hear from others who have either done this or thought about it.

So here are my questions for USIH folks: How will this fail? What are the philosophical problems with teaching history inductively? What are the methodological issues? What am I downplaying or not considering? - TL

The Sixties? So What!

The image on the left is the poster for the documentary on SDS, Rebels with a Cause. The promotional material for the film declares: Rebels

"chronicles the movements for social change of the Sixties that began with the civil rights movement and culminated with the angry protests against the US war in Vietnam. Told through the eyes of SDS members, the film is about far more than SDS. It’s about the values, motivations, and actions of a generation that lost its innocence but gained a sense of power and purpose. It’s about a decade that changed America."

That about sums up the problem with sixties historiography recently identified in Ben's post and the comments about his post. Indeed, the fact that I can toss off the acronym "SDS" knowing that we understand which group I am referencing, is part of problem. And Rick Perlstein's essay in Lingua Franca (thanks JJ) when he was still editor of that now defunct journal, nicely captures the battle younger historians had fought to wrestle the 1960s away from the "observer-participant" generation.

I suggested that the state of sixties historiography might not be so bad and wanted to provide few points for further discussion:

First, the generation that attempted to challenge prevailing wisdom about the significance of the 1960s ran up against both popular as well as professional resistance. The sixties generation of scholars who built up a one-dimensional account of their decade might have been a formidable force, but their influence pales in comparison to the machine that made money off of mythologizing a decade to a generation eager to lap it up.

Second, Perlstein quotes Richard Ellis speaking about his experience of hitting a professional wall when he tried to argue that SDS "devolved into dogmatic factionalism." While not discounting that experience, how might we conclude that there were gatekeepers in the profession that stymied scholarship about the 1960s? From the cross-section of scholars Perlstein spoke to, including David Farber, Thomas Sugrue, and Doug Rossinow (among others) its hard for me to buy that the profession kept good historians from publishing really good work.

Third, the material of the 1960s as a decade seemed to inspire some innovative historical work. Along these lines I see David Farber's first book, Chicago '68 (1988) as pioneering effort to integrate a multitude of voices that comprised the 1960s in a way that did not privilege any particular group. Other books in this genre might include: Tim Tyson's Radio Free Dixie and a colleague of mine from graduate school, Derek Catsum's Freedom's Main Line, just to name a few.

Finally, in the field of diplomatic history, Jeremi Suri's 2003 book Power and Protest established a new intellectual platform for doing international history by combining multi-national archives with very solid political, intellectual, and social histories.

I am curious where others see the historiography of the 1960s headed and how scholarship of other decades might help a critical revisiting of the 1960s.

The Sixties? So What!

The image on the left is the poster for the documentary on SDS, Rebels with a Cause. The promotional material for the film declares: Rebels

"chronicles the movements for social change of the Sixties that began with the civil rights movement and culminated with the angry protests against the US war in Vietnam. Told through the eyes of SDS members, the film is about far more than SDS. It’s about the values, motivations, and actions of a generation that lost its innocence but gained a sense of power and purpose. It’s about a decade that changed America."

That about sums up the problem with sixties historiography recently identified in Ben's post and the comments about his post. Indeed, the fact that I can toss off the acronym "SDS" knowing that we understand which group I am referencing, is part of problem. And Rick Perlstein's essay in Lingua Franca (thanks JJ) when he was still editor of that now defunct journal, nicely captures the battle younger historians had fought to wrestle the 1960s away from the "observer-participant" generation.

I suggested that the state of sixties historiography might not be so bad and wanted to provide few points for further discussion:

First, the generation that attempted to challenge prevailing wisdom about the significance of the 1960s ran up against both popular as well as professional resistance. The sixties generation of scholars who built up a one-dimensional account of their decade might have been a formidable force, but their influence pales in comparison to the machine that made money off of mythologizing a decade to a generation eager to lap it up.

Second, Perlstein quotes Richard Ellis speaking about his experience of hitting a professional wall when he tried to argue that SDS "devolved into dogmatic factionalism." While not discounting that experience, how might we conclude that there were gatekeepers in the profession that stymied scholarship about the 1960s? From the cross-section of scholars Perlstein spoke to, including David Farber, Thomas Sugrue, and Doug Rossinow (among others) its hard for me to buy that the profession kept good historians from publishing really good work.

Third, the material of the 1960s as a decade seemed to inspire some innovative historical work. Along these lines I see David Farber's first book, Chicago '68 (1988) as pioneering effort to integrate a multitude of voices that comprised the 1960s in a way that did not privilege any particular group. Other books in this genre might include: Tim Tyson's Radio Free Dixie and a colleague of mine from graduate school, Derek Catsum's Freedom's Main Line, just to name a few.

Finally, in the field of diplomatic history, Jeremi Suri's 2003 book Power and Protest established a new intellectual platform for doing international history by combining multi-national archives with very solid political, intellectual, and social histories.

I am curious where others see the historiography of the 1960s headed and how scholarship of other decades might help a critical revisiting of the 1960s.

