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

including Call Me Nympho, Jazz Me Baby, and Male for Sale . All of which were, in fact, public rarities.
But the new America says, “This is free speech.” In the new America the ancient moral law is mocked. “Nation under God—who’s He?”…No longer is a uniform a symbol of authority. The rules of the game have been changed now….Up through the courts of law, justice becomes a sick joke, new loopholes allegedly protecting freedom now turn more and more criminals free on the nation’s streets….By new laws it’s not the lawbreaker who is handcuffed, it is the police ….Vigilante committees, good citizens, grope for a solution.
    Cut to shots of the U.S.-Mexican border—from more than half a century ago.
Over the borders— dope . Narcotics traffic setting a new depraved record. And the victims so often are the defenseless—the kids….How did this happen? Is there a reason we seemed to have changed so much in so short a time?
    A really short time—according to this film, the moral decay got bad only during the previous eleven months, since the assassination of the “young, inspiring” President Kennedy. After NBC asked for deletions of “60 of the most risqué seconds,” Goldwater at the last moment decided not to air the film, even though his campaign sent two hundred prints to conservative groups to show all over the country.
    He lost by a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson, of course, whose share of the vote remains the largest ever. At the time one takeaway was that right-wing economic ideas were a total political nonstarter, anachronisms that would remain so. But in fact the Goldwater campaign was just the first rollout of a new American political template, an unsuccessful beta test. It tried to exploit popular unease with the culturally new as a way to get a green light for the rollback that Goldwater and the serious right really cared about—a restoration of old-style economic and tax and regulatory policies tilted toward business and the well-to-do.
    That lashing of cultural fear to political economics was just ahead of its time. Because 1964 was before the proliferation of hippies and marijuana and psychedelics, before a large feminist movement emerged and workplaces started filling with unprecedented numbers of women. It was before U.S. combat forces went to Vietnam, before the antiwar movement blossomed. It was before violent crime really shot up—murders in the United States increased by half during the five years from 1964 to 1969, and in New York City by that much in just two years, from 1966 to 1968.
    Goldwater’s landslide defeat was before the epic black uprisings that came later in the 1960s (Watts, Newark, Detroit) along with the black power movement. But it was just after a couple of years of spectacular civil rights demonstrations and confrontations and immediately after the Civil Rights Act became law—which is why the Goldwater film had so many shots of unruly black people and why five of the six states Goldwater won were in the Deep South.
    It was also before a critical mass of white people outside the South started feeling the way most white Southerners felt—besieged by blacks, their whiteness no longer quite such a guaranteed all-access VIP pass. It was before wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Golden Age ruined by meddling liberal outsiders from Washington and New York, previously a white Southern habit, became such a common white American habit. It was before respectable opinion, having spent a century trying to make ethnic tribalism seem anachronistic and wrong, began accepting and embracing a lot of it. “One of the central themes in the culture of the 1970s was the rehabilitation of ethnic memory and history as a vital part of personal identity,” the leftist professor Marshall Berman wrote in his wonderful 1982 book All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity . “This has been a striking development in the history of modernity. Modernists today no