As is this book, on the whole. Schulman’s goal is to make the recovery that followed the 1970s seem like the orderly result of policies and trends that were in place long before Ronald Reagan. “The early 1980s,” he writes, “did not so much repudiate the political and cultural legacies of the Seventies as complete and consolidate them.” Even Reagan’s military buildup is described as “expanding and intensifying the rearmament that Jimmy Carter had begun after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.” So Schulman winds up confusing certain inchoate, rearguard actions against 1970s America with 1970s America itself. That is, he does the very worst thing a historian can do: use hindsight to paint an era’s problems as simpler than they were, and its choices as more straightforward.
NR
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