How We Got Here

I am exceedingly grateful for this book. I'm 52 years old and came of age during the 70's. I was a child of my times. I was aware that things were changing, but never had any real idea of the true nature of these changes while they were happening. Like most of my peers, I never went further than the headlines. I accepted the interpretation of the others around me who were equally ignorant of the facts behind those headlines. Now I spend a great deal of my time trying to understand just why I have become so unhappy with what America has become. I liked some of the social changes I saw, but became quite disenchanted with the wanton destruction of all the institutions that I know are essential to a successful civilization. Marriage, religion, masculine and feminine ethics, law, respect for legitimate authority, families, education, morality......., the list goes on and on. All these things were smashed beyond recognition without the slightest thought about how they might be replaced. This book fills in the blanks. What was the real meaning of the Pentagon papers? Why were the Carter years such a failure of leadership? What part did the government play in the madness? What were the political facts behind Vietnam? These and many more questions are touched upon in easily readable form. The second from the last paragraph of the book sums up the general tone rather well:"Americans are a people of anxious conscience, and they do not seem very pleased with themselves these days. They see corruption in office and their fellow-citizens apparently acquiescing in it; they see pervasive child-neglect, disrespect for legitimate authority, quotas in the workplace, gruesome crimes in the quietest towns, misspellings in the letters form their children's teachers, smut on the airwaves, the hardening misery of the poorest of the poor. They lack the vocabulary to express their misgivings. How can one judge if one has been taught all one's life that it is wicked to be judgmental? But rendering the misgivings inarticulate does not make them go away. So let's be articulate. It is not true that things in general were better half a century ago. Things in many respects were worse----more militaristic, less innovative, more statist, less tolerant, more unionized, less humane, more prejudiced. Nostalgia for the past would be misplaced, and even if it were not, nostalgia is the weakest and most useless of emotions, the narcotic of the defeated and the helpless. But if things in general were not better, some things in particular were. It was better when people showed more loyalty to family and country, better when they read more and talked about themselves less, better when they restrained their sexuality, better when professors and curators were unafraid to uphold high intellectual standards, better when immigrants were expected to Americanize promptly, better when not every sorrow begat a lawsuit."

The book is a comprehensive look at the 1970s and the cultural changes that came out of it. If you survived the 70s you will get it immediately. I'm 68 years old and in recent years have finally begun to understand what happened to me and the country in the 70s . I finally grew up and had time to think. Great book if you have come to feel out of step with the baby boom generation. I think it's unclear what happens next. Picking up the pieces of what has been smashed, and reassembling moral virtue and broad respect for the rational, in other words, reclaiming the best of the pre- 70s culture, while retaining the 70s commitment to equal opportunity for women and minorities, will not be easy. For those of us who are approaching old age, championing this work is a moral obligation and the best gift we could give to the generations to come. We owe it to them.

"~Although Frum is conservative and I'm a cynical, iconoclastic liberal, his book is witty, fascinating, most often correct and politically objective even when his political leanings surface. It's also a primer on how the best intentions can lead to the worst results, like the ethnic splintering that has replaced assimilation. His section on the ramifications of Phil Burton's revolt against the old power structure in Congress is one of those moments when I muse: "Why didn't I think of that?"~"~ Communists were harmless and well meaning.)

An interesting text with a lot of pop culture - which does not mean that it isn't accurate. I must mention that the Kindle edition is even more rife with typos than the usual Kindle production. "Would" is often "woad"; "d" occasionally comes thru' as "cl". Other mysteries appear. No one proofread this at all. Typos are a real problem with Kindles, but this is worse than usual.

It is commonly thought that the decade of the 1960s set the tone for the kind of country America became in the early twenty-first century. But in "How We Got Here," author David Frum makes his case that the social revolution that brought modern life about took place in the decade of the Seventies, not in its predecessor.Frum's effort is a wide-ranging, exceptionally well-researched volume (there are statistics to back up multitudes of the assertions made herein) that covers economic, social, cultural, military, and political life in the 1970s, a decade during which there was a great loss of faith in institutions--many of the social policies that worked well for the country earlier in the century, Frum notes, failed and had to be reworked for a new era.This page-turner looks at seemingly all of the major topics at the center of our national conversation in the Seventies, including crime, Vietnam, Watergate, divorce, family life, religion, the sexual revolution, busing, relations between the sexes and races, inflation, the oil and gas shocks, energy, the Cold War, taxes, and government. Many of the incidents discussed have been forgotten a third of a century later, and their mention helps provide the reader a vivid portrait of what life was like then.The author puts the 1970s into context, comparing the country prior to the Seventies to the present-day America that sees that decade as the fairly distant past. Frum notes that life is better in some ways and worse in others due to the changes that came about, but closes with optimism, reminding the reader that America has corrected mistakes in the past and that we can correct the mistakes rooted in the Seventies by making the right choices.

A solid attempt to describe the complex and multifaceted forces shaping the 70s that laid the foundations of the US (and other nations) that we know today. Despite the author's own political and ideological positions being markedly different from the left, he makes an effort to portray both sides in a balanced manner.