What were the "liberal excesses" of the 70's?

[JHB]

I keep hearing that one of the reasons Reagan won in 1980 and opened the conservative Long March was a backlash against "excesses" by liberals/the left.

I was a kid-to-early-teen during that time, so it wasn't the most politically-observant period of my life, but I don't remember anything that was all that extreme, especially from the perspective of today (nothing on par with teabagger policies, for instance).

Busing? Opposition to the death penalty (during a time of rising crime)? Am I just not thinking of something, or is "liberal excess" all just Washington "conventional wisdom"?

[Lindsay]

1. Government

was helping brown people.

And kids were having sex and smoking pot. And talking back.

:shrug:

That's all I got.

[hifiguy]

62. I was there

and I think you got it just right. I can't think of any other reasons.

[LWolf]

66. Yes.

Plus the end of the draft.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Well...

the American presidents in the 70s were Nixon (Republican), Ford (Republican) and Carter (Democrat, but really pretty moderate). I cannot understand how 'left-wing excesses' come into it.

The standard British Conservative version of the same thing is that Thatcher was elected as a reaction to 'excessive' power by the unions. Could that also be what's meant here? Otherwise, I can't imagine.

[oldlib]

58. My Republican friends

thought that Carter was a joke. That he was in-effective and a bumbler. I thought that Jimmy Carter was a good president and I always enjoyed his commentary. His brother Billy was a drunk and a renegade, and Jimmy would discuss him periodically. We could have republican friends in those days, because they weren't as obnoxious as they now are.

[MadHound]

3. Disco,

Lots of disco, lots of coke.

[HillbillyBob]

7. Don't forget 'free love' ..excesses that was what they would

have ther righttards believe. I was a teen and Raygun and Carter was my first eligible election even as naive as I was I KNEW that raygun was bad news..found out right quick when I joined the USN when the fag witch hunts started.. I was air traffic control trainee and someone turned me in to keep themselves out of trouble, I can't say killing patco ruined my life but I have been struggling ever since with one shit job after another..never quite far enough ahead on bills to go back to school. Joining up was the ONE chance I had at a better life.
The late 70s was when I became aware of the dominionists and the jebbus or die kkk type churches.

[Odin2005]

32. Disco was an atrocity against music!

:rofl:

[boston bean]

4. you left off the "sexual revolution" which really got them all a dither... nt

[Chorophyll]

5. Hot tubs, chest hair, Fleetwood Mac...

I dunno. I was a kid too. I think "liberal excesses" is a code term for a period during which the culture changed very rapidly. You know conservatives can't handle that. They still haven't recovered.

[Bonhomme Richard]

6. "liberal excesses" was actually the repugs using the racism card. n/t

[HillbillyBob]

9. Correct...

nt

[checks-n-balances]

23. Non-specific charges being flung around

Part of what Ed Schultz calls the "two-word culture" being propagated by rightwing machine.
"frivolous lawsuits"
"limousine liberals"
"lunatic left"
etc.

[QC]

49. BINGO! n/t

[HughBeaumont]

8. What "liberals"??

Carter was hardly a "liberal" (there was also a better job creation record on his watch than Reagan's first term) and the rest of the 1970s contained either a corrupt oil-owned Repub or a bumbling unelected enabler Repub. To Ford and Carter's credit, the debt was kept relatively low and manageable (not really many wars of choice and a high TMTR will do that).

Under Reagan and Bewsh I, the National Debt skyrocketed, taxes got slashed and Friedmanomics became the NEW NORMAL.

"tax 'n' spend librul" = "Republican Boilerplate". Repeat it often enough and pretty soon every Joe Nosepicker will treat it as truth.

[LiberalEsto]

10. Fake gas shortages

Disco
Leisure suits

[polmaven]

35. John Lennon!

n/t

[hobbit709]

11. Watergate.

[bananas]

57. Watergate and Church Committee hearings on national TV.

A lot of younger DUers are probably unaware of the Church Committee hearings.
I don't remember if the Church Committe hearings were broadcast live,
but there were TV news reports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

The Church Committee is the common term referring to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID) in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair.

