The Return of the 1970’s

I lived through the 1970’s and their inflationary depression. It was a dismal, lousy decade. The economy was in shambles with shortages, intermittent energy “crises”, cripplingly high interest rates, and a continuing, unrelenting inflation that sapped the economy and decimated people’s savings. The government under both parties grew more powerful, intrusive, costly, aggressive, and vigorously annoying. Abroad the Cold War was raging on, and we were losing. The decade saw a failed war in Vietnam, disaster and humiliation in Iran, the rise of OPEC with unfriendly governments demanding exorbitant prices for oil they had stolen from American and British companies, the expansion of the Soviet empire into Africa and Latin America, and the relative and in some cases absolute decline of American military power versus the Soviets. For so-called leaders the nation had Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, two men who belong on any sensibly thought out list of the nation’s five or six worst presidents.

The national mood in response to all this was a sense of fear, gloom, and foreboding so deep and pervasive as probably to seem incomprehensible to someone coming of age in the 1980’s or thereafter. Shops and mail order outfits sprang up all over the country selling wheat grinders, freeze dried food, insect proof bulk storage bins, and other “survivalist” supplies. There was a brisk market for books on how to profit from an impending economic collapse and how to survive a coming worse than just economic collapse. Gun stores did very a good business in weapons and ammo. There was a huge demand for gold, silver, and various collectibles. The press was full of articles proclaiming that the American era was over and that the rising generation of boomers would have to accept a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. George Will wrote a column claiming that no nation had fallen as far and as fast as the United States was doing since the collapse of imperial Spain (not a completely unreasonable opinion given what was going on and that high government officials were speaking of the need to negotiate a tolerable second position for America in a Soviet-dominated world). There was talk of malaise in the nation, but that was too mild a term for what was really going on in people’s minds.

Yet we know how it all ended. We turned ourselves around. The United States won the Cold War. The early 1980’s began a quarter century of prosperity and economic progress. People were able to look back on the worries and apocalyptic talk of the 1970’s as overdone, as a strange and almost silly or quaint aberration and certainly as something that belonged in the dead past – until lately.

Now we are seeing it again - the fear,the aggressive government, the serious economic troubles, the failure and drift abroad (though nothing nearly as serious as the Cold War), the doubts about the country’s future, and even two presidents who would make fairly good stand-ins for Nixon and Carter. Once again people are stocking up on gold, silver, guns, and ammo. Once again there is money to be made selling bulk food supplies and writing books on how to survive the coming something or other. Once again, large numbers of the citizens are worried that the government is moving from mere drag and annoyance to positive threat.

It seems to be the 1970’s all over again. We woke up and worked out way out of that mess. We can only hope that we will be as good and as lucky again.