Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

“Alexa, change the president.”

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Bark louder, little dog.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / Open Thread: 70s v 80s?

Open Thread: 70s v 80s?

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Some people say that the 1970s were a trivial interim between the Glorious Youth Revolution of the 1960s and Reagan’s triumphant Morning in America election. I’ve always said this underrates the Seventies (even just for the social advances in ‘women’s lib’ and ‘gay pride’, which were not trivial even for those of us not female or LBGT). Then again, the degradation of American political culture by the self-styled Moral Majority in th Eighties remains, IMO, second only to the Reconstruction in its awfulness. So I was intrigued by Dahlia Lithwick’s latest:

Last week Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia each grabbed headlines with controversial late-summer comments about the dysfunctions of the current Supreme Court. Speaking to a Montana meeting of the Federalist Society last Monday, Scalia—evidently alluding to the recent marriage equality decisions—opined that “[i]t’s not up to the courts to invent new minorities that get special protections.” (There is no transcript of the event, as usual, so we have to rely on contemporaneous newspaper accounts and Twitter reports). Then, in a rare and wide-ranging interview with the New York Times’ Adam Liptak later in the week, Ginsburg offered up the view that this past term’s Voting Rights Act decision was “stunning in terms of activism,” and that the Roberts court, “if it’s measured in terms of readiness to overturn legislation … is one of the most activist courts in history.”

Predictably, the left-wing blogosphere reacted with horror at Scalia’s implication that the courts had “invented” a homosexual minority. And equally predictably, the right-wing blogosphere exploded in umbrage at Ginsburg’s suggestion that the Roberts court is “activist” and that the Voting Rights Act case was wrongly decided. It’s not hard to spot some important parallels between the two free-range justices—the most famous legal frenemies of their time—and their controversial public statements about the Roberts court. Both Scalia and Ginsburg are among the most senior members of the court. Scalia is 77, and Ginsburg is 80. Each is doubtless beginning to feel that there is much they will not accomplish in their remaining time on the bench, and each appears ever more willing to achieve with dissents, speeches, and interviews what can’t be done in the four corners of a majority opinion.

More importantly, both seem to be longing for some long-gone judicial era: Ginsburg evidently missing her own activist days as a women’s rights litigator, and Scalia missing the Ed Meese Revolution when everyone agreed that judges were utterly useless….

It’s tempting to suggest, then, based on the recent comments of the two, that it’s a wash. If the court’s radical liberal bomb-thrower and equally radical conservative firebrand are equally frustrated, maybe the Roberts court is tacking precisely down the middle. That assessment would be precisely wrong.….

Reader Interactions

121Comments

  2. 2.

    Schlemizel

    @raven:

    agreed – I think whatever decade people refer to usually is offset by 5 years in reality. I wonder what the teens will bring us?

  4. 4.

    TG Chicago

    And equally predictably, the right-wing blogosphere exploded in umbrage at Ginsburg’s suggestion that the Roberts court is “activist” and that the Voting Rights Act case was wrongly decided.

    I went to the link to see how wingers could argue that the Roberts court was not activist. Sadly, the link wasn’t an explosion of umbrage at all. I have to believe that they could have come up with a more umbrage-splosiony link.

  5. 5.

    KG

    history, i think, works in fits and starts. there’s progress then there’s some regression then there’s some more progress. some times history forces the progress and some times history forces the regression. at the end of the day, to borrow a line from Nixon, in all of human history, there is no time and no place that i’d rather live, than right here, right now… at least until tomorrow.

  8. 8.

    KG

    @TG Chicago: i haven’t been much in the FedSoc circles lately, but I’m sure the argument will be what it has been for a while… it’s not activist because it’s rolling back what activist courts have done previously, so it’s showing restraint. it’s a terrible argument, but it’s the one they’ve run with.

  10. 10.

    PeakVT

    The speed with which states like Texas and North Carolina sprinted to make voting more difficult in the weeks after the decision suggests that Ginsburg was correct in her assessment: The court badly misread the status quo.

    A good piece overall, but Lithwick is being entirely too charitable here. The court simply made partisan ruling.