...

By the early years of the 1970s, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the unfolding Watergate scandal brought the era of minimal oversight to an abrupt halt. The US Congress was determined to rein in the Nixon administration and to ascertain the extent to which the nation's intelligence agencies had been involved in questionable, if not outright illegal, activities.

A series of troubling revelations started to appear in the press concerning intelligence activities. First came the revelations of Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population<1><2> and Sam Ervin's Senate investigations that resulted.<3> The dam broke on 22 December 1974, when The New York Times published a lengthy article by Seymour Hersh detailing operations engaged in by the Central Intelligence Agency over the years that had been dubbed the "family jewels". Covert action programs involving assassination attempts against foreign leaders and covert attempts to subvert foreign governments were reported for the first time. In addition, the article discussed efforts by intelligence agencies to collect information on the political activities of US citizens.<4>

These revelations convinced many Senators and Representatives that the Congress itself had been too lax, trusting, and naive in carrying out its oversight responsibilities.

Overview

In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee published fourteen reports on the formation of U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations, and the alleged abuses of law and of power that they had committed, together with recommendations for reform, some of which were put in place.

Among the matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, including Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and President John F. Kennedy's plan to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Under recommendations and pressure by this committee, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (ultimately replaced in 1981 by President Reagan's Executive Order 12333) to ban U.S. sanctioned assassinations of foreign leaders.

Together, the Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were classified, but more than 50,000 pages have since been declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

...

[OHdem10]

12. SS Medicare Welfare and Medicaid.

[loyalsister]

68. Yup

That's when Johnson's greatest accomplishments actually kicked in.

[spanone]

13. reagan won cause they fucked with carter

[Viking12]

14. According to the Repugs: EPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act

You know, all that dirty hippie pollution control stuff.

[hootinholler]

33. That Nixon passed.

I think they mean the great society from Johnson.

-Hoot

[surrealAmerican]

37. ... but that was the sixties.

[hootinholler]

38. Well teh republicans have always been a day late and a dollar short.

:shrug:

-Hoot

[RevStPatrick]

15. Housing projects.

There's your non-cute answer, and while they might have had their hearts in the right places, large urban housing projects really didn't work out all that well.

[xoom]

22. +1

[Odin2005]

36. A lot of inner-city crime and social dyfuction can be traced back to "The Projects"

That's why Section 8 now does things like rent and housing subsidies now.

It was even worse in Europe, I've read.

[Gormy Cuss]

39. If by "housing projects you mean public housing developments, that's a much older phenomenon.

The first wave came on line not long after the Housing Act of 1937. The big wave, in the 1950s, brought most of the large scale, high rise developments. By the 1970s these properties were being bulldozed or rehabbed.

Beginning in the 1960s new developments on a grand scale were very rare. They had been replaced by a push to privately owned developments with HUD subsidies (mortgage and/or rental.)

So no, that "liberal excess" was much earlier.

[RevStPatrick]

48. I now live 2 blocks from one of the oldest public housing projects...

...in the country:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamsburg_Houses

It was built in 1937.

I sort of took the OP's question of "What were the "liberal excesses" of the 70's" to be less that rigidly decade-specific. It was in the 70's that the housing projects went to shit, leading to the "white flight" of that decade. I know this, because I was a kid who moved from a private housing project in Queens - Lefrak City - to the suburbs in 1972 when people started getting murdered in the stairwells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lefrak_City

As many others here have noted, that phrase "liberal excess" is often meant to have racist connotations, and it was in the 70's and white flight when the projects became "noticeable" to much of the country.

[JHB]

53. You took the question correctly...

Housing projects existed prior without the sort of Mad Max/Escape From New York connotation that "the Projects" had by ~1980. Some of the discussions I've heard or read noted that the older projects were more mixed-income and had much better ability to expel criminals and other active troublemakers.

I asked the question mainly because it's become such a standard trope that "liberals had gone too far" that it's all they remember, and rarely get asked "How? What had gone 'too far'?"

