Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (98 page)

27
. For a widely discussed critique of PC, see D’Souza,
Illiberal Education
. A vigorous response is John Wilson,
The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education
(Durham, N.C., 1995).

28
. Hunter,
Culture Wars
, 144–45.

29
. Ibid., 34.

30
. (New York, 1999). Himmelfarb agreed that some aspects of American culture had improved by 1999.

31
. Morris Fiorina et al.,
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America
(New York, 2004). Though the wars did seem to abate, some writers after 2000 remained convinced that cultural divisions, exacerbated by rising immigration, threatened the United States. See Samuel Huntington,
Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
(New York, 2004).

32
. Hunter,
Culture Wars
, 43.

33
. Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998), 16.

34
. Martin,
With God on Our Side
, 275, 289.

35
. Leo Ribuffo, “If We Are All Multiculturalists Now, Then What?”
Reviews in American History
32 (Dec. 2004), 463–70.

36
. Zimmerman,
Whose America?
1–8, 126–29.

37
. Diamond,
Not by Politics Alone
, 3–9, 20–22.

38
. Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004), 305–7.

39
. Himmelfarb,
One Nation, Two Cultures
, 96–99, 108–14; Wolfe,
One Nation, After All
, 40–72, 83–84; David Frum,
Dead Right
(New York, 1994), 168–70.

40
. Pregnancy rates for Americans aged fifteen through nineteen decreased by 28 percent between 1990 and 2000.
New York Times
, Feb. 20, March 7, 2004.

41
. Between 2000 and 2003, homicide rates inched upward, but other violent crimes (rape, aggravated assault, robbery, and homicide) continued to decrease. Rates of property crime (burglary, larceny, auto theft) were stable.
New York Times
, May 25, 2004.

42
. See
chapter 10
for discussion of welfare policies in the 1990s.

43
. Neil Howe and William Strauss,
Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation
(New York, 2000), 209–14. Electoral turnouts of young people, however, were lower than those of older people.

44
. Robert Samuelson, “We Are Not Really ‘Bowling Alone,’”
Providence Journal
, April 16, 1996. Fukuyama,
Great Disruption
(1999), 92–95, agrees, seeing the late 1990s as ushering in a “great reconstruction” in many ways. For reflections on communitarian thinking, see also Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy
, 175–200, 221–30.

45
. William Saletan,
Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War
(Berkeley, 2003); Diamond,
Not by Politics Alone
, 140–41;
New York Times
, Jan. 15, 2003.

46
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 59. An increase in the percentage of babies born out of wedlock to whites accounted for most of this increase in the 1990s. The rise in such births was the result primarily of the fact that
married
women were having fewer children, compared to non-married women, than earlier—not that the
number
of out-of-wedlock babies was rapidly rising. (It was rising, but slowly.) Awareness of this complicated chain of causation, however, was not widespread, nor did such awareness change the fact that the
percentage
of such births had become extraordinarily high over time.

47
.
New York Times
, Nov. 23, 2004.

48
. Andrew Hacker, “How Are Women Doing?”
New York Review of Books,
April 11, 2002, 63–66;
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 368, 370.

49
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 47–49; Diamond,
Not by Politics Alone
, 115; Andrew Hacker, “Gore Family Values,”
New York Review of Books
, Dec. 5, 2002, 20–26; Hacker, “How Are Women Doing?”;
New York Times
, March 11, 2003.

50
.
New York Times
, March 26, 2001.

51
. Ibid., Jan. 31, 2003.

52
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 247.

53
. Gregg Easterbrook,
The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse
(New York, 2003), 74–76; James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,”
Atlantic Monthly
249 (1982), 29–38. A widely read endorsement of this “broken windows” argument is Malcolm Gladwell,
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Difference
(New York, 2000), 133–51.

54
. Though controversial, California’s law remained on the books. In 2004, a proposition aimed at moderating it failed to pass.

55
. And to 2,212,475 million by the end of 2003.
New York Times
, Nov. 8, 2004.

56
. Ibid., Nov. 18, 2004.

57
. For these and other statistics in these paragraphs, see “Do Not Pass Go,”
New York Review of Books
, Sept. 25, 2003, 44–46; Fukuyama,
Great Disruption
, 71;
New York Times
, April 7, July 28, 2003, Jan. 6, Oct. 26, Nov. 8, 2004;
Providence Journal
, May 7, 2002, April 7, 2003. For similarly graphic statistics concerning 2004, see
New York Times,
April 25, 2005.

