stayin alive

In the book Stayin’ Alive historian Jefferson Cowie writes a very engaging explanation of the political and cultural aspects that effected white workers’ economic individuality and what damaged a “vibrant, multi-cultural, and gender conscious conceptualization of class” (Stayin Alive, Cowie. 72). A single portion of the narrative touches on the rise of the New Right while another tracks the breakdown of working-class cultural idols. New Deal liberalism and the growth of a New Right founded upon a white working-class cultural conservatism are both not a new story. In Stayin’ Alive, the essential catastrophe of the 1970s was not only the Watergate incident, stagflation, racial conflict, and the local scuffles over the Vietnam War, however; In Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, the 1970s essential catastrophe was the social condensation that had brought poverty to American workers which was seen evidently in a class-based disaster caused by “the collapse of the bargain based on consumption in exchange for soul-killing work – that is, the crumbling of an entire paradigm upon its own vacuity” (p. 305). In this reading of 1970s history, white workers were not just perpetrators of racist and sexist reaction. They were also victims of capitalism, of the limits of New Deal liberalism, and of Republicans’ sophisticated reading of white working-class cultural concerns.
As one would read Cowie’s book, it is made evident that the white working-class hunted for a new direction. Liberals did not deliver a strong or effective economic policy or a persuasive idea for the future in a world of limited boundaries. However, the New Right succeeded in persuading a great number of Americans that those boundaries did not exist in the first place as its leaders “offered a restoration of the glory days by bolstering morale on the basis of patriotism, God, race, patriarchy, and nostalgia for community” (p. 16).
Cowie also writes a wonderful class related breakdown of the music, movies, and