Because when you do ask the question, it's a bit more complicated, as the responses have illustrated. Some things (like the projects problems) were the result of collisions between several factors, many of which are not uniquely "liberal". Others are things that these days would have a lot of people saying "that's all?"

The question was prompted to better equip a response when the trope is trotted out again, usually under the "they both do it" pigeon-hole when the current Republican radicalism is pointed out.

Liberal "excess" back then never came close to what radical conservatives are doing now.

[Gormy Cuss]

59. Some of the big old public developments went to pieces much earlier than that though

Pruitt-Igoe in ST. Louis being the classic example. It was torn down in the early 70s.

I agree with you though that the phrase "liberal excess" has strong racial connotations and that white flight was pretty common in the 1960s, though it started earlier than that and was related to the postwar housing boom in the suburbs. White flight most certainly affected places like Lefrak City.

[Recursion]

44. Ah, I see you beat me to it (nt)

[Ganja Ninja]

16. Sex, Drugs, Rock n Roll. n/t

[deutsey]

27. Yeah, by the late '70s there was a kind of decadence permeating the culture

combined with what Carter called a general sense of "malaise." It was as if the old left/boho heart of the the '60s had finally given out.

Times were ripe for a Reaction and that's just what we got.

[Bluenorthwest]

34. Jimmy Carter did not use that term. Sorry.

Here is the speech many call 'the Malaise Speech'. Carter never uses that word at all, so claiming that is what he called it is false. It is along the lines of 'Al Gore said he invented the internet'.
The entire speech, which everyone should read, a speech by an American President. A speech by a Democrat.
http://www2.volstate.edu/geades/FinalDocs/1970s&beyond/malaise.htm

[deutsey]

40. You're right, but the guy who convinced him to do the speech used it in his original memo

I guess that's where the term comes from? At any rate, it at least has a more solid connection to Carter than the Internet crap.

Patrick Caddell was the guy, according to PBS's American Experience:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/carter-crisis-speech/

At the heart of the internal debate over the administration's future was a memo by Caddell, Carter's pollster and resident "deep thinker." "What was really disturbing to me," he remembered, "was for the first time, we actually got numbers where people no longer believed that the future of America was going to be as good as it was now. And that really shook me, because it was so at odds with the American character." Caddell argued that after fifteen years filled with assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and a declining economy, Americans were suffering from a general "crisis of confidence." Address this fundamental problem, he told the president, inspire the country to overcome it, and you will turn your presidency around.

Others in the administration, led by Vice President Walter Mondale, strongly disagreed. "I argued that there were real problems in America that were not mysterious, that were not rooted in some kind of national psychosis or breakdown, that there were real gas lines, there was real inflation, that people were worried in their real lives about keeping their jobs," Mondale said. "We could engage the nation by addressing those problems and asking for a new level of public support... I also argued that if, having gotten elected on the grounds that we needed a government as good as the people, we now were heard to argue that we needed a people as good as the government, that we would be destroyed."

" had this real division," Caddell recalls. "And then Jimmy Carter ended it by saying... 'I've decided. I'm going to do everything that Pat said in his memo.' I thought the vice president was going to have a heart attack."

The Speech

On the evening of July 15, 1979, millions of Americans tuned in to hear Jimmy Carter give the most important speech of his presidency. After sharing some of the criticism he had heard at Camp David -- including an unattributed quote from the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton -- Carter put his own spin on Caddell's argument. "The solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country," the president said, asking Americans to join him in adapting to a new age of limits.

But he also admonished them, "In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns." Hendrik Hertzberg, who worked on the speech, admits that it "was more like a sermon than a political speech. It had the themes of confession, redemption, and sacrifice. He was bringing the American people into this spiritual process that he had been through, and presenting them with an opportunity for redemption as well as redeeming himself." Though he never used the word -- Caddell had in his memo -- it became known as Carter's "malaise" speech.



The point for me was that the general drift of the late '70s was at the heart of that speech. I don't believe "liberals" were to blame for that, but the conservatives were able to exploit it especially in the hedonistic culture that had emerged from '60s rebellion.

