Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974

I am old enough, and I was drug-free enough, that I actually DO remember the sixties and seventies. As a teen during the mid-sixties, I still recollect a devout Republican in our church who felt cheated by JFK’s defeat of VP Nixon in 1960.My point is that 1960 may have been the critical fault line, even though Nixon’s forced resignation did indeed further rupture the two basic political parties and their adherents.Otherwise, the authors have produced a valuable reference that students of political science can use to work towards a more harmonized America.Integration and equality is, in my opinion, at the root of our political divide, which is why I selected the below excerpt.EXCERPT‘...This growing racial polarization mapped itself with increasing clarity on the larger landscape of America. Responding to desegregation as well as the deindustrialization and decay of older downtowns, more and more white residents fled from cities entirely, opting for lily-white suburbs instead. The phenomenon of “white flight” happened across the nation, with central cities in US metropolitan areas experiencing an almost 10 percent drop in their white populations over the course of the 1960s. In the North, however, the pattern was even more pronounced, with rates nearly twice the national average. Detroit, for instance, lost 350,000 whites over the decade. The inner cities that had been left behind, marked by what demographers awkwardly termed “minority-majority” populations, then selected black officials to represent them in city hall and Congress. In such ways, the successful integration of African Americans into the political system partly stemmed from the failures of integration in society at large. 14Cultural NationalismWhite withdrawal wasn’t the only reason the promises of integration were unfulfilled. Increasingly, African Americans and other racial minorities expressed growing reservations about a process of integration that seemed to unfold solely on terms established by whites. A notable element of black nationalism was an insistence that African Americans should not adopt the icons or ideals of a “WASP” (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) mainstream culture