Sucking in the mid-to-late '70s: how the Carter-Reagan era set the course for contemporary America.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim
• Position: Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America - Book review

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, by Philip Jenkins, New York: Oxford University Press, 352 pages, $28

LOATHED BY THE people who lived through them, held in disapprobation for ages afterward, the 1970S were for many years remembered mainly for being so forgettable. Compared with the upheaval and white-hot transformation of the '60s, the decade Garry Marshall built always seemed petty, small, ridiculous.

All that has changed in the last 10 years. A bumper crop of studies has treated the '70s as a period of catastrophic or liberating disruption that largely created contemporary America. Histories such as Bruce J. Schulman's The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, David Frum's How We Got Here, and William C. Berman's America's Right Turn, as well as media studies such as Rob Owen's Gen X TV and Josh Ozersky's Archie Bunker's America, have reenvisioned the period from Nixon to Reagan as fertile territory for social theory, a period of lasting and important change. (Sticklers for chronology should be aware that these books contain material that is not strictly contained within the 1970s, that they all differ on when the periods we think of as "the '60s," "the '70s," or "the '80s" began or ended, and that most studies of the period come with an understanding that we're referring to a "long '70s" of more than 10 years' duration.)

On its surface, Philip Jenkins' brilliant Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties-America is another installment in this growing body of literature. But Jenkins, a Penn State historian who has written several books on American social history, shifts both the time frame and the terms of the discussion to produce a rich, surprising reading of what Tom Wolfe in 1976 christened the Me Decade.

First, Decade of Nightmares dispenses with arbitrary decade markers entirely, identifying 1975 to 1986 as the period when the modern American sensibility developed. (Jenkins plays fast and loose enough with his examples that it may be more accurate just to say the book approximately covers the Carter-Reagan era, with leeway at both ends.) The book also asks more nuanced questions than others in its genre.

For one, how did a period of such enormous disruption also produce so much continuity? The post-1975 period was a time when the apparent triumph of progressive '60s values was decisively reversed, when the identity politics of the New Left fell into permanent disarray, when the liberal era's technocratic approaches to social problems were abandoned in favor of Manichean thinking that defined social ills as moral problems and aberrant behavior as the product of evil rather than dysfunction. Yet these retrenchments did not reverse the gains made in civil rights, feminism, and gay liberation, even though these last two were subject to strident counterattacks.

A trickier question involves how political disruption and continuity go hand in hand. Popular history largely ignores the important policy linkages between Jimmy Carter, the deregulating architect of the anti-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, and Ronald Reagan, the bumbler behind the "Reagan recession" and the disastrous mission in Lebanon; but in retrospect there are important ways in which Reagan's revolution preceded his presidency. "Reagan's opportunities to impose his particular vision," Jenkins writes," were shaped by a wide variety of developments, social, economic...