  11. 11.

    raven

    @KG: I know this local couple that seem so progressive in so many ways but they are highly placed in the FedSoc. My brother the lawyer says they have to be evil.

  13. 13.

    Betty Cracker

    The Moral Majority was heinous in its own right and professed themes, of course, but its true horror lay in its effectiveness in camouflaging the aims of its bank-rollers, which was wholesale theft of our national wealth and prospects. All the stuff about sluts, welfare queens, gays, etc., was just bread and circuses for the rubes.

  15. 15.

    Anoniminous

    Any decade bringing this to market as appropriate clothing needs to be buried in a nuclear waste landfill.

  19. 19.

    Amir Khalid

    @raven:
    When I hear Americans say something like that, they usually see the JFK assassination as the start of the 1960s and the fall of Nixon as their end. What do you see as the bookend events for the 1960s?

  21. 21.

    Chris

    @Trollhattan:

    Interesting; I’ve always seen the sixties starting in, well, 1960, because to me (and many more), President JFK is one of the most iconically “sixties” figures there is. (This is the pop culture influenced vision of someone who wasn’t born until the late eighties, mark you).

  23. 23.

    Trollhattan

    This certainly raises the bar for polite and open discussion of historical people and events.

    Conservative radio host and Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham attacked the speakers at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech, at one point using the sound of a gunshot to cut off a sound bite of civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) — a man whose skull was infamously fractured by a state trooper on “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, AL, in 1965. Ingraham used the speech’s anniversary to race-bait about black-on-white crime statistics and hosted Pat Buchanan to bemoan the idea that minorities face any higher level of adversity in America 50 years later.

    mediamatters.org/blog/2013/08/26/laura-ingraham-celebrates-march-on-washington-5/195590

    Ha-ha-ha, what a cutup she must be at parties.

  25. 25.

    SFAW

    @jacy:

    Whatever decade you first had sex is the best decade.

    Well, if that’s the determinant, then I’m REALLY looking forward to 2021+.

    I hope.

  28. 28.

    Comrade Jake

    @Trollhattan: on any other network, she’d be fired for that. At Fox, they’ll throw her a party and use any criticism of her behavior as more evidence for the plight of whitey.

  29. 29.

    SFAW

    @jeffreyw:

    Who the fuck thought that squid ink flavored puppy chow was a good idea?

    Jeffrey –
    Well, I ‘spect it’s better than puppy-flavored (or puppeh-flavored?) squid ink pasta.

    Soylent Puppeh? oops, wrong thread.

  31. 31.

    Trollhattan

    @Chris:

    FWIW, while a wee lad I wuz I think of the Kennedy years as the ’50s set on “11.” Daily and pop culture were an extension of the Eisenhower era, which his murder essentially all ended in a single stroke.

    Somebody more erudite than I, such as David Halberstam, will have a far more nuanced take. For me it seemed as though 1964 kicked a large boulder off the summit of a very tall mountain, with Vietnam the main theme woven throughout all that happened afterwards.

  32. 32.

    Rex Everything

    The 70s kicked the 80s’ ass by most measures. The only things that were better in the 80s were hip-hop and videogames.

    The 80s sucked, and in many ways they never truly ended. We’re still in a Reagan-dominated nightmare. The anti-government, anti-labor, pension-eating, bubble-inflating, deregulating, public good–despoiling, Ayn Rand–worshipping bloc has only gained strength, momentum, and dominance.

  33. 33.

    KG

    @raven: there’s a rather big split within the FedSoc. There is a very strong libertarian streak there (see Ted Olson, for example). There’s also a very strong traditionalist streak. But mostly, it’s just lawyers who want to meet other lawyers, maybe some judges, network, and get some MCLE credits taken care of.

  41. 41.

    Chris

    @Betty Cracker:

    I’ve always thought the basic horror of the religious right lay in the fact that it was a blatant 2.0 version of the old segregationist power bloc and cultural values, suddenly made presentable again after the most half-assed repackaging in history, which didn’t fool anyone, but provided the paper-thin veneer of respectability that allowed polite society to openly take them seriously again.

  52. 52.

    gogol's wife

    As for 70s versus 80s, I had a lot of fun in both decades. Music was better in 70s than 80s, but not as good as 60s.

