UNLOCKED: History is a Weapon #4 - Pivotal Decade (1970s) w/ Matt Christman part 2

This Wreckage

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 22 January 2020

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In anticipation of HIAW 6 (out this week for patrons!) we are releasing for the public the second half of this episode.

Matt and Sean finish this extended look into the 1970s by answering the questions: Why did Carterism (spoiler alert!) fall apart over its internal contradictions? Where have the politics of personal virtue taken us? Why was Reagan the man of the hour and why was Clintonism his enduring achievement? How did neoliberalism become the economic consensus and what the hell is happening now that its entire political and economic edifice is collapsing?

All will be revealed herein. The boys may have been tipsy off Tecate, but you'll need to pack that bong for a big old rip as 500 years of *systemic cycles of accumulation* are synthesized to make sense of this current pivotal decade that echoes so much of what happened in the '70s.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And then so we get to this question of legitimacy, right? So how is legitimacy gained by a political or economic system or just, you know, just the larger system?
0:21.0	The United States has like this project moving forward. Of course like at the end of the day
0:26.4	it's down to like base material interests like we're talking about right? But like let's be clear
0:31.7	between you know the end of the Second World War, this like glorious 30 years and up until the 70s,
0:39.0	there was a really deep sense amongst most Americans, right, that the system was legitimate and that it
0:44.6	worked yeah it wasn't perfect but it worked even Nixon saying it's in 68 is not
0:49.1	perfect but it works and now when Watergate happens when all of Nixon's chickens come home to Roost, because he's doing the same sort of backhanded shit he's always been doing shiving people and you know fucking bugging old ladies in the street to do whatever he can
1:03.7	to gain power when he's finally caught by it that is a psychological shock for the
1:09.0	American people no matter where you are on the political spectrum that a president of the United States
1:13.5	would be engaged in such just based criminality. Oh yeah. So that has a real effect
1:19.5	on politics after. And having it happen simultaneously with the, he could only push down that garbage so much before it overflows,
1:29.3	right around the same time that Watergate is happening the the
1:33.4	the economic forces he was trying to suppress with his with his gimmicks and
1:37.4	with his lever fiddling they finally happened like the inflation begins and then of course you have the exogenous impact of the oil or the on Kippur war and then the oil shocks
1:47.3	Which something people had never thought about cheap energy was just taking in as part of the new economy and
1:55.8	No one saw that coming and all of a sudden we're living in a different world and they happen at the same time.
1:58.2	So it's like not only are our leaders crooks in a very simple like literal like breaking into
2:05.6	fucking houses and shit sense but also the the system that they were they were
2:10.8	supposed to be shepherding and cultivating also is failing at the exact same time.
2:16.2	So you have a complete collapse and legitimacy, any kind of faith in any institutions in America,
2:23.4	which had been, yeah, for a long time,
2:25.6	pretty much unquestioned.
	...

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