Too Good Not to Repost

(h/t Crooked Timber)

Too Good Not to Repost

(h/t Crooked Timber)

Do You Still Read Hofstadter?

In continuation of what appears to be a series, I'd like to talk about Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter, of course, was the American political historian who taught at Columbia with other academic luminaries such as Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Though an immaculate stylist and one of the most influential historians of his generation, Hofstadter's star faded upon his (premature) death, before experiencing a slight revival with the publication of of David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Today his reputation is unclear to me, and I can't quite figure out the status of his work, even when it overlaps with my own field.

Hofstadter introduced several hugely influential terms into historical analysis and public debate, many of which you still hear: "status anxiety," "anti-intellectualism in American life," and "the paranoid style of American politics." And his books continue to be known, though many of them have various problems. I still run across references to his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, though I've never had the occasion to read it. His second book, The American Political Tradition, would prove the most lasting, but after Rogers Smith's work positing multiple traditions in American political life, I'm not sure that Hofstadter's book can hold up. The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, as Brian Ingrassia has pointed out in a recent comment, remains the fullest statement of academic freedom (at least as far as I know), even though it is so old. I've heard numerous people call Anti-Intellectualism in American Life a "brilliant but flawed book," but whenever I press them on the flaws, they are never quite forthcoming. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays continues to be known mainly for the titular essay. And, finally, there is The Age of Reform, a book that is still widely read but, many people assure me, the most problematic of the lot. In short, many of his books are still in some kind of circulation, some more than fifty years after he wrote them, but they are all of uncertain reliability.

So how are we to regard Richard Hofstadter? I think I'm not alone when I say that I have long had an intellectual crush on him. And I suspect that one of the reasons that his work is still read is that, even if you think that he is historiographically dated, he is just so fun to read. But what is the academic status of his individual works and of his oeuvre as a whole?

Do You Still Read Hofstadter?

In continuation of what appears to be a series, I'd like to talk about Richard Hofstadter. Hofstadter, of course, was the American political historian who taught at Columbia with other academic luminaries such as Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun. Though an immaculate stylist and one of the most influential historians of his generation, Hofstadter's star faded upon his (premature) death, before experiencing a slight revival with the publication of of David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Today his reputation is unclear to me, and I can't quite figure out the status of his work, even when it overlaps with my own field.

Hofstadter introduced several hugely influential terms into historical analysis and public debate, many of which you still hear: "status anxiety," "anti-intellectualism in American life," and "the paranoid style of American politics." And his books continue to be known, though many of them have various problems. I still run across references to his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, though I've never had the occasion to read it. His second book, The American Political Tradition, would prove the most lasting, but after Rogers Smith's work positing multiple traditions in American political life, I'm not sure that Hofstadter's book can hold up. The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, as Brian Ingrassia has pointed out in a recent comment, remains the fullest statement of academic freedom (at least as far as I know), even though it is so old. I've heard numerous people call Anti-Intellectualism in American Life a "brilliant but flawed book," but whenever I press them on the flaws, they are never quite forthcoming. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays continues to be known mainly for the titular essay. And, finally, there is The Age of Reform, a book that is still widely read but, many people assure me, the most problematic of the lot. In short, many of his books are still in some kind of circulation, some more than fifty years after he wrote them, but they are all of uncertain reliability.

So how are we to regard Richard Hofstadter? I think I'm not alone when I say that I have long had an intellectual crush on him. And I suspect that one of the reasons that his work is still read is that, even if you think that he is historiographically dated, he is just so fun to read. But what is the academic status of his individual works and of his oeuvre as a whole?

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

A Brief Stray Thought on the Historiography of the Seventies

In recent months, this blog has devoted numerous posts to the historiography of the 1970s, most recently in Andrew's consideration of of two excellent books on that period, Jefferson Cowie's Stayin' Alive and Daniel K. Williams's God's Own Party.

Like other USIH bloggers, I've found the recent explosion of interesting work on the 1970s to be really exciting.  A whole cohort of historians are asking critical questions about the recent past that intersect in interesting ways with U.S. intellectual history in general and my own scholarly interests in particular.  

Rather suddenly, I think, the historiography of the 1970s has become in certain ways richer, more coherent, and more interesting than the older and more established historiography of the 1960s.

There's obviously no simple explanation for this fact. Some of it, I suspect, has to do with the fact that, from the perspective of the early 21st century, the Seventies now seem to have been a more significant watershed decade than the Sixties.*  But I suspect that there's another, more strictly historiographical factor, at work here, too.

Much of the foundation of the historiography of the Sixties consisted of books by people who were, in one way or another, active participants in the events about which they wrote.  I'm thinking of books like Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward's Poor People's Movements, Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching, James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets, or Sara Evans's Personal Politics.  These were among the books I read when I studied the Sixties in graduate school at the end of the 1980s.  And I learned a ton from them. But the questions they ask and the stories they tell are very much grounded in the concerns of the historical actors themselves.  And these books in a sense created the foundational narratives to which younger historians of the Sixties like Lisa McGirr, Joe Crespino, and Doug Rossinow would find themselves responding to.  To get a historical perspective on that decade, this second generation of historians had to, in a sense, move beyond its immediate struggles.

