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"Historical eras rarely begin or end at neat or precise points," writes Philip Jenkins in his new book, "and decades are highly malleable." We may allow ourselves to speak of "the '70s" or "the '80s" as if we knew just what these phrases denoted; but it is a mistake, of course, to expect this essentially arbitrary terminology to convey some sort of unity on the decades that answer to these names. In Jenkins' view, as laid out in "Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America," U.S. history suffered a profound rupture halfway through the '70s, splitting that decade in two. While the first half may best be seen as the tail end of the '60s, the remaining years, along with the early '80s, demand to be understood as something else entirely -- an unprecedented era of insecurity and dread that set the stage not only for the so-called "Regan revolution" but for the decades to follow as well: "Measured by responses to any one of a range of issues, American sensibilities changed dramatically in the decade after 1975. Whether in matters of foreign policy or war, disorder or terrorism, poverty or urban crisis, crime or drug abuse, many Americans adopted a more pessimistic, more threatening interpretation of human behavior, which harked back to much older themes in American culture. At home and abroad, the post-1975 public was less willing to see social dangers in terms of historical forces, instead preferring a strict moralistic division: problems were a matter of evil, not dysfunction. Ideas of relativism and complex causation were replaced by simpler and more sinister visions of the enemies facing Americans and their nation. And the forces of evil arrayed against us were conceived in terms of conspiracy and clandestine manipulation. ... These concerns focused on a number of outside enemies, most obviously the Soviet Union, but there were countless enemies within. In the political rhetoric of the time, these diverse groups personified the immorality and outright evil that had arisen in consequence of the moral and political decadence of recent years. Conditions were bad, it seemed, because sixties values had let them get so bad." It is common wisdom, of course, that the conservative turn of the early '80s represented a backlash against, and a repudiation of, the naive but hopeful values of the '60s. But Jenkins' intelligent and judicious account of the period is nevertheless enlightening, largely because of the care he takes in identifying the deep themes that united Americans' attitudes toward perceived threats of varying natures and, one might have thought, quite distinct orders. Consider, to take one of Jenkins' central examples, the paranoid tendency to insist on seeing every threat or potential threat not as an isolated phenomenon but rather as an element of a conspiracy. Once this tendency takes hold, as it did powerfully during the "decade of nightmares," it becomes the dominant interpretive metaphor in terms of which all dangers and indeed all politics are understood. And the resulting picture is, almost inevitably, an apocalyptic one whose adherents see their country as besieged by a wave of evildoers, its very existence hanging by a thread. This is most obviously so on the global scale, where, in the late '70s American mind, the Soviet Union goes from "adversary" to "evil empire," revolutionaries and insurgents in various countries all come to be seen as part of a vast creeping communist menace, and the phenomenon of terrorism is transformed from a tactic of the desperate into an international network for whom evil is not a means but an end. But the transformation is all the more startling -- and Jenkins' portrayal of it all the more compelling -- in the context of domestic threats. As "Decade of Nightmares" convincingly illustrates, the vast majority of perceived domestic threats during this period were interpreted as, fundamentally, threats to the nation's children. Baby Boomers who had taken a rosy view of their own prospects in the '60s were far less sanguine a decade later when they viewed the world as the place their vulnerable offspring would somehow have to survive, and the behaviors they had once viewed as valuable liberties came to be seen, in their children, as indications of hazardous libertinism. To say that the late '70s brought a growing awareness of the problems posed by child abuse, child pornography and adolescent drug use would be a dramatic understatement: The dominant view went well beyond awareness, and incorporated the panicked belief that a veritable epidemic of abuse, pornography and drugs -- not to mention religious cults, homosexual predators and serial killers -- were descending like plagues upon the nation's unprotected and largely unsuspecting youth. As with external threats to the nation's security, the reigning tendency was to see these perils not as emerging from isolated individuals, but as the product of yet another set of conspiracies: "By the end of the decade, not only were threats to children a familiar concept, but so was the imagined form of the danger: clandestine rings and secret organizations, evil predators seeking to seduce or capture them." Particularly notable is the national hysteria about drug use, as frequently exaggerated media reports regarding the dangers of various substances help transform the "go ask Alice" openness of the '60s into the "just say no" mantra of the '80s. During this period, "crack cocaine ... acquired all the stereotypical evils associated with PCP, and before that with older demon drugs such as cocaine and marijuana, stereotypes that drew heavily on images of black primitivism and savagery. ... In 1986, Time magazine declared the crack problem the issue of the year, and Newsweek proclaimed it the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate (bigger, that is, than the 1980 hostage crisis or the nuclear confrontation of 1983)." The most significant negative effect of the so-called war on drugs may well have been the American enthusiasm for incarceration that helped make the United States the industrialized world's leading imprisoner of its own people. But the paranoia Jenkins describes damaged the prospects for many other groups as well. Fears that the crumbling of traditional gender roles would somehow damage children helped defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, while the association in the public mind of sexual predation with homosexuality put roadblocks in the path of the burgeoning gay rights movement. To this day, conservative resistance to progressive reforms tends to center on the threat these reforms would allegedly pose to "family values." Although writers such as Jenkins do an admirable job of undermining the oddly popular view that conservative policies are on the whole more family-friendly than progressive ones, that bias remains influential and is likely to be so for some time. "[L]ooking at public policy over the past thirty or forty years," Jenkins writes, "we see how thoroughly ideas of personal moral evil have replaced alternative interpretations and driven out other possible approaches to social problems at home and abroad. While nobody wants a return to the starry-eyed nonjudgmental optimism of the 1960s, the reaction of the post-1975 decade went too far in its way, with the thorough demonization of criminals, drug users, and social deviants, the quest for conspiracies, and the abandonment of solutions that did not mesh easily with military metaphors." Jenkins is well aware that descendants of the nightmares he discusses still haunt the American public. One cannot keep from hoping that he is right to think that a better understanding of history might help us shake them off. Troy Jollimore teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico. His first book of poetry, "Thom Thomson in Purgatory," will be published later this year. |
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