Looking back to my first years in college, 1971-1973, at the approximate zenith of the middle economic class, I had recently witnessed big events of the prior decade, including such highlights as passage of Civil Rights Acts (1964, 1968), Voting Rights Act (1965, although substantially reduced in its effect by U.S. Supreme Court by Shelby County v. Holder 2013, Abbott v. Perez 2018, and Brnovich v. DNC 2021) and Amendments to the Social Security Act which created Medicare and Medicaid (1965) which were in contrast to the searing political assassinations and subsequent riots, and also to the debacle of the Viet Nam war and the growing student unrest and riots on college campuses. College students (and their parents) were well aware that the legislative and executive branches of federal government in USA were involved in a convergence of private enterprise capitalism and public capitalism in the form of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower had warned us about. Anti-establishment events on college campuses, sometimes devolving into riots, were not uncommon in1968-1972. The Pentagon Papers, revealed in 1971, increased public distrust of the federal government. Other signs of change championed by liberal-progressives included passage of the Clean Water Act in 1970, the first Earth Day event in 1970, passage of the Clean Air Act in 1972, passage of the ERA in 1972 (unratified) the Roe v. Wade decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (ostensibly, will be overturned in 2022), and the nation’s medical and mental health authorities no longer considered homosexuality as a disorder as of 1973.
The rise of the political opposition to anti-establishment movements and to political success of liberals (e.g., civil rights, women’s rights, social justice generally, and environmental justice), however, apparently alarmed the centrists and conservatives and sharpened and strengthened their resolve to fight the trends in unrest. Conservatives presumably sought to ensure that 1) corporate capitalism and its integration into public capitalism—what products the taxes are spent on—would remain preeminent, and 2) “unwanted” social change was arrested. Hence, Nixon’s southern strategy and law-and-order campaign in 1968 which were created to convince the uneasy socially-conservative southern democratic voters to support the republican agenda (reprised by Reagan in 1980), and Nixon’s “war on drugs,” which began in 1971, were both features of “culture war”. Other signposts of conservative responses include 1) the now-famous Lewis Powell (later appointed to the supreme court) memo to combat socioeconomic trends, provided for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1971 (https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/) 2) the creation of the Heritage Foundation in 1973, and 3) the political alliance of corporations and religious evangelicals in the formation of ALEC in 1972. Coincidentally, with the rising influence of Milton Freedman on how to unfetter corporate capitalism in the 1970s, the “Chicago School” of economists (e.g., see Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom)—with a neoliberal economic philosophy wherein the focus was to maximize shareholder profits, but to ignore other stakeholders—became ascendant.
By 1980 the liberals were well into political decline and conservatives had gained both political and economic preeminence. The remaining liberals compromised and participated as more centrists (as already had been seemingly necessary for the Clinton administration) than progressives, and perhaps it was not until 2008 that the large corporations were being seen by the public as more of a problem than a solution to current problems. By 2010, and arguably 2009, the public anger was directed toward government as well. The enormous potential for progressive change anticipated in late 2008 has not fully materialized, perhaps because the Nixonian-style culture war that was rejuvenated by conservatives after democrats gained the presidency in 1992 and was reprised in 2009, continues unabated. What portends?
This is is the Secular Week of Action, by the way: https://weekofaction.org/#resources and May 4 2022 is the National Day of Reason: https://www.nationaldayofreason.org/national-day-of-reason
ORIGINS AND EXTINCTIONS 