Now there are some wonderful participant-observer books about aspects of the 1970s, too (among many half-finished books on my shelf is Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, a fascinating history of the New Communist Movement of the '70s, written by a participant).  But the core historiography of the Seventies, in part because it arrived fairly late to the party, has been created by historians a little more removed from the events about which they are writing than those who wrote the foundational texts of Sixties historiography.

The Seventies fascinates today precisely because of things we could only really see with the hindsight of history.  And the wonderful books about the period that have appeared in ever-increasing numbers over the last decade are distinctly historical in the questions they ask and the answers they offer.
____________________________________________
* I'd add that contemporary popular culture seems to suggest that the place of the Sixties and Seventies in American public memory is shifting, too.  For example, compare and contrast the very slowly emerging Sixties of Mad Men with the wild and woolly Seventies of Life on Mars....but this is a conversation for another post.

David Sehat in the Washington Post

USIH blogger David Sehat appears in the Washington Post today, as part of the paper's "Five Myths" series. Building on his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, today's column addresses "Five Myths About Church and State in America." He will be online at the paper's website at 11 AM ET to discuss his column. If you'd like to participate, you can click here to submit questions ahead of time or during the discussion.

Mike

David Sehat in the Washington Post

USIH blogger David Sehat appears in the Washington Post today, as part of the paper's "Five Myths" series. Building on his book The Myth of American Religious Freedom, today's column addresses "Five Myths About Church and State in America." He will be online at the paper's website at 11 AM ET to discuss his column. If you'd like to participate, you can click here to submit questions ahead of time or during the discussion.

Mike

After Ideology

(Dear Readers: This guest post is written by my good friend Corey Washington and his co-author Johanna Carr. I first got to know Corey in 2001, when he was still a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Since then he quit the philosophy business and got a second Ph.D. in neuroscience from Columbia. He's now a consultant in New York City. Corey's background gives him a fairly unique perspective, I think. I have always enjoyed our debates because he attacks issues from such a different vantage point. He and Johanna are in the beginning stages of writing a book that is an argument against the very notion of ideology. I asked him to write up a synopsis for the USIH blog, since this seems like the perfect venue for critical feedback on an essay in the realm of ideas. Like most of us, Corey loves a good debate. Enjoy.)

I recently finished reading two books endorsing atheism – God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Each gives a variety of reasons for believing that God does not exist, but the central argument offered by both men is a variation on Occam’s razor:

(a) The hypothesis that God (an all powerful, all knowing, all good being who intervenes in the world) exists is extraordinary.
(b) Being extraordinary, it requires extraordinary supporting evidence before it should be believed.
(c) There is no compelling, let alone extraordinary, evidence for God’s existence.
(d) Hence, one should infer that God does not exist.

Many of my friends are atheist (or agnostic), and mostly for reasons similar to that above. They do not believe in God, because they see no good evidence that he exists. Clearly, they engage in evidence based reasoning about religion. At the same time, almost all of them describe themselves as falling into some political grouping: Marxist, socialist, social democrat, liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist – sometimes per economics, sometimes per social issues, sometimes regarding both.

When they talk about politics, they often express very strong beliefs in political ideas based on very little evidence. They might claim legalizing cocaine would benefit society at large or more stimulus spending would be bad for the economy. Some maintain life would be better if there were no markets, others if there were no taxes. While some of these claims are extraordinary and others not, in each case the evidence presented clearly falls short of what a rational person would demand in order to endorse a given claim as vehemently as its advocates do.

It is clear that for most people support for their policy views follows from an underlying ideology rather than from strong evidence. They argue for no taxes because they believe small government is better. They argue for legalizing cocaine because they believe in the right to privacy. In very few cases, do they present a well-formed opinion based on research and evidence. And as any rational person knows only evidence, not ideology, is a sound basis for such empirical claims.

My friends are not unusual. Political beliefs, like religious beliefs, are usually based on very weak, and selective, evidence. People tend to have the same political orientation as their parents, which may result from environment, i.e. growing up in their parents’ household, or a genetic predisposition to a particular political orientation, as recent studies have indicated. People also often develop views as a result of hanging around others with a certain political orientation. Once formed, political views are maintained and reinforced by reading material that supports one’s positions and by discounting material that conflicts. Likewise, people often embrace views advocated by the “experts”, they find idedologically appealing, while discrediting those with equivalent credentials, whom they do not. (When I discuss economics with my friends in Amherst, MA, they quote economist Paul Krugman about as often as Christians quote Jesus.)

In short, ideology seems to be the equivalent of religion, without the God stuff.

Given how randomly political beliefs are formed and injudiciously maintained, we have little reason to be confident they are true. To see this, suppose you set out to maximize the number of true beliefs, and minimize the number of false beliefs, you have about a controversial issue. How should you proceed? You should probably do what scientists do when investigating a new subject: read a range of papers from credible sources; be careful to get different perspectives on the issue. Talk to experts in the field with varying points of views; get their assessments of what you have read and heard from others. If possible, you might even try to conduct your own experiments.

