Tracing the roots of America's post-'60s transformation

Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, By Philip Jenkins, Oxford University, 344 pp., $28

A Martian gazing down on the United States in 1968 and again in 1985 would have witnessed two strikingly different countries. The first was a nation divided into hostile camps, clashing on everything from sex, drugs, and race to the Vietnam War. It was a land of everyday turmoil and rebellion.

By the '80s, however, the country had settled into something like '50s normalcy -- buttoned-down and steady at work; ruled once again by convention; confident, even aggressive, in the international arena. Where hippies once burned money, yuppies now monitored 401(k)s.

What accounts for this seismic shift, this social-political counterrevolution? In "Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America," Philip Jenkins offers some answers beyond customary notions of inevitable cycles of reform and reaction.

A professor of history and religion at Penn State, Jenkins suggests that this political transformation can be understood only in the context of larger cultural currents. Specifically, the period from 1974 (Nixon's resignation that year amounting to the symbolic end of the '60s) to the mid-80s was dominated by "widespread fears and anxieties" -- about communism, crime, child abuse, and more -- that provoked an absolutist moral vision of good and evil.

This was an atmosphere Ronald Reagan would exploit and ride to power. Hardly its creator, ``he was joining a revolution already in progress." Jenkins covers so much ground in this relatively short book that it has the dizzying feel of a survey course conducted at light speed. Quick, here's a glimpse of the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment, here the rise of the gay rights movement, and -- don't blink! -- Paul Ehrlich's ``Population Bomb" and the shooting of John Lennon. Given all the rapid-fire trend spotting, it's easy to miss that the author actually has a thesis.

Jenkins gets down to business in the chapter ``The Politics of Children: 1977." This he considers the pivotal year when fears for the kids, lashed by uncritical mass media, reached hysterical levels. Predators -- whether pedophiles, nursery school teachers, porn merchants, drug peddlers, Moonie cultists, drunk drivers, or fathers -- were everywhere, yet hidden by conspiracy and disguise. ``Save the children" was a rallying cry uniting legitimate parental concern and intolerance against scapegoats like gays.

As crime rates soared, attitudes toward criminals became more punitive. Prison populations ballooned. Never mind that a huge percentage of prisoners had committed ``victimless crimes" such as drug possession.

Simultaneously, the United States seemed under threat from equally pernicious enemies abroad. The menace of the Soviet Union was augmented by Third World surrogates hijacking airplanes and stirring trouble in Latin America. By 1979, a new evil arose in the form of an ayatollah in Iran holding Americans hostage and mocking American power. That Khomeini seemed like nothing more than another cult leader made him at once ludicrous and terrifying. Jimmy Carter, by contrast, came off as an impostor, the epitome of weakness.

In the context of perils from every direction, the rhetoric of unrelenting war against evil triumphed over moral relativism. It became, and remains, the age of martial metaphors. Wars were proclaimed against crime, drugs, porn, and terrorism. Lost in the sloganeering, the author believes, was any sense of moral-political complexity.

Though Jenkins largely keeps his own centrist politics to himself, he gives Reagan high marks for keeping pressure on the Russians. Internal forces alone would not have prompted a withering away of the state. ``No account of the collapse of the Soviet empire," he writes, ``can ignore the vision of Ronald Reagan, who had correctly predicted in the face of all skepticism that we would win and they would lose."

And he credits the president with unleashing free-market capitalism. The explosive growth of high-tech industries in the '80s ``looked like wonderful commercials for decentralization and deregulation, entrepreneurship and risk taking, heroic private enterprise and free trade."

In the author's accounting, Reagan's achievements overshadow the dangers of nuclear brinksmanship and the hypocrisies of trickle-down economics.

Usually, Jenkins's judgments come wrapped in workmanlike prose. But his revelations sometimes arrive with the force of a slap. Consider child sexual abuse, which reemerged in the mid-'70s after a period of not-so-benign neglect.

For decades, specialists considered molestation rare and typically involving some degree of guilt in the child. In fact, according to Wardell Pomeroy, one of Alfred Kinsey's co authors, incest could produce ``many beautifully and mutually satisfying relationships between fathers and daughters," all without harmful effects. As Jenkins observes, ``Little of the expert writing on child abuse published between about 1955 and 1978 can be read today without embarrassment."

``Decade of Nightmares" tries to encompass so much that its argument is often obscured. But it's a substantial book, utterly without embarrassment.

Dan Cryer is a freelance writer in New York.