Age of Fracture Quotes

“Whereas the structural trend toward increased inequality was gradual and went for a long time unobserved, the crises in the lives of the urban poor were public and dramatic. The new armies of the homeless that seemed suddenly to materialize in every major city in the early 1980s, sleeping in doorways, camped under elevated highways, spreading their temporary cardboard shelters over office tower heating grates, were a startling and disturbing sight. Not since the Depression had the least-advantaged Americans been so starkly visible to the rest.”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“These battles of the political theory books and manifestoes did not occur in a vacuum, nor were they without tangible consequences. Their dominating background was the growing heterogeneity of American society in the last quarter of the century: its more diverse and more vocal subcultures, on the one hand, and its steadily growing economic inequalities on the other.”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“When John Kenneth Galbraith rose to deliver the presidential address of the American Economic Association in 1972, the angular Harvard professor and supremely self-confident adviser to presidents was arguably the most famous living economist in America. From The Affluent Society in 1958 to The New Industrial State in 1967, his critical accounts of capitalism's tendencies to underfund social goods and concentrate corporate control had been fixtures on the best-seller lists. Galbraith's thirteen-part BBC television series on the workings of capitalism in 1977 was to help goad the production of Milton Friedman's counterassertion of 1980, the PBS series Free to Choose, an iconic statement of the new market ideology.”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“Between those who sold the Republican majority on a massive tax cut in 1981 and the professional critics of Keynesianism there were deep rifts and rivalries. A striking number of the leading organizers of the "supply-side" movement were economic innocents: Robert Bartley, who assumed direction of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 with ambitions to make it (as he did) the most sharply conservative editorial page in mainstream journalism; Jude Wanniski, the flamboyant journalist who was Bartley's first associate editor; George Gilder, the self-taught sociobiologist; Jack Kemp, the maverick congressman eager to put a populist face on the Republican party; and Irving Kristol, dean of neoconservative journalism and matchmaker to the new conservative foundations. Robert Lucas dismissed the linchpin of supply-side economics-the Kemp-Roth bill calling for a 30 percent across-the-board cut in federal individual income tax rates-as a "crackpot proposal.”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“A second and more powerful explanation looks to changes in the institutions
of intellectual life. In this reading of late-twentieth-century U.S. history, the key to the age was the conscious efforts of conservative intellectuals and their institutional sponsors to reshape not only the terms of political debate but the mechanics of intellectual production itself. By the late 1970s, Nixon's former secretary of the Treasury, the Wall Street investor William E. Simon, was urging that "the only thing that can save the Republican Party . . . is a counterintelligentsia," created by funneling funds to writers, journalists, and social scientists whose ideas had been frozen out of general circulation by the "dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy" prevailing in the universities and the media.12”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“In accounting for the transformations in ideas and culture that reshaped the last quarter of the twentieth century, three sharply different explanations have been offered. The first posits a shift in the nation's core psyche and character. It was the "me decade," the journalist Tom Wolfe wrote famously in 1976: an age obsessed with self-referentiality. The nation, this line of reasoning argues, was caught up in an "age of greed," a new "culture of narcissism," a collapse of faith in public institutions, a pell-mell, selfish rush into a myriad of private lifestyle communities.”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

“Caught in the middle of these debates in a special issue of Feminist Studies in 1988, Leslie Rabine was not alone in confessing to her "profound and often enraged sense of insoluble ambivalence toward deconstruction."36”
― Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture