Saw a post about this at !history@hexbear.net and was a bit confused by exactly how badly the people there were going at each others throats in the comments. Nobody seemed able to agree on what precisely happened in 1971. Suggested explanations included:
- Neoliberalism being declared the state religion by Grand Moff Richard Nixon
- The gold standard being abolished
- The oil crisis
- The Republican and Democrat parties becoming increasingly divided
- Declining birthrates
- Institutional Racism
If any of you could give some explanations with, like, sources that aren’t just 10 pages of graphs with arrows pointing at 1971, that would be pretty great.
No sources from me but speculation. It’s the decade before, the 60’s where focus was on people, freedom, honest compensation for labor and social equality.
I know I will get push-back on this, it being perhaps to simple of a theory or me missing key elements. I will die on this hill though, it was the hippies.
The conservatives around the world got a collective heart attack from the 60’s and what transpired therein and this is when conservatism started to plan on breaking those wild communist activist freeloaders. We can see the effects today still. Mismanagement from the ‘left’ (or better yet, the world at large tbh) to capitalize on the spirit of the 60’ and truly change society. The focus on business and the suppression of those pesky ‘hippies’ and/or ‘communists’ started to gain traction and voila, there is the divide of the two lines somewhere in the 70’s.
For good measure, I have nothing against the 60’ and hippies, just pointing to these as a ‘shock to the system’ as an explanation for what happened in the 70’s and what we see today.