Throughout the process you would try to be very even-handed, weighing conflicting evidence for strength and credibility. You would also be hyper-critical of hypotheses you are considering endorsing – always looking for evidence that what you believe is wrong, so as to avoid coming to an incorrect conclusion. In the end, you might end up endorsing one view (if the evidence was overwhelming), but most likely you would end up taking an intermediate position. Notice how strikingly different this approach is from how people generally form their opinions on political issues.

There is good scientific evidence that political reasoning is based on innate, non-rational principles. Nevertheless, the fact that people reason so badly about politics is striking given that people are intelligent and believe strongly that it is important for their political beliefs to be true. Religion may also be innate and non-rational, but if people are rational enough to give up God-oriented religion because there is not sufficient evidence, why do they not give up ideologies as well?

When I ask this question, the responses are quite similar to what you hear when you discuss atheism with a religious person. Atheists/agnostics cannot imagine how you could act ethically, or more broadly make sense of the world, without an ideology. That is, ideology seems to give many atheists/agnostics a value system just as religion does for believers. I believe ideologies also provide people with a community of like-minded friends, as do religious beliefs, and people are loath to alienate themselves from their friends. But if your goal is to have an accurate political view of the world, what use are such ideologies and communities if they are based on beliefs one has very little reason to think are true?


Corey Washington's Background:
M.S., MIT, Linguistics, 1987.
PhD, Stanford, Philosophy, 1994
Asst. Prof, U Washington, 1992-1996
Asst. Prof. U Maryland, 1996-2003
PhD Columbia, Neuroscience, 2010
Corey is presently a New York City consultant.

Johanna Carr received her degree in Philosophy, emphasis on History of Science, from Stanford 1991. After years in the tech world, failing to effect any change in corporate politics, she is currently pursuing a second PhD in Motherhood.

After Ideology

(Dear Readers: This guest post is written by my good friend Corey Washington and his co-author Johanna Carr. I first got to know Corey in 2001, when he was still a philosophy professor at the University of Maryland. Since then he quit the philosophy business and got a second Ph.D. in neuroscience from Columbia. He's now a consultant in New York City. Corey's background gives him a fairly unique perspective, I think. I have always enjoyed our debates because he attacks issues from such a different vantage point. He and Johanna are in the beginning stages of writing a book that is an argument against the very notion of ideology. I asked him to write up a synopsis for the USIH blog, since this seems like the perfect venue for critical feedback on an essay in the realm of ideas. Like most of us, Corey loves a good debate. Enjoy.)

I recently finished reading two books endorsing atheism – God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. Each gives a variety of reasons for believing that God does not exist, but the central argument offered by both men is a variation on Occam’s razor:

(a) The hypothesis that God (an all powerful, all knowing, all good being who intervenes in the world) exists is extraordinary.
(b) Being extraordinary, it requires extraordinary supporting evidence before it should be believed.
(c) There is no compelling, let alone extraordinary, evidence for God’s existence.
(d) Hence, one should infer that God does not exist.

Many of my friends are atheist (or agnostic), and mostly for reasons similar to that above. They do not believe in God, because they see no good evidence that he exists. Clearly, they engage in evidence based reasoning about religion. At the same time, almost all of them describe themselves as falling into some political grouping: Marxist, socialist, social democrat, liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist – sometimes per economics, sometimes per social issues, sometimes regarding both.

When they talk about politics, they often express very strong beliefs in political ideas based on very little evidence. They might claim legalizing cocaine would benefit society at large or more stimulus spending would be bad for the economy. Some maintain life would be better if there were no markets, others if there were no taxes. While some of these claims are extraordinary and others not, in each case the evidence presented clearly falls short of what a rational person would demand in order to endorse a given claim as vehemently as its advocates do.

It is clear that for most people support for their policy views follows from an underlying ideology rather than from strong evidence. They argue for no taxes because they believe small government is better. They argue for legalizing cocaine because they believe in the right to privacy. In very few cases, do they present a well-formed opinion based on research and evidence. And as any rational person knows only evidence, not ideology, is a sound basis for such empirical claims.

My friends are not unusual. Political beliefs, like religious beliefs, are usually based on very weak, and selective, evidence. People tend to have the same political orientation as their parents, which may result from environment, i.e. growing up in their parents’ household, or a genetic predisposition to a particular political orientation, as recent studies have indicated. People also often develop views as a result of hanging around others with a certain political orientation. Once formed, political views are maintained and reinforced by reading material that supports one’s positions and by discounting material that conflicts. Likewise, people often embrace views advocated by the “experts”, they find idedologically appealing, while discrediting those with equivalent credentials, whom they do not. (When I discuss economics with my friends in Amherst, MA, they quote economist Paul Krugman about as often as Christians quote Jesus.)

In short, ideology seems to be the equivalent of religion, without the God stuff.

