Consensus In The Vietnam War

No period of time passes without leaving its mark on human history. It is uncommon, though, for a decade to be as transformative on a society as the 1970s – and closely related events in the 1960s and 1980s – were on the United States. The Vietnam war and the counterculture’s response reached their zenith. Environmentalism as a sociopolitical force found new and much stronger footing. The mobile phone and microprocessor, the foundations of large-scale modern telecommunications, were invented. However, though we may list any number of seminal events, the decline of the liberal consensus may have been the most important. For more than two decades the consensus had provided a level of ideological stability within the United States, and meant that
Moreover, they began to understand how potent a political force they could construct if they could only determine how to distill the issues of each voter’s moral fabric into political rhetoric. Chief among the Republicans who understood this was one Richard M. Nixon. He, likely more than any other politician of his day, understood the shifting social and political currents of the society in which he lived. To put it succinctly, he knew that voters were “not appealed to by revenue sharing” (Courtwright,
As is noted in America in the Seventies, “the economic downturn of the mid-1970s” and “the impact of national deindustrialization and a concomitant disappearance of…jobs” had a disproportionate impact on members of minority groups – particularly those who were members of the working class (Bailey and Farber, 59). Prior to the demise of the liberal consensus, considering the belief held during that era that the government had a responsibility to ensure economic prosperity, and ignoring the racial issues that certainly would have cropped up, it is possible and even likely that the state would have stepped in to support working class during the period of economic transition. However, by the time of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that belief was specific to groups of people and not a general assumption held by members of the government. Carter was progressive enough to hold to his promise “to increase the number of blacks and other minority candidates” in federal positions. However, most benefits had “their greatest impact…on mid- and upper-income minorities, not the poor.” However, the abandonment of Keynesian economics that occurred alongside the decline of the liberal consensus meant that Carter was not willing to use risky financial means to reach social ends (Kaufman,