[Somawas]

17. Hating Nixon and opposing the war in VietNam.

[Blue_Tires]

18. "Letters to Penthouse Forum"

will tell you all you need to know...

[rurallib]

19. education - the last thing a reactionary wants is someone who can think

[valerief]

20. Civil rights were those liberal excesses. You know, letting everyone sit at the big table,

not just old white men.

[tsuki]

31. +1000

[LeftinOH]

21. Suddenly, lots of emphasis on wearing seat belts; Federal mandates

about safety bumpers on cars; anti-littering campaigns; Roe vs Wade (especially); public interest in solar energy & other alternatives to fossil fuel; the "energy crisis" which forced Americans to reconsider their fondness for gas-guzzling road hogs, etc, etc, etc.

I was a kid then, but I remember lots of public consciousness-raising: Environmental, Industrial, Social. It was not so bad. The 1980s was a selfish, hateful period.

[Bluenorthwest]

24. That is code speak for 'gay rights, women's rights and civil

rights in general'. Minority groups on TV. When they say that, they mean bra burning and Stonewall, basically. Maybe pot smoking instead of the 'cocktails' sucked down at WH gatherings.

[NNN0LHI]

25. SSI came into existence in 1973

Bet that is what they consider "liberal excesses" of the 70's and would like to do away with.

Don

[mmonk]

26. We had a civilization I think.

Empathy, compassion, and community.

[SmileyRose]

28. Liberal Excess = can't lynch blacks and beat up women anymore

thanks to the "Liberal Excesses" of the 70's black women can actually get a job.

Oh the horror.

[undeterred]

29. Polyester, the Bee Gees, and Donna Summer

[Odin2005]

30. Change was happening too fast for many to deal with mentally. People got scared.

A futurist at the time (Toffler I think his name was) called it "future shock".

[WinkyDink]

41. Elton John.

[deutsey]

42. "Island Girl" was indeed a dark turning point in American history

:evilgrin:

[WinkyDink]

45. *small voice-I love that song-small voice*

[deutsey]

46. I actually don't think it's bad...but I do prefer his stuff from the early '70s

[Recursion]

43. Cabrini-Green (nt)

[Zorra]

47. The main one that frightened the establishment was an excess of independent thinking.

Liberals questioned authority. This led to movement toward freedom, equality, and opportunity.

Conservatives have done their best to rein in this frightening social phenomenon ever since. They is a skeered and fearin'.

[Bluerthanblue]

51. well said-

I agree.
:hi:

[Bluerthanblue]

50. maybe code for Roe v. Wade?

and the embarrassment of Watergate?

The 70's showed, from my perception that the people power of the 60's and early 70's worked. The war finally ended, the President wasn't above the law. I think that really shook the conservative mentality deeply. The liberal excesses had less to do with money and more to do with the lack of control over people??

just my take on it.

Good question!

[JVS]

52. There wasn't liberal excess. What happened was that the conservative party imploded under Nixon

[MrScorpio]

54. Nixon, Ford and Carter had all abandoned Freidmanism

So, basically it was everything.

Reagan was seen as the "correction"… And we've been fucked up ever since.

[pitohui]

55. people smoked pot and talked a lot

other than that who are they kidding?

[Safetykitten]

56. No...let's get this straight. Carter was a ineffective and weak President.

There were a series of economic hits and the last straw was the hostage crisis. This was the last straw on the economic and America as weak impotent power. The hostage crisis dragged on, and Reagan was in the right place at the right time and made Carter look like a wimp.

And interestingly, there was a period of time when Carter took office in a sweep of people wanting a fresh start, a new begininnig after the Nixon, Ford, and other republican fiasco. A matter of fact, there were reports about a normalcy and a feeling of recovery from the dreary Vietman era taking hold. College campuses were returning to a normal college life, and things were looking good...but like another President we know...he blew it. The window of opportunity was squandered. We can thank Carter for the 1st phase of the republican resurgence, Obama for the Republican Restoration.