58
. Glendon,
Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse
(New York, 1991), 9–14.

59
. Luttwak,
The Endangered American Dream
, 215; Lawrence Friedman,
American Law in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 2002), 8–9.

60
. Samuel Walker,
The Rights Revolution: Rights and Community in Modern America
(New York, 1998).

61
. The subtitle of her book.

62
. Jonathan Raban,
Bad Land
(New York, 1996), 309.

63
. Robert Goldberg,
Enemies Within: The Cult of Conspiracy in Modern America
(New Haven, 2001), 232–60.

64
. James Fallows,
Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
(New York, 1996), 142.

65
. Derek Bok,
Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education
(Princeton, 2003); and Benjamin DeMott, “Jocks and the Academy,”
New York Review of Books,
May 12, 2005, 29–32. For estimates of the economic costs and benefits of big-time college football, see
New York Times
, Jan. 2, 2005.

66
. Easterbrook,
The Progress Paradox
, 136–38.

67
. Gillon,
Boomer Nation
, 162.

68
. Brooks,
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
(New York, 2000), 87.

69
. Howe and Strauss,
Millennials Rising
, 280–82, 318.

70
. Bryson,
Notes from a Big Country
(London, 1998), 397.

71
. Madonna’s excesses seemed to enhance her popular appeal. Roseanne’s did not.

72
. Eric Schlosser, “Empire of the Obscene,”
New Yorker
, March 10, 2003, 61ff. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(Chicago, 1997), 373.

73
. In 2004, Viacom, the parent company of CBS, settled complaints of indecency lodged with the FCC against Stern and others by paying a fine of $3.5 million.
New York Times
, Nov. 24, 2004.

74
. Hunter,
Culture Wars
, 232.

75
. Lucille Ball, the star of
I Love Lucy,
was pregnant during the 1952–53 season of the series and was shown wearing a maternity clothes. This was a bold step for television.

76
. Haynes Johnson,
The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years
(New York, 2001), 206.

77
. Margaret Talbot, “Turned On, Tuned Out,”
New York Times Magazine
, Feb. 16, 2003, 9–10.

78
. Mary Ann Watson,
Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience Since 1945
(Fort Worth, 1998), 201–3.

79
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 184.

80
. “What People Earn,”
Parade
, Feb. 14, 1999.

81
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 863 (figures for 1999).

82
. David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
(New York, 2001), 161–66.

83
. Easterbrook,
The Progress Paradox
, 188–212.

84
.
A Prairie Home Companion
first aired in July 1974.

85
. Among relatively non-sex-saturated and non-violent movies that enjoyed box-office (and in most cases, critical) success in the 1990s were
Home Alone
(1990),
A River Runs Through It
(1992),
Sleepless in Seattle
(1993),
Forrest Gump
(1994),
The Bridges of Madison County
(1995),
Twister
(1996),
As Good as It Gets
(1997), and
You’ve Got Mail
(1998).
Jurassic Park
broke box-office records. Some films of the 1990s that included a good deal of explicit sex or violence, such as
The Piano
(1993),
Fargo
(1996), and
A Simple Plan
(1998), received favorable reviews from critics.

86
. In 2004, it was estimated that Americans supported approximately 1,000 literary magazines, a record number.
New York Times
, Dec. 27, 2004.

87
. See
chapter 2
for discussion of similar debates in the 1970s.

88
. Frank Rich, “What the Tube Is For,”
New York Times Magazine
, Sept. 20, 1998, 53–56.

89
. According to a study in 2002 of American reading habits, the percentage of adults who read literary works declined from 57 in 1982 to 54 in 1992 and to 47 in 2002. The percentage of young adults (aged eighteen to twenty-four) who read such books dropped especially rapidly, from 60 in 1982 to 43 in 2002. The percentage of adults that read any book declined from 61 to 57 between 1992 and 2002. The study, which claimed to rely on U.S. Census data, was released by the National Endowment of the Arts. It did not report whether Americans read more non-fiction, such as history, or whether they read a good deal of serious writing—whether fiction or non-fiction—in magazines. It blamed the Internet for the decline that continued after 2000.
New York Times
, July 8, 11, 2004.