The Decade the Music Died

With President Carter running around building houses for the poor, writing bad novels, and offering sage commentary on everything from furniture to ethics, it's possible to overlook the little matter of his disastrous presidency. The most valuable contribution of Philip Jenkins's new book (Oxford University Press, 352 pages, $28) is its powerful reminder of how bad things really got before America was ready to take a gamble on an elderly movie star.

It's all here in Technicolor: the skyhigh interest rates, the hostage crisis in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Cuban troops in Africa, U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young's defense of the Cuban troops in Africa, brother Billy Carter's excellent Libyan adventure, and, above all, the famous "malaise" speech from the Oval Office proving beyond all doubt that it was all our fault. Throw in that great headline from the Washington Post - "President Attacked by a Rabbit" - and you get an idea of what Ronald Reagan had to clean up before he was able to roll that signature reelection commercial about it being "morning again in America."

Unfortunately, Mr. Jenkins is a religious sociologist and, thus, he has a broader canvas in mind. He endeavors to show that the rise of the political right was largely a simpleminded reaction to a whole lot of bad news on the culture. He's got a point, especially on crime. But in beating it to death, he gives short shrift to the all-important economic issues and offers a remarkably confusing narrative on the vagaries of popular fear and prejudice.

In doing so, he suggests, without actually saying it, that the Republicans are winning because they are pandering to popular fears and prejudices. Like so many scholars, he wants to have it both ways: Liberals may be wrong to see, for example, a race card behind every anti-crime measure, but conservatives are pretty shrewd at reading and riding the zeitgeist.

We have to choose our words carefully here, and it would be misleading to describe the rhetoric of threat entirely in terms of "paranoia," with its connotation of illusory menace. As we learned on September 11, outside enemies can be all too real, with the capacity to wreak immense damage, and so can domestic villains: sexual predators and criminals do exist. But through the 1980s, there was a staggering disconnect between the portrayal of menaces and what could plausibly be seen as their objective menace.

Sound familiar? It should, because Mr. Jenkins brings his story up to date with two or three chapters on the 1990s and into the George W. Bush era. Here he finds Republicans still at it with their threats from within and without, and Democrats either playing the Republican game, as President Clinton did on crime and welfare and plenty more, or reverting to their losing ropea-dope liberal form. It's basically the same old, tired, entirely cynical argument that the great unwashed masses are too easily scared and exploited.

Mr. Jenkins has a special idee fixe on the matter of serial killers. He trots out Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, et al. to demonstrate what he sees as the connection between the press and the public's horror and fascination with this tiny minority of murder cases and the epochal rightward shift that has occurred in criminal jurisprudence, making America the most "punitive" society among advanced nations. He even sticks in a plea for revisiting the issue of prisoner rehabilitation and other "progressive" ideas that have been tossed in the get-tough-on-crime drive.

Here again, he is careful to distance himself from the 1960s-speak crowd that says the best anti-crime program is an anti-poverty program. But in the end it is difficult to tell how his approach would differ substantively from the system "Dirty Harry" so effectively trashed in the movies. Where Mr. Jenkins shines is in nailing the power of the press, fiction and nonfiction, to move popular opinion, and he has a fairly nuanced sense of how politics and culture work in tandem, rightly pointing out that political historians often neglect the significance of movies such as "Halloween" or even "Five Easy Pieces."

And Mr. Jenkins does try hard to be fair to President Reagan, noting that while his "Evil Empire" rhetoric was mocked by Western liberals, it offered a moral clarity that had "enormous impact in the Eastern Bloc," both for the dissidents and the illegitimate authorities attempting to crush them. He also recognizes the prodigious political skills of the Gipper: "His administration's victories owe much to Reagan's personal determination, rhetorical skills, and ability to keep framing the conflict in comprehensible moral and even religious terms of good and evil."

Perhaps the best insight of Mr. Jenkins's book is that he knows that eras, and even decades, are not measured easily by years.The mythic 1960s, as he amply demonstrates, is really a lot more about the 1970s than the 1960s. Indeed, a sound symbolic argument could be made that the music really didn't die until John Lennon was murdered in 1980. A lot of bad things were happening in America by that point in time, and America was clearly more than ready for a change.

Mr. Willcox last wrote in these pages on President Bush.