History is a Weapon #4 - Pivotal Decade (1970s) w/ Matt Christman Pt 1 PREVIEW

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2019

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The boys are back! This History Is A Weapon is so massive (and inebriated) that we had to break it into two parts.

In this installment, Matt and Sean shoot a little shit about the radical geography of Europe before we plunge into the pool of disco and despair that was the 1970s: how global crisis upended the 'Golden Age' of American capitalism, how Richard Nixon rode a wave of aggrievement to become the voice of a 'silent majority' in backlash, and how the uneasy alliance between organized labor and the Democratic Party began to fracture as stagflation undermined the post-war compromise.

Part II, another goddamn hour-and-a-half of historical goodness, will drop later this week to complete the story of how this thing called neoliberalism came to dominance, how it, too, is now crumbling, and how we might dialectically overcome the limitations of working class self-organization evident in previous cycles of struggle.

To listen to this bonus content and more, become a patron at www.patreon.com/theantifada

Transcript

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0:00.0	So at that point as Perlstein says, Nixon never again in his entire political career went up, went against the working class in rhetoric, right?
0:12.0	Because he understood that that was a boundary within this consensus that existed,
0:17.0	that politically you could not cross.
0:19.0	And then as the Vietnam War heats up, as the civil rights movement leads to a
0:25.2	backlash as these fucking long hairs start going out on the streets and smoking dope
0:31.5	and just stuping all over the place.
0:33.6	Shitting on the American flag.
0:34.8	Yeah, shitty on the...
0:35.8	I listen to his 1968 RNC acceptance and he talks like for five minutes about desecrating the American flag like that was his thing he realized that like his personal agreements were starting to be shared
0:51.0	Yeah, within this backlash culture he was before a man ahead of his time in that respect, and he understood it.
0:55.4	He understood and we gestured at this in that episode.
0:59.6	He understood that there were segments of the white working class and I'm not even using that ironically
1:05.4	at this point because the organized working class during this era was primarily white for historical
1:11.5	and racist reasons, right?
1:13.2	He understood that there was a generation of working class people who were deeply alienated
1:18.2	by the social changes happening within society.
1:20.8	And because he had a deep-seated agreement of his own he was able to like telepathically recognize the silent
1:28.8	silent majority of the grievance out there and weaponize it for law and order
1:35.0	against these criminal elements who are out there you know like marching at
1:39.4	Selma or you know trying to levitate the fucking bettic on whatever the case
1:43.8	maybe and like the signal moment of that is the the hard hat strike here in New York
1:48.2	oh yeah when a bunch of builders beat the shit out of some hippies near a city hall.
	...

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