[JHB]

60. Oh, I'm very aware of that part

I bring it up anytime someone trots out the "the last time a Democratic president was primaried..." analogy while conveniently ignoring the role of the hostage crisis (and especially the Desert One fiasco) in Carter's loss.

But blaming it on vaguely defined "liberal excess" is a convenient was for certain people (political consultants, lazy journalists) to avoid taking a hard look at how we got in this mess.

[MilesColtrane]

61. Reagan won because of double digit inflation, rising gas prices, and...

the nightly "Iran Hostage Crisis: Day 377" drumbeat from the media.

[Taverner]

63. You know, giving a shit about minorities and women. Trying to make things fair.

Excesses like that...

[QC]

64. Uppity blacks, uppity women, uppity queers, environmental regulations,

affirmative action, Jimmy Carter.

Obama's primary routine about the "excesses" of the 60s and 70s was just another sign among many that he was far more conservative than his Civil Rights Movement / Cesar Chavez rhetorical style and tropes would have made one believe.

[MisterP]

65. the world stopped being colonial, government worked to help the poor, the CIA was investigated,

Americans didn't want to ass-ram foreigners any more at the cost of thousands of lives and billions of dollars ("Vietnam syndrome"), Nixon went to Moscow and Beijing, and people believed the government could lie about foreign policy

[swilton]

67. The problem with Jimmy Carter that caused the ascendancy

of Regan was that Jimmy Carter, recognizing the energy dependence of the US, asked Americans to conserve energy. He even held quasi fireside chats wearing a sweater to keep warm. He also lowered and raised thermostats in federal buildings so that the Federal Government would conserve energy. Finally he installed solar panels on the White House....He used the term 'malaise' in one of his fireside chats - Regan challenged him as being a part of blame America first....said there was nothing wrong, we didn't need to conserve - essentially - be happy, don't worry about energy and let the 'market' take care of everything - especially the environment and energy. After that talking about such things as global warming, reliance on foreign oil became taboo subjects.

[oldlib]

71. We had a maximum

55 mph in California during that time. It's surprising how much gas is saved at that lower limit. I had also sold our Mustang and bought a 6 cylinder Pinto station wagon at that time, to save gas, and primarily because we needed the room for our 2 young boys. Jimmy Carter was a decent and fine president.

[SoCalDem]

69. The EPA, Affirmative Action, the ERA & Roe v Wade

Those 4 were the burrs under the saddle for right wingers, and many of those righties were still irked by the fact that they probably had little or no fun during their college years, so they were predisposed to become the meanies we know them as today.

The 4 items I listed , all had immediate effects on the COST of doing business (from the boss-perspective)

Women started demanding money & rights art work (even though the amendment was never ratified), and they took control over their own reproductive issues. That had to seriously piss off the "MadMen-ish" righties. They could no longer "park" the little woman in the suburbs, tethered to 5 kids.

Affirmative action meant that they could no longer avoid hiring minorities.

The EPA meant that they would have to pay to get rid of the toxic byproducts of manufacturing, and could no longer "dump-at-will"... (This is why so many fled to "the south", where the local poor people were "treated" to thousands of "new jobs", alongside liberal doses of birth defects, cancer & many other maladies that would show up after they fled again to Mexico)

the CRAZY thing, is that these occurred during NIXON/Ford mostly, although the roll-out continued through Carter...

People forget that between 1968 and 1993, we only had the presidency for 4 measly years.

[county worker]

70. It started with Johnson's Great Society. The idea was that government programs

could solve most of societies problems. Nixon and Carter thought the same way. Giving Panama back to the Panamanians was something that really pissed off people. Carter telling people to live more frugally or more simply because of the growing scarcity of raw materials. Turning down the heat in your house etc were pissing people off.

People saw that the programs did not produce the intended results for one reason or the other and there was a backlash against government solving problems.

It was the start of anti intellectualism also. Given a real chance many of the programs would have succeeded but there was no patience with them.

One of the main questions was this, why should my kid be forced to go to a school outside his neighborhood when there was a perfectly good school that I paid for right here just so society would be better integrated or so that underprivileged kids could have a better chance in life.