Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen Page A

organize an absolutely nutty George Hamilton memorial limbo competition at the country club, both .” In other words, post-1960s irony turned out to be “a way for all kinds of taboo styles to sneak past the taste authorities— don’t mind us, we’re just kidding —and then, once inside, turn serious.” America in the 1970s and ’80s gave itself permission not only to celebrate the old days but also to reproduce and restore them. Picking and choosing and exploiting elements of the past extended to politics and the political economy.
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    To understand how that worked, how the opening of the nostalgia floodgates throughout culture helped the political tide to turn as well, it’s useful to look back barely a generation—when it spectacularly failed to work in the early 1960s. The national political right had tried demonizing liberal modernity before enough Americans were fatigued or appalled by accelerating newness for politicians to exploit that reaction successfully.
    Barry Goldwater—a conservative Republican when that wasn’t redundant, a not-very-religious right-winger when that wasn’t an oxymoron, a libertarian before they were called that—halfheartedly tried to use the incipient cultural backlash when he ran for president in 1964. He’d gotten into politics fighting the New Deal when it was still new, and ever since had advocated for the U.S. economy taking a sharp right turn or full U-turn back to the days before the 1930s. Milton Friedman, an avatar of that ultra-conservative economic strain the same age as Goldwater, was one of his advisers when he was the Republican nominee, the most right-wing nominee ever. He proposed cutting personal and corporate income taxes by 25 percent for starters, scrapping new and imminent socialist programs like Medicare and food stamps, keeping Social Security from getting any more generous, and ending “this cancerous growth of the federal government.”
    The political economy (including maximum anti-Communism) was his overriding focus. But none of that appeared in the half-hour campaign ad that a team of Goldwater operatives produced and bought time to run on 150 NBC stations just before the 1964 election. The film is an extraordinary artifact, remarkably ahead of the curve for its hysterical depiction of the scary new—teenagers, black people, protests, unbelievers, cosmopolitanism run amok. It was a propaganda ur-text for today’s ongoing American culture war, which at the time almost nobody considered a war. It tied together and sensationally stoked all of the embryonic backlashes.
    The film starts without narration for ninety seconds, just an exciting quick-cut montage of young people doing the Twist, a crowd of black people singing on a city street, cops arresting people, a pair of apparently gay men, topless go-go dancers, all intercut with shots of a recklessly speeding car and with a soundtrack of frenzied rock guitar riffs. As the narrator begins his voice-over, cut to the Statue of Liberty, a small town and its church, white children obediently pledging allegiance to the flag—then cut back to another frenzied montage of black people protesting and being arrested and some white people having too much fun, in particular dancing women shot from behind or without tops. That’s the structure of the entire thirty-minute film, three parts decadence interposed with one part good-old-fashioned America, back and forth. “Now there are two Americas,” the narrator begins,
the other America—the other America is no longer a dream, but a nightmare ….Our streets are not safe, immorality begins to flourish—we don’t want this….The new America—ask not what you can give but what you can take ….Illegitimate births swell the relief rolls….Teenagers read the headlines, see the TV news, anything goes now….They see the cancer of pornography festering.
    Cut to an extremely long sequence of porn film posters, strip club marquees, and paperback covers