I am old enough, and I was drug-free enough, that I actually DO remember the sixties and seventies. As a teen during the mid-sixties, I still recollect a devout Republican in our church who felt cheated by JFK’s defeat of VP Nixon in 1960.
My point is that 1960 may have been the critical fault line, even though Nixon’s forced resignation did indeed further rupture the two basic political parties and their adherents.
Otherwise, the authors have produced a valuable reference that students of political science can use to work towards a more harmonized America.
Integration and equality is, in my opinion, at the root of our political divide, which is why I selected the below excerpt.
EXCERPT
‘...This growing racial polarization mapped itself with increasing clarity on the larger landscape of America. Responding to desegregation as well as the deindustrialization and decay of older downtowns, more and more white residents fled from cities entirely, opting for lily-white suburbs instead. The phenomenon of “white flight” happened across the nation, with central cities in US metropolitan areas experiencing an almost 10 percent drop in their white populations over the course of the 1960s. In the North, however, the pattern was even more pronounced, with rates nearly twice the national average. Detroit, for instance, lost 350,000 whites over the decade. The inner cities that had been left behind, marked by what demographers awkwardly termed “minority-majority” populations, then selected black officials to represent them in city hall and Congress. In such ways, the successful integration of African Americans into the political system partly stemmed from the failures of integration in society at large. 14
Cultural Nationalism
White withdrawal wasn’t the only reason the promises of integration were unfulfilled. Increasingly, African Americans and other racial minorities expressed growing reservations about a process of integration that seemed to unfold solely on terms established by whites. A notable element of black nationalism was an insistence that African Americans should not adopt the icons or ideals of a “WASP” (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) mainstream culture but instead reaffirm heroes and histories of their own. As Malcolm X put it, just as a tree severed from its roots soon died, “a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.” 15
Accordingly, African Americans advanced a new form of cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s that championed distinctive styles of black expression and celebrated accomplishments of prominent African American artists, intellectuals, and entertainers. Academics and athletes alike set models for cultural expressions of black power, as soul and funk musicians broadly popularized the theme. James Brown captured the mood in his 1968 hit, “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud!” Television, as always, both echoed and amplified the growing trend, most noticeably with ABC’s Roots, an eight-part serialization of Alex Haley’s best-selling family history. Broadcast over eight nights in January 1977, the series attracted the single largest audience in television history, with network officials estimating that 130 million Americans watched all or part of the program. Indeed, Roots was a national phenomenon. “It’s [the] Super Bowl every night,” marveled the Associated Press. “People are bringing TV sets to work, watching in airports and bars, leaving...’
Taken from “Fault Lines,” Chapter Three, by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian L. Zelizer copyright 2019.
BOTTOM LINE
This is an excellent companion to “Fifth Risk,” by Michael Lewis.
Five stars out of five.
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Overview of how we got to our present state of partisanship