Given how randomly political beliefs are formed and injudiciously maintained, we have little reason to be confident they are true. To see this, suppose you set out to maximize the number of true beliefs, and minimize the number of false beliefs, you have about a controversial issue. How should you proceed? You should probably do what scientists do when investigating a new subject: read a range of papers from credible sources; be careful to get different perspectives on the issue. Talk to experts in the field with varying points of views; get their assessments of what you have read and heard from others. If possible, you might even try to conduct your own experiments.

Throughout the process you would try to be very even-handed, weighing conflicting evidence for strength and credibility. You would also be hyper-critical of hypotheses you are considering endorsing – always looking for evidence that what you believe is wrong, so as to avoid coming to an incorrect conclusion. In the end, you might end up endorsing one view (if the evidence was overwhelming), but most likely you would end up taking an intermediate position. Notice how strikingly different this approach is from how people generally form their opinions on political issues.

There is good scientific evidence that political reasoning is based on innate, non-rational principles. Nevertheless, the fact that people reason so badly about politics is striking given that people are intelligent and believe strongly that it is important for their political beliefs to be true. Religion may also be innate and non-rational, but if people are rational enough to give up God-oriented religion because there is not sufficient evidence, why do they not give up ideologies as well?

When I ask this question, the responses are quite similar to what you hear when you discuss atheism with a religious person. Atheists/agnostics cannot imagine how you could act ethically, or more broadly make sense of the world, without an ideology. That is, ideology seems to give many atheists/agnostics a value system just as religion does for believers. I believe ideologies also provide people with a community of like-minded friends, as do religious beliefs, and people are loath to alienate themselves from their friends. But if your goal is to have an accurate political view of the world, what use are such ideologies and communities if they are based on beliefs one has very little reason to think are true?


Corey Washington's Background:
M.S., MIT, Linguistics, 1987.
PhD, Stanford, Philosophy, 1994
Asst. Prof, U Washington, 1992-1996
Asst. Prof. U Maryland, 1996-2003
PhD Columbia, Neuroscience, 2010
Corey is presently a New York City consultant.

Johanna Carr received her degree in Philosophy, emphasis on History of Science, from Stanford 1991. After years in the tech world, failing to effect any change in corporate politics, she is currently pursuing a second PhD in Motherhood.

Ideology And U.S. Intellectual History: Or, What Does Grover Norquist Think About?

About a month ago I asked "Who's In?" in an effort to explore both the hierarchy of intellectuals and the outer boundary of legitimate topics for intellectual historians. I was reminded of that post when I read a New York Times editorial today titled "Rethinking Their Pledge."

I haven't exactly been living under a rock, but I hadn't attended to a name that came up early in the editorial: Grover Norquist (right). Norquist heads an influential conservative group called Americans for Tax Reform. That group authored the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which guides Tea Party/conservative thinking about tax policy. Here is the substance of the House of Representatives version of the pledge (bolds mine):

"ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates."

According to the NYT editorial, the pledge is creating controversy among Republicans, including Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a pledge signer (below, right). The problem is pledge point number two. He was loudly criticized by Norquist for violating that point by asking for an end to federal ethanol subsidies (a $5 billion annual tax credit) without simultaneously proposing a cut to government spending. In other words, Coburn has reached some sort of internal limit on how many programs he wants to cut. That limit apparently coincides with a 'size' of government that violates Norquist's pledge; Coburn, then, is not a true conservative in the view of ATR pledge adherents. Here's how the NYT summarized the situation:

"[Norquist's ideological] purity finally ran into a tough-minded pragmatist in Senator Coburn. Though [Coburn's] zeal to eliminate many worthy government programs is still excessive, he is right to see the wastefulness in the ethanol giveaway — and the extremism of Mr. Norquist’s position. Senator Coburn’s spokesman has even described Mr. Norquist as 'the chief cleric of Sharia tax law.' "

I have never heard of Coburn described anywhere else as a pragmatist (read: practical-minded politician), but that is probably reflective of my ignorance of his biography and recent work. What interests me most, however, is how Norquist's idea of tax policy and the ATR pledge have somehow risen to the plane of dogmatic, faithful adherence. From where---exactly---did this ideology come? The California tax revolts of the 1970s?

An Internet search for Norquist revealed only one reasonably solid source of information apart from his own writings and affiliated organizations: Wikipedia. My personal intellectual signal for a strong Wikipedia page closely correlates with the number of references given. This is not full-proof, but it's a signal. The Norquist page has 45 citations. The best I have seen is the page for Rush Limbaugh, which currently has 158 citations. Nice.

I was most fascinated with the portion of Norquist's Wikipedia biography that correlates with the formation of American for Tax Reform (quoted as of 9 am this morning):

-------------------------------------------------
"Norquist is best known as the founder of Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, which he did at the request of President Ronald Reagan.[17] The primary policy goal of Americans for Tax Reform is to reduce the percentage of the GDP consumed by the federal government.[8][18] ATR states that it "opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle."[19] Americans for Tax Reform seeks to curtail government spending by supporting Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) legislation[20] and transparency initiatives,[21] and opposing cap-and-trade legislation[22] and Democratic efforts to overhaul health care.[23]

In 1993, Norquist launched his Wednesday Meetings series at ATR headquarters, initially to help fight President Clinton's healthcare plan and eventually becoming one of the most significant institutions in American conservative political organizing.[14]"
-------------------------------------------------

If we can momentarily take Wikipedia at face value, it appears that future historians and current scholars of the conservative movement will have to reckon with ATR's history and Norquist's biography.

