2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: George McGovern strongly called for the redistribution of income -- and lost 49 states to 1. [View all]The Traveler
(5,632 posts)The country was strongly divided over the issues of war vs peace, and even more significantly race (coded as "law and order" . Feminism was still considered kinda racy and radical by a large segment of the population. The flow of information through society was almost completely top down, the exception being an educational system that savored free thought much more than today's implementation. Our infrastructure was still the envy of a world that had just finished digging itself out of the wreckage of WWII.
Unions were still strong and so working Americans were not yet completely at the mercy of an emerging corporatocracy. Discussion of climate change was limited to mostly physics departments of major college Universities and dystopian science fiction novels . (Yeah, back in the 70s we knew something about it, and we were way over optimistic about how long it would take to unfold.) The big economic concern of the middle class was the effect of imports, especially cars and steel, on the structure of the American economy. The big economic concern of the upper class was (as suggested by the title of a New York Times best seller) "Preserving Capital" as the economy adjusted to going off the gold standard (the Nixon Shock of 1971), which basically upended the Bretton Woods system of international exchange.
In some respects, the landscape hasn't changed much. We are again dealing with issues of war vs peace, and unresolved issues of race (still coded as "law and order" . But back then, the middle class was trying to hold on to something they had. Now they are trying to imagine having something like that again. Economically, the landscape is completely different. Culturally, the landscape is completely different. The principal flow of information is now from peer to peer. Unions have relatively little power, and the average American feels (rightly) completely exposed to the unrestricted power of corporate influences. Our infrastructure is widely perceived as crumbling, and those who travel abroad come back astonished at how primitive and backward our infrastructure has become in comparison to other nations, and that knowledge is leaking out into the masses who cannot afford to travel.
It is a different era. The problems we face today do not resemble the problems neoliberalism was formulated to address (e.g. stagflation). The question being asked out there is: Can the current system work for me at all? The questions of 1972 were "Can McGovern's approach to economics work? What could I lose in the process?" These are vastly different inquiries.
For these reasons, I think your comparison to McGovern is specious. I believe you attempt to convey a lesson from history by staying safely within the shallows.
Trav