  53. 53.

    Chris

    @Rex Everything:

    The 70s kicked the 80s’ ass by most measures. The only things that were better in the 80s were hip-hop and videogames.

    I kind of like the movies of the eighties. Star Wars and the new Star Trek movies technically started in the late seventies, but shaped the eighties movie scene quite a bit… then Indiana Jones, Back To The Future, Lethal Weapon, Terminator… even quirky little movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit that have no equivalent today.

    And a lot of my favorite TV shows, too. MacGyver, the A-Team, Airwolf, Magnum.

    Horrific as they were from an economic and political point of view (especially when viewed from 2013), the eighties produced a lot of my favorite pop culture.

    (The hairstyles were, of course, atrocious).

  55. 55.

    Suffern ACE

    I kind of think the fifties started when the Soviets got the bomb and ended with the Cuban missile crises. And the sixties ended with OPEC, and pretty much everything since then has been about people whining that gas used to be a nickel.

  57. 57.

    lamh36

    Ugh…!

    The Clearest Sign Yet That Hillary Clinton is Running

    The Democratic National Committee summer meeting “was a sedate gathering where routine party business was conducted routinely,” the New York Times reports.

    But when Harold Ickes walked into the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, Democratic strategist Donna Brazile raised her eyebrows: “He predated the Clinton era, but when I saw Harold reappointed to the D.N.C., he surely, in my judgment, symbolizes the return of the Clintons.”

    Ickes was put back on the committee by chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and acknowledged that he “actively sought” the seat as the “most important committee at the D.N.C. because of its role in shaping the nomination process. The goal is to design rules to nominate the strongest candidate for the general election.”

  59. 59.

    Keith G

    The 70s were every bit as revolutionary and consequential as the 60s. Starting with Kent and Jackson State shootings, the resultant campus disruptions nation wide, Busing riots, longshoreman and coal miners strikes, the UFW’s Salad Bowl strike.

    There were a lot of things to do, a lot of fights to fight. Stonewall in ’73. By ’76 a judge in Columbus, Ohio ordered the police there to stop arresting gay folk for simple PDA’s. The fight for the ERA

    The (cultural) end of the 70’s has a double exclamation point for me.: January 1981, Reagan is sworn in and the first patient in the US to die of AIDS.. Later that year was the first time that I read an account of a deadly, little known “Gay” illness.

  60. 60.

    Botsplainer

    @jacy:

    Whatever decade you first had sex is the best decade.

    Yeah, but in the 70s, we had a buncha unsafe, dirty ol’ casual sex and D&Cs were freely available. No worries about resistant infections, AIDS was unknown and the herpes epidemic was way off in the horizon.

  62. 62.

    gogol's wife

    @Keith G:

    Good summary. That’s true to my recollections.

    You really have to live through history to understand it! It makes me realize how little I understand of the nineteenth century, even though it feels to me as if I live there.

  64. 64.

    Rex Everything

    @Chris: I don’t hate 80s movies. But I have far more favorites from the 70s. I enjoy the movies you listed, but I don’t really like how dominant they became, how post-1977 they went very quickly from being a novelty to being the typical movie. Have to disagree with your assessment of Roger Rabbit as a “little movie”: its budget of $70 million exceeded anything made the previous decade.

    Also, maybe it’s just possible that Roger Rabbit has no equivalent today, but the other movies you mentioned—Star Wars, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Back To The Future, Lethal Weapon, Terminator—not only have current equivalents: they’re virtually the only kind of movies Hollywood makes anymore. Whereas the great films of the 70s are practically a lost art.

  65. 65.

    bemused

    @Comrade Jake:

    At least Robertson isn’t an elected legislator such as Louis Gohmert who spouts just about any crackpot conspiracy theory out there.

  66. 66.

    Keith G

    @gogol’s wife: I have a lot of affection for early 80s Post Punk, New Wave, and New Romantic movements in music. I think they fit the mood of the time very well.

  67. 67.

    SFAW

    @jeffreyw:
    Beautiful. But doesn’t running the kitteh through the dryer lead to so much static electricity that the kitteh defibrillates itself? And isn’t that dangerous if the kitteh isn’t having a cardiac “event”?

