Abusing the Seventies.(Review)

The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, by Bruce J. Schulman (Free Press, 352 pp., $26)

The last quarter of Bruce Schulman's The Seventies consists of a sustained attack on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, which, on-the-ball readers will remember, took place in the 1980s. Much as historians describe a "long 19th century" that runs from the French Revolution to the Great War, Schulman, a professor of history at Boston University, takes as his subject a "long 1970s" that runs from 1968 to 1984. What unites these years, for Schulman, is that they were a period of baleful conservative ascendancy. They began with the election of Richard Nixon- an "underhanded," "cunning," "devious" "pathological liar," for those who've never heard of him-and culminated in Nixon's sugary avatar Ronald Reagan, who "truly lacked sympathy for the downtrodden."

The first of many roadblocks in the way of this vision of Nixon as the father of modern conservatism is that he remains America's most liberal president since the Great Society. Schulman grants this liberalism, but views it as part of a cannily concealed right-wing agenda. True, he says, Nixon signed the Clean Air Act, established the Environmental Protection Agency, held events nationwide to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, and established 642 new national and state parks. But, Schulman notes, "Nixon also established procedures for economic cost- benefit review of all environmental regulations." (Wow. Thunder on the right!)

Schulman sees the ninefold increases Nixon ordered in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts as a crafty plot to "strip the cultural elite of its power." You see, the budget rose so high that museum heads and opera directors across the Northeast wound up getting a smaller percentage of federal arts funding. "Dick Nixon," Schulman writes, "had proved very tricky indeed."

In the shadow of this political narrative, the broad social trends of the 1970s appear as mere epiphenomena. Schulman notices four big ones: feminism, privatization, a revolution in finance, and the rise of the Sunbelt. Here, Schulman's hostility towards conservatism actually helps his analysis. It allows him to discover important points of contact between conservative trends and the "decadent" aspects of the Seventies that would elude a more balanced observer. He notes that the right-wing Sunbelt has always been as dependent on federal handouts as the left- wing cities of the Northeast, and that many forms of fundamentalist Christianity offer "personalized" salvation of a New Age variety. He shows, moreover, that the stagflation of the 1970s did as much to produce contemporary investing habits as did the stock-market boom of the 1980s. Inflation turned Americans into speculators, because "to let savings sit in a bank in an age of inflation was to lose everything."

Schulman prides himself on his understanding of 1970s culture, but it is here that he makes his worst missteps. His besetting weakness as a cultural critic is one he shares with 1970s culture itself: a self- righteous delight in attacking straw men, a complacency that leads him to dress up conformism as intellectual bravery. "The decade's most potent and memorable cultural products," he writes, "raised an upturned middle finger at conventional sources of authority." Like hell they did. They kicked dead horses like "the Washington establishment" or "the WASP establishment" or "Puritanism" or "the big corporations"-at a time when these formerly powerful institutions and tendencies were discredited, repudiated, and powerless to fight back.

Thus, Schulman quotes Maryland congresswoman Barbara Mikulski as if she were exhibiting some sort of guts when she said that no longer were "white ethnics" willing ...