Word: turnings
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...long as a quarter-century, but the politics and economics don't move obviously in sync. Prosperity, for instance, can reinforce the "natural" political shift toward the right, as it did after World War II and for most of the past 25 years, but it can also accelerate a turn to the left, as it did in the early 1960s. Or the social discombobulations provoked by a given zig, as with the late '60s, can make the zag that follows more extreme; thus the long political period we've just been through...
...possible election of Obama. It is bizarre how secondary that epochal change now seems. It's as if Jesus had returned - but just afterward extraterrestrials landed, and as a result everybody stopped paying much attention to the holy dude. But it's also a perfectly apt and gratifying turn of events: candidate Obama positioned himself as a smart, steady character who happened to be black, and the economic emergency that helped ensure his election has pushed the fact of his race and its heavy symbolic freight into the shadows of public consciousness. Once the crises have passed, however, I think...
...must start spending again, and we will. But we've all known people who, having survived the 1930s, never lost their Depression habits of frugality. And so it will be again. We don't need to turn ourselves into tedious, zero-body-fat, zero-carbon-footprint ascetics, but even after the economy recovers, deciding to forgo that third car or fifth TV or imperial master bathroom or marginally cooler laptop will come more naturally...
...America that hatches will not be some bizarro world opposite of everything that came just before. History proceeds dialectically. The New Deal era ended, but its basic social and economic underpinnings have endured. Notwithstanding the backlash against the 1960s, the changes born of that decade's sharp left turn - civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmentalism, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll - became part of the American way of life. In the same way, even as we now rediscover the need for sensible regulation and systemic fairness, the fundamentally good lessons of the Reagan age - entrepreneurialism mostly unbound, proud Americanism - will endure...
Andersen is a novelist of (Heyday, Turn of the Century), the host of the public-radio program Studio 360 and a former columnist for TIME...