YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION---WELL, YOU KNOW WE ALL WANT TO CHANGE THE WORLD--- Episode 1

       THE RADICALISM OF THE MIDDLE AMERICANS 
                                                1970---2000

    Frustration politics gathered in the United States during the last three decades of the twentieth century, especially during periods of reduced confidence in America's institutions and future in the world economy. For six or seven years ---1972 to 1975 and 1988 to 1992 ----the frustrated politics were heated ; however, they were usually muted. 
    Before the late 1960s, the splinter politics of the United States tended to hark back to the conflicts and issues of the New Deal coalition. One such was how Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive campaign for the presidency recaptured the leftish naivete of the 1930s. { I just finished a biography of Henry Wallace---- he was a great American.} The more powerful example was the insistence on states' rights and opposition to civil rights that guided South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and his 1948 Dixiecrat movement and spurred Alabama governor George C. Wallace to run for president in 1964, 1968, and 1972, while in between promoting several Deep South slates of independent presidential electors in 1956 and 1960. 
   Gathering in the late sixties and early seventies, however, three overlapping events --- U.S. embarrassment and defeat in the Vietnam War, the trauma of the Watergate scandal, and the ability of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to impose a major oil price increase --- combined to stir popular concern about the nation's governmental and global incapacities. In 1974 a worn-out Richard Nixon had concurred with pundit Walter Lippmann's evaluation that his historical role had been "to liquidate, defuse, deflate, the exaggerations of the romantic period of American imperialism and American inflation. Inflation of promises, inflation of hopes, the Great Society, American supremacy --- all that had to be deflated because it was all beyond our power. . . " 
   Politically, however, Nixon shaped a mobilization of Middle American frustration over the events of the sixties. That coalition was renewed and extended between 1978 and 1980 around a kindred trio of issues --- the treaties returning the Panama Canal, the second OPEC oil price hike in 1979, and the Iranian seizure of the U. S. embassy in Tehran. Once again the populace sensed the economic weakening of the American prospect. 
   Still another surge of frustration politics gathered in the late eighties and crested in the early 1990s. Some of its shapers were the 1987 stock market crash, the attention in 1988 and 1989 to books contending that the United States was in a decline like Britain's a century earlier and the growing national fear of Japanese economic rivalry. Others included the 1990 debate over the eighties as a "decade of greed," and the 1991-92 disquiet over high deficits and the economy---1990 had ushered in America's first white-collar recession---and the weak aspects of the Gulf War. These were the failure to dislodge Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the U.S. budget difficulties that required Washington to pass the hat for allied financial support of U.S. military operations. 
   Although the discontents of the early seventies, 1978-80, and the early nineties are not usually strung together, it makes sense to do so. They have a continuity. Each yielded an identifiable, though by no means similar, radicalization and frustration affecting a significant portion of the U.S. electorate : the so-called Middle American Radicals (MARs) of the 1970s, the vital working-class increment of the Reagan coalition of 1980, and the worried Perot, Buchanan, and Clinton electorates of 1990-92. More than economics was involved, but each of these periods did overlap one or more recessions.