That said, I was most interested in the Reagan citation from line one from this excerpt. Source [17] takes you to ATR's "About us" page. I find this intriguing because the current line of thinking about Reagan seems to me to be---I offer no specific source here---that Reagan was more rhetorically conservative in terms of tax and fiscal policy than he was actually. That may have been a practical position in the face of an obstinate Congress. I would be happy to hear from Reagan scholars on this. It may also be the case that that Norquist is fibbing somewhat about his inspiration? If he isn't, then it seems clear that Reagan's fiscal/tax ideology was stronger than is currently in vogue to discuss.

Returning to questions about the line between who is, and is not, a legitimate object of intellectual history, it seems, in the case of Norquist, that it will take some kind of an intellectual-historical study to determine the final answer. Unless one works from the premise that obvious philosophical complexity, evidenced from the strength of one's publications and orations, determines the legitimacy of study, there is no easy way to determine, up front, whether an inquiry into Norquist's intellectual background would yield fruitful results. I suppose one would approach the subject with idea that an article (short or long) would be the final product, and then be surprised if the results turned out otherwise.

Does the power of one's ideology---evidenced by its number of adherents, or the political power of those adherents---legitimize intellectual inquiry, in the form of a "history of ideas" study? I think the answer has to be yes. - TL

Ideology And U.S. Intellectual History: Or, What Does Grover Norquist Think About?

About a month ago I asked "Who's In?" in an effort to explore both the hierarchy of intellectuals and the outer boundary of legitimate topics for intellectual historians. I was reminded of that post when I read a New York Times editorial today titled "Rethinking Their Pledge."

I haven't exactly been living under a rock, but I hadn't attended to a name that came up early in the editorial: Grover Norquist (right). Norquist heads an influential conservative group called Americans for Tax Reform. That group authored the "Taxpayer Protection Pledge," which guides Tea Party/conservative thinking about tax policy. Here is the substance of the House of Representatives version of the pledge (bolds mine):

"ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase the marginal income tax rates for individuals and/or businesses; and
TWO, oppose any net reduction or elimination of deductions and credits, unless matched dollar for dollar by further reducing tax rates."

According to the NYT editorial, the pledge is creating controversy among Republicans, including Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, a pledge signer (below, right). The problem is pledge point number two. He was loudly criticized by Norquist for violating that point by asking for an end to federal ethanol subsidies (a $5 billion annual tax credit) without simultaneously proposing a cut to government spending. In other words, Coburn has reached some sort of internal limit on how many programs he wants to cut. That limit apparently coincides with a 'size' of government that violates Norquist's pledge; Coburn, then, is not a true conservative in the view of ATR pledge adherents. Here's how the NYT summarized the situation:

"[Norquist's ideological] purity finally ran into a tough-minded pragmatist in Senator Coburn. Though [Coburn's] zeal to eliminate many worthy government programs is still excessive, he is right to see the wastefulness in the ethanol giveaway — and the extremism of Mr. Norquist’s position. Senator Coburn’s spokesman has even described Mr. Norquist as 'the chief cleric of Sharia tax law.' "

I have never heard of Coburn described anywhere else as a pragmatist (read: practical-minded politician), but that is probably reflective of my ignorance of his biography and recent work. What interests me most, however, is how Norquist's idea of tax policy and the ATR pledge have somehow risen to the plane of dogmatic, faithful adherence. From where---exactly---did this ideology come? The California tax revolts of the 1970s?

An Internet search for Norquist revealed only one reasonably solid source of information apart from his own writings and affiliated organizations: Wikipedia. My personal intellectual signal for a strong Wikipedia page closely correlates with the number of references given. This is not full-proof, but it's a signal. The Norquist page has 45 citations. The best I have seen is the page for Rush Limbaugh, which currently has 158 citations. Nice.

I was most fascinated with the portion of Norquist's Wikipedia biography that correlates with the formation of American for Tax Reform (quoted as of 9 am this morning):

-------------------------------------------------
"Norquist is best known as the founder of Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, which he did at the request of President Ronald Reagan.[17] The primary policy goal of Americans for Tax Reform is to reduce the percentage of the GDP consumed by the federal government.[8][18] ATR states that it "opposes all tax increases as a matter of principle."[19] Americans for Tax Reform seeks to curtail government spending by supporting Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) legislation[20] and transparency initiatives,[21] and opposing cap-and-trade legislation[22] and Democratic efforts to overhaul health care.[23]

In 1993, Norquist launched his Wednesday Meetings series at ATR headquarters, initially to help fight President Clinton's healthcare plan and eventually becoming one of the most significant institutions in American conservative political organizing.[14]"
-------------------------------------------------

If we can momentarily take Wikipedia at face value, it appears that future historians and current scholars of the conservative movement will have to reckon with ATR's history and Norquist's biography.

