HOW 'GO ASK ALICE' BECAME 'JUST SAY NO'

A Historian Argues the Late '70s Begat the Reagan Era and Today

DECADE OF NIGHTMARES, The End of the Sixties and the Making of
Eighties America, By Philip Jenkins (Oxford University Press; 344 Pages; $28)

"Historical eras rarely begin or end at neat or precise points,"
writes Philip Jenkins in his new book, "and decades are highly
malleable." We may allow ourselves to speak of "the '70s" or "the
'80s" as if we knew just what these phrases denoted; but it is a
mistake, of course, to expect this essentially arbitrary terminology
to convey some sort of unity on the decades that answer to these names.

In Jenkins' view, as laid out in "Decade of Nightmares: The End of
the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America," U.S. history
suffered a profound rupture halfway through the '70s, splitting that
decade in two. While the first half may best be seen as the tail end
of the '60s, the remaining years, along with the early '80s, demand
to be understood as something else entirely -- an unprecedented era
of insecurity and dread that set the stage not only for the so-called
"Regan revolution" but for the decades to follow as well:

"Measured by responses to any one of a range of issues, American
sensibilities changed dramatically in the decade after 1975. Whether
in matters of foreign policy or war, disorder or terrorism, poverty
or urban crisis, crime or drug abuse, many Americans adopted a more
pessimistic, more threatening interpretation of human behavior, which
harked back to much older themes in American culture.

At home and abroad, the post-1975 public was less willing to see
social dangers in terms of historical forces, instead preferring a
strict moralistic division: problems were a matter of evil, not
dysfunction. Ideas of relativism and complex causation were replaced
by simpler and more sinister visions of the enemies facing Americans
and their nation. And the forces of evil arrayed against us were
conceived in terms of conspiracy and clandestine manipulation. ...
These concerns focused on a number of outside enemies, most obviously
the Soviet Union, but there were countless enemies within.

In the political rhetoric of the time, these diverse groups
personified the immorality and outright evil that had arisen in
consequence of the moral and political decadence of recent years.

Conditions were bad, it seemed, because sixties values had let them
get so bad."

It is common wisdom, of course, that the conservative turn of the
early '80s represented a backlash against, and a repudiation of, the
naive but hopeful values of the '60s. But Jenkins' intelligent and
judicious account of the period is nevertheless enlightening, largely
because of the care he takes in identifying the deep themes that
united Americans' attitudes toward perceived threats of varying
natures and, one might have thought, quite distinct orders.

Consider, to take one of Jenkins' central examples, the paranoid
tendency to insist on seeing every threat or potential threat not as
an isolated phenomenon but rather as an element of a conspiracy. Once
this tendency takes hold, as it did powerfully during the "decade of
nightmares," it becomes the dominant interpretive metaphor in terms
of which all dangers and indeed all politics are understood. And the
resulting picture is, almost inevitably, an apocalyptic one whose
adherents see their country as besieged by a wave of evildoers, its
very existence hanging by a thread.

This is most obviously so on the global scale, where, in the late
'70s American mind, the Soviet Union goes from "adversary" to "evil
empire," revolutionaries and insurgents in various countries all come
to be seen as part of a vast creeping communist menace, and the
phenomenon of terrorism is transformed from a tactic of the desperate
into an international network for whom evil is not a means but an
end. But the transformation is all the more startling -- and Jenkins'
portrayal of it all the more compelling -- in the context of domestic threats.

As "Decade of Nightmares" convincingly illustrates, the vast majority
of perceived domestic threats during this period were interpreted as,
fundamentally, threats to the nation's children.

Baby Boomers who had taken a rosy view of their own prospects in the
'60s were far less sanguine a decade later when they viewed the world
as the place their vulnerable offspring would somehow have to
survive, and the behaviors they had once viewed as valuable liberties
came to be seen, in their children, as indications of hazardous
libertinism. To say that the late '70s brought a growing awareness of
the problems posed by child abuse, child pornography and adolescent
drug use would be a dramatic understatement: The dominant view went
well beyond awareness, and incorporated the panicked belief that a
veritable epidemic of abuse, pornography and drugs -- not to mention
religious cults, homosexual predators and serial killers -- were
descending like plagues upon the nation's unprotected and largely
unsuspecting youth.

As with external threats to the nation's security, the reigning
tendency was to see these perils not as emerging from isolated
individuals, but as the product of yet another set of conspiracies:
"By the end of the decade, not only were threats to children a
familiar concept, but so was the imagined form of the danger:
clandestine rings and secret organizations, evil predators seeking to
seduce or capture them." Particularly notable is the national
hysteria about drug use, as frequently exaggerated media reports
regarding the dangers of various substances help transform the "go
ask Alice" openness of the '60s into the "just say no" mantra of the
'80s. During this period, "crack cocaine ... acquired all the
stereotypical evils associated with PCP, and before that with older
demon drugs such as cocaine and marijuana, stereotypes that drew
heavily on images of black primitivism and savagery. ... In 1986,
Time magazine declared the crack problem the issue of the year, and
Newsweek proclaimed it the biggest story since Vietnam and Watergate
(bigger, that is, than the 1980 hostage crisis or the nuclear
confrontation of 1983)."

The most significant negative effect of the so-called war on drugs
may well have been the American enthusiasm for incarceration that
helped make the United States the industrialized world's leading
imprisoner of its own people.

But the paranoia Jenkins describes damaged the prospects for many
other groups as well. Fears that the crumbling of traditional gender
roles would somehow damage children helped defeat the Equal Rights
Amendment, while the association in the public mind of sexual
predation with homosexuality put roadblocks in the path of the
burgeoning gay rights movement.

To this day, conservative resistance to progressive reforms tends to
center on the threat these reforms would allegedly pose to "family
values." Although writers such as Jenkins do an admirable job of
undermining the oddly popular view that conservative policies are on
the whole more family-friendly than progressive ones, that bias
remains influential and is likely to be so for some time.

"[L]ooking at public policy over the past thirty or forty years,"
Jenkins writes, "we see how thoroughly ideas of personal moral evil
have replaced alternative interpretations and driven out other
possible approaches to social problems at home and abroad.

While nobody wants a return to the starry-eyed nonjudgmental optimism
of the 1960s, the reaction of the post-1975 decade went too far in
its way, with the thorough demonization of criminals, drug users, and
social deviants, the quest for conspiracies, and the abandonment of
solutions that did not mesh easily with military metaphors." Jenkins
is well aware that descendants of the nightmares he discusses still
haunt the American public.

One cannot keep from hoping that he is right to think that a better
understanding of history might help us shake them off.