Another reason for the scholarly bias against the 1970s concerns the peculiar focus of political historians. Scholars still tend to focus on presidents, their top advisers, and the exercise of executive power. As a result, the 1960s--a period that features the Camelot of John F. Kennedy and the tragedy of Lyndon Johnson--or the "Reagan Revolution" of the 1980s attracted more interest than a decade filled with corrupt or lackluster presidencies. Bob Dole, the long-time Senate Republican Leader and 1996 presidential nominee neatly, summarized this view when he described Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon respectively as "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and just Evil." While recent scholarship is clarifying the complexity and the pivotal nature of those presidencies, the initial impressions proved very influential.
The 1970s also flew under the radar because the decade's key developments challenged the way that many left-leaning historians conceived of conservatism. Coming from political perspectives unsympathetic to conservatism, most historians depicted the movement either as a product of manipulative elites who capitalized on anger about race and taxes, or as the product of a charismatic leader such as Ronald Reagan who persuaded voters to join a cause that might not even serve their interests. But focusing on the 1970s reveals a very different picture, one that depicts conservatism as the product of a true movement mobilization. Once dismissed as an extremist ideology, the New Right emerged in the 1970s as a potent political movement; it built a formidable organizational infrastructure (foundations, political action committees, radio and television shows, think tanks), pioneered new tactics (direct mail and a host of innovative volunteer operations), and rewrote the agenda of national politics.
Over the past few years, however, many of these barriers have fallen; a wide variety of historians--scholars of politics, religion, popular culture, foreign policy, race relations, and the environment--are giving the 1970s energetic attention. Why has interest suddenly emerged? First and foremost, the field has witnessed an important generational change. The current young scholars, many of them featured in our book, came of age during the 1980s. They were not rooted in the lingering debates of the 1960s and more willing to look closely and seriously at the origins of conservatism. Because these scholars were not products of the Baby Boom, they were also willing to de-center the 1960s--to see recent United States history as something other than the replaying of that fabled decade.
That generational shift also fed a hunger for new, unexamined material and the 1970s offered the perfect venue for such ambitions. Here was a decade when big things clearly happened, with untapped archival material beginning to emerge, but one that remained wide open, a time and place where scholars had not focused their attention.
Finally, the effort to unravel contemporary conflicts--to understand the contested political and cultural terrain of the United States in the early twenty-first century--has nourished new interest in the 1970s. Just as historians of the civil rights era re-examined the legacies of slavery and segregation, today's scholars hope to solve the puzzles they find in the headlines by probing their origins. The seeming incoherence of our era--defined at once by the considerable achievements of conservatism in shaping American politics, diplomacy, and social life and the tenacity of liberal policies, institutions, and cultural attitudes--repeatedly drove scholars back to the seminal developments of the 1970s.
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