That said, I was most interested in the Reagan citation from line one from this excerpt. Source [17] takes you to ATR's "About us" page. I find this intriguing because the current line of thinking about Reagan seems to me to be---I offer no specific source here---that Reagan was more rhetorically conservative in terms of tax and fiscal policy than he was actually. That may have been a practical position in the face of an obstinate Congress. I would be happy to hear from Reagan scholars on this. It may also be the case that that Norquist is fibbing somewhat about his inspiration? If he isn't, then it seems clear that Reagan's fiscal/tax ideology was stronger than is currently in vogue to discuss.

Returning to questions about the line between who is, and is not, a legitimate object of intellectual history, it seems, in the case of Norquist, that it will take some kind of an intellectual-historical study to determine the final answer. Unless one works from the premise that obvious philosophical complexity, evidenced from the strength of one's publications and orations, determines the legitimacy of study, there is no easy way to determine, up front, whether an inquiry into Norquist's intellectual background would yield fruitful results. I suppose one would approach the subject with idea that an article (short or long) would be the final product, and then be surprised if the results turned out otherwise.

Does the power of one's ideology---evidenced by its number of adherents, or the political power of those adherents---legitimize intellectual inquiry, in the form of a "history of ideas" study? I think the answer has to be yes. - TL

The New Historiographic Consensus on the 1970s

Whereas Peter Carroll cheekily titled his classic 1982 account of 1970s America It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, the emergent historiographic consensus on that decade not only claims that, in fact, “something happened,” the title of Edward Berkowitz’s overview of the 1970s, but that it was a “pivotal decade,” the title of Judith Stein’s new book on deindustrialization. Central to this new historiographic consensus is another area of wide agreement: that the 1970s were a crucial decade for conservative political transformation; that the 1970s signaled the beginning of the end of the New Deal Order. This thesis is pondered at length by a dozen authors in Bruce Schulman’s and Julian Zelizer’s edited collection, Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s.

Two excellent books I recently read—Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, and Daniel K. Williams’s God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right—certainly do nothing to challenge these two interrelated consensuses. But the very different subject matter of the two books raises questions about what was most important in shaping the conservative transformation that occurred in the 1970s. Cowie’s and Williams’s divergent treatment of Nixon and the 1972 presidential election is a nice lens through which to view these complicated questions about causation—and will be the focus of my post today.

Cowie’s entertaining mix of political, labor, and cultural history paints a dour but believable picture of the 1970s collapse of Golden Age hopes and expectations. As Rick Perlstein writes in a glowing review of Stayin’ Alive: “The continuous readjustment of expectations—downward: that was a key experience of the 1970s. An expectation can be wrenchingly hard to readjust because there is an awful existential lag involved. As historians go, Jefferson Cowie is that awful existential lag’s bard.” Cowie dedicates two chapters to the compelling history of Big Labor’s dealings with the two presidential candidates from the 1972 election, which might have been landmark had it not been for Watergate: George McGovern and Richard Nixon.

Cowie maintains that we can learn a lot about the white working class of the 1970s by examining the perplexing ways in which it reacted to McGovern and Nixon. Organized labor, especially under the leadership of the AFL-CIO’s cold warrior extraordinaire, George Meany, loathed McGovern and the new social movements given life by the “New Politics” reformation of the Democratic Party following the 1968 disaster in Chicago. This, despite the fact that Senator McGovern had a 93% pro-labor voting record, all the more remarkable given that he represented a state, South Dakota, that had a small labor constituency (Interestingly, organized labor’s hatred of McGovern also persisted in spite of his PhD in labor history at Northwestern, where he wrote what Cowie describes as a very good dissertation [later a book] on the Colorado Coal Strike of 1913-14 and the infamous Ludlow Massacre). In stark contrast, the white working class, and especially its more conservative leadership, respected Nixon, despite his horridly anti-labor record.

Cowie chalks this paradox up to cultural politics. On McGovern, Cowie writes: “Despite his commitment to real material concerns of working people, a long-standing intellectual interest in labor issues, and an exceptional pro-labor voting record, McGovern’s candidacy created an enduring, if distorted, political template for what the white, male American working class was not: radical, effete, movement-based, anti-war, and, perhaps most profoundly, Democratic” (122). Pat Buchanan, writing in his book The New Majority, which came out between Nixon’s 1972 landslide victory and Watergate, called the election “a victory of ‘the New American Majority’ over the ‘New Politics,’ a victory of traditional American values and beliefs over the claims of the ‘counter-culture,’ a victory of the ‘Middle America’ over the celebrants of Woodstock Nation” (161). In short, Nixon was the style candidate, and McGovern was the substance candidate. Style won out. With the ground shifting under their feet, the white-working class aligned with a politician whose values seemed to reflect their own.

Cowie’s portrait of the 1970s working class is in no way a simplistic reading of how the working class was duped by the economic royalists, in the manner of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. He complicates such a simplistic rendering by, for instance, highlighting poll data that suggests the working class was less likely to support the war in Vietnam than were college educated Americans. But his sole focus on the relationship between the white working class and the larger political culture—a relationship, which, to his credit, he understands better than any historian—misses something important about the increasingly conservative landscape of the 1970s.

Paul Boyer, in his contribution to the Schulman/Zelizer edited collection, “The Evangelical Resurgence in 1970s,” criticizes Thomas Frank for ignoring religion as a factor in Kansas conservatism. “Broad-brush caricatures aside, Frank hardly addresses the post-1970 history or grassroots specificity of evangelical Protestantism in contemporary Kansas, including the state’s 7 Christian radio stations, 22 evangelical Christian bookstores, 8 Vineyard Christian Fellowships…” “It was not Republican political operatives,” Boyer continues, “but a vast army of pastors, evangelists, writers, musicians, and entrepreneurs, keenly attuned to the post-1960s mood of cultural disorientation and to the media outlets, pop-culture trends, management theories, and marketing strategies of consumer capitalism, who woke the sleeping giant of American evangelicalism in the 1970s” (50). In other words, if we are to understand the 1970s shift to conservatism, we must also come to terms with the political and cultural transformations of American Christianity.

I don’t blame Cowie for ignoring this history—it’s not the subject of his book. But he does sometimes confuse working-class cultural politics with Christian cultural politics. He quotes from a National Review editorial that analyzed the 1972 election results as a way to understand the cultural politics of the white working class: “Plainly, the New Majoritarians are themselves descendents of the anti-modernists and anti-cosmopolitans,” whom, in the words of Cowie, “William Jennings Bryan defended against science and the modern world” (162-163). Cowie should know that the descendents of Bryanism are not the urban “ethnics” who filled the ranks of the labor movement. These two groups represent distinctly different demographics and need distinctly different histories.

This is where Dan Williams serves as an important interlocutor. Though God’s Own Party traces the Christian Right from before W. J. Bryan to the present, Williams does recognize the centrality of the 1970s, when Christian cultural politics—education, family, and eventually, abortion—slowly but surely gained momentum, so much so that by 1980 the Christian Right was considered perhaps the key demographic in the Reagan coalition. Even before Christian cultural politics garnered mainstream attention, Republican politicians recognized the electoral importance of evangelical voters. This especially included Nixon, ever the master of electoral strategy.

Cowie titled a chapter in Stayin’ Alive “Nixon’s Class Struggle,” about how Nixon and his chief “working man” strategist Charles Colson (who, after a prison stint related to Watergate crimes, went on to a career as a Christian Right radio personality), sought to steal the labor vote from the Democratic Party. Williams titled a chapter in his book “Nixon’s Evangelical Strategy,” about Nixon’s success at manipulating the evangelical vote. 1972 election results reveal that both strategies were successful. But whereas Nixon failed to carry organized labor’s rank-and-file voters (somewhere in the range of 35-40% of them voted for him, much higher than in any previous election since FDR, but still not a majority), a startling 84% of white evangelicals voted for Nixon that year. If we are to consider the 1972 election landmark—or, only denied the landmark status granted to the 1980 election because of Watergate—then which demographic is more important? The white working-class vote, or the white evangelical vote?

Cowie shows that many urban ethnics, including union members, supported George Wallace in 1968, and again in 1972, because they saw Wallace as representing their class interests as against a liberal elite that, most egregiously in their eyes, sought to ram forced busing down their throats. Many of these Wallace supporters voted for Nixon in 1972 (when, unlike in 1968, Wallace did not run in the general election as an independent, due to the injuries he suffered at the hands of his would-be assassin during the Democratic primaries—and because, as some have argued, based on circumstantial evidence, Nixon struck a deal with Wallace to keep him out of the general election).

In contrast, Williams shows that most evangelical preachers, even right-wing fundamentalist preachers with an overtly racist streak, like Billy James Hargis, largely rejected George Wallace’s campaigns and instead supported Nixon in 1968 and again in 1972. Williams contends that this was because Nixon focused his campaign on wooing evangelicals due to an intelligent reading of national voting demographics. His campaign knew that the key to electoral success and to a future Republican majority was in winning over the growing Sunbelt. They also knew that evangelicals were the fastest growing population of the Sunbelt. Williams writes: “By the early 1970s, the nation’s ten largest churches were located in the South, West, and socially conservative Midwest, and nearly all of them were evangelical” (94). As such, the Nixon team decided that the best chance they had of reelection in 1972 was an even greater appeal to social conservatism. This analysis was predicated on the books put out by the political gurus of the time: Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority; and Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, The Real Majority (who, ironically, pitched their book to the Democratic Party in hopes of turning back the tide of McGovernism and the “New Politics”).

Strangely, Cowie also points to the Phillips and Scammon-Wattenberg tracts as the intellectual rationales for Nixon’s “working man” strategy. Now, insofar as social and cultural conservatism appealed to all who opposed the social and cultural liberalization that came to fruition in the 1960s, including white “ethnics” and conservative evangelicals, Nixon’s strategy worked on both important constituencies. But this is not to say that both constituencies are equally important to the conservative movement that came to life in the 1970s. I would say the Christian Right was much more important, and continues to be much more important to Republican success and failure.