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How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture
Collins
May 2007
On Sale: May 8, 2007
400 pages
ISBN: 0060747668
EAN: 9780060747664
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Until the 1950s, the struggle to feed, clothe, and employ
the nation drove most of American political life. From
slavery to the New Deal, political parties organized around
economic interests and engaged in fervent debate over the
best allocation of agonizingly scarce resources. But with
the explosion of the nation's economy in the years after
World War II, a new set of needs began to emerge—a search
for meaning and self-expression on one side, and a quest for
stability and a return to traditional values on the other. In The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey offers a bold
reinterpretation of the latter half of the twentieth
century. In this sweeping history of postwar America, the
tumult of racial and gender politics, the rise of the
counterculture, and the conservative revolution of the 1980s
and 1990s are portrayed in an entirely new light. Readers
will learn how and why the contemporary ideologies of left
and right emerged in response to the novel challenges of
mass prosperity. The political ideas that created the culture wars, however,
have now grown obsolete. As the Washington Post aptly
summarized Lindsey's take on the contradictions of American
politics, "Republicans want to go home to the United States
of the 1950s while Democrats want to work there." Struggling
to replace today's stale conflicts is a new consensus that
mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic
freedom of the right into a potentially powerful ethos of
libertarianism. The Age of Abundance reveals the secret
formula of this remarkable alchemy. The book is a
breathtaking reevaluation of our recent past—and will change
the way we think about the future.
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