  68. 68.

    scav

    Hey Pat Robertson! I hear Christians deliberately spread lies with their sharp tongues!

    scusi. needed a randomrant.

  69. 69.

    Steeplejack

    @Amir Khalid:

    I would go cultural rather than political: the ’60s really started with the Beatles (’63-64) and ended with disco (’73-75?). But that’s close enough to Kennedy’s death and the fall of Saigon to match pretty well.

  73. 73.

    Higgs Boson's Mate

    The Sixties were over by late ’67. That’s when Lord and Taylor began selling hippy-influenced clothing, love beads could be bought at Woolworth’s, and “hippies” began to appear in shows like “Bewitched” and “I Dream of Jeannie.” By then Hashberry had become a sewer of opportunists and shops dedicated to selling genuine hippy stuff to the tourists.

  75. 75.

    Steeplejack

    Damn, the New York Times Web site has been down for a few hours, and TPM says it is experiencing an “external attack.”

    In what I am sure is a related phenomenon, I got an “Account has been suspended” message when I tried to come on here an hour or two ago.

  82. 82.

    JGabriel

    @Rex Everything:

    The 80s sucked, and in many ways they never truly ended. We’re still in a Reagan-dominated nightmare.

    Politically, the 80’s sucked and we’re still suffering. No argument there. But as a college DJ in the 80’s, I gotta say the indie/alternative music scene was pretty great, along with the hip-hop scene you already mentioned. So it was a pretty good decade for music.

    Pretty much everything else about it blew rancid chunks though.

    .

  83. 83.

    Rex Everything

    @raven: “70s movies sucked”—are you kidding?!

    I will NOT make a list. I won’t. I won’t. It would just be too fucking long…

  84. 84.

    Trollhattan

    @raven:

    It’s The Owl of the Damned!

    Have had owls fly past me out of the dark (GODDAMN WHAT WAS THAT?!?), have seen them captive, and have listened to them while camping, but have never spied one just hangin’ out in a tree. Darn it.

  85. 85.

    Chris

    @Rex Everything:

    “Equivalents” yes, but rarely as good as the originals, IMO. This may just be a case of saturation, and movies following in the footsteps of the eighties movie franchises instead of blazing their own (cue criticism of the mania for sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots and adaptations).

    Also in the movie department, forgot to mention, the long overdue turnover from Roger Moore to Timothy Dalton (still my favorite Bond, Daniel Craig before Daniel Craig was cool).

  87. 87.

    Rex Everything

    @JGabriel:

    But as a college DJ in the 80′s, I gotta say the indie/alternative music scene was pretty great,

    Yeah, that’s true. Good point.

  89. 89.

    Cacti

    The 70’s reaped the first real harvest of the Southern Strategy, which Nixon rode to 48-state romp of George McGovern. Watergate merely slowed its ascendancy for about 5 years.

  90. 90.

    raven

    @Trollhattan: This was weird, he was in the area for a couple of days and then, one morning at daybreak, there was an incredible ruckus outside. I contacted a wildlife friend and he explained that it was “mobbing” behavior. I guess owl’s eat lots of other birds so they gang up to chase them away. He got nailed by crows, bluejays and all kinds of other critters and I just stood and watched. They’d dive bomb him (I keep saying him but I have no idea) and whack the shit out of him and he’d just take it. Every now and then he’d move. Next day he was gone.

  91. 91.

    bemused

    @raven:

    I like it…doesn’t have to be technically “correct” to be beautiful to me. It has an ethereal feel.

  92. 92.

    Roger Moore

    @Comrade Jake:

    All I have to say is: disco sucks

    That’s nice, but the 1970s had slightly more music than disco. Unless you’re going to dismiss Zeppelin and Floyd, you need to get a better criticism of the 70s than its music.

  93. 93.

    bemused

    @raven:

    Oh my…poor stubborn owl.

    I have to show these to my youngest son who is constantly taking outdoor/animal photos. He really wanted to take some photos of a rutting moose destroying a tree in their campground on Isle Royale late one Sept night but didn’t dare make a sound. He and his girlfriend plus two other camping parties didn’t take a breath until they were sure the moose was far away. Pretty scary.

  94. 94.

    Trollhattan

    @raven:

    Do you think he was a resident, or was he perhaps moving through on migration?

    Know at least one winery who put owl boxes in the vineyards. They’re apparently very good at pest control.

  97. 97.

    Trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:

    Oh, yeah, there was a TON of great music. But the latter half of the decade was commercially dominated by disco and country, at least in the clubs and bars where I lived, to the exclusion of all the music that excited my ear.

    Which isn’t to say we wouldn’t drag ourselves to the Mabuhay Gardens to see the Dead Kennedys or X, but the drive home was another thing entirely.

  98. 98.

    Cacti

    @Trollhattan:

    Oh, yeah, there was a TON of great music. But the latter half of the decade was commercially dominated by disco and country, at least in the clubs and bars where I lived, to the exclusion of all the music that excited my ear.

    I’ll never forgive the 70’s for making Don Henley and Glenn Frey famous.

    The 70’s were also the decade that killed Duane Allman.

  100. 100.

    Roger Moore

    @Cacti:

    Who were both formed in the 1960s.

    So what. They both made their real musical impact in the 1970s. For example, which would you consider a more significant album by Floyd: Ummagumma or Dark Side of the Moon? A Saucerful of Secrets or The Wall? More or Wish You Were Here? Zeppelin released I and II in 1969, and the rest of their discography in the 1970s. Not even close, either way.

  102. 102.

    raven

    @Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Yea, seems like it’s pretty personal. The night JFK was shot my buddies and I hung out in front of the closed drug store. I peg it by my own experience, I was a punk ass suburban Chicago kid who ended up in the Army at 17. Seeing racism and racial conflict up close started the wheels turning at two years overseas pretty much sealed the deal. America was a lie.

  103. 103.

    Cacti

    @Roger Moore:

    So what. They both made their real musical impact in the 1970s.

    You have a stronger argument for Zeppelin.

    With Pink Floyd, the band formed in 1965, and released their first 4 studio albums before 1970. I have a hard time calling them a 70’s band when it goes that far back into the previous decade.

    If we go strictly by quality of output, the Rolling Stones put out two of their best albums in 1971 and 1972, and The Who in 1971 and 1973.

  105. 105.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Cacti: Eh London Calling was one of best albums of the 70s and one of the best albums of the 80s. Released in late ’79 in Britain and early 80 in the US.

  111. 111.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Omnes Omnibus: I suppose it all depends on your age and experiences at the time. In the summer of ’64 I was newly married, but it (the marriage, my husband) was very wound up with the JFK assassination (we were in the jewelry store ordering our rings when the news came across). It was my personal life and the country’s political life and the dominance of the media all colliding, and it changed everything — far more, I might add, than the usual “everything changed” of 9/11 that we usually hear about. Although again, I imagine that depends on one’s own outlook at the moment.

  116. 116.

    Stella B.

    Disco my ass. In 1974 I was 15. On the seventh day God created Bruce. Bruce would eventually convince Mr. Gorbachev to tear down that wall. Ronald Reagan my ass. You people don’t no nothin’ about the 70s and 80s.

  118. 118.

    Ajabu

    As somebody who was in L.A. making most of the R&B hits of the time, I can tell you that 70’s music was the real deal. LTD, The Manhattans, Marvin Gaye. Not to mention Earth, Wind & Fire, Bill Withers, Michael Jackson & Stevie Wonder.
    Music (and politics) all turned to shit when my former governor became president.
    And the 60’s definitely began with the JFK assassination. Before that was an extension of the 50’s.
    But, hey, what do I know? I just lived through it.

  120. 120.

    SFAW

    @Ajabu:

    Of course, that’s all predicated on Black music.

    So you’re really talking about the 50s? You know – Elvis? Pat Boone? And the Beach Boys in the 60s, too.

  121. 121.

    patroclus

    To me, the 60’s started with the Freedom Rides and ended with Woodstock. The 70’s started with the invasion of Cambodia and ended with the malaise speech and Thatcher’s victory, which foreshadowed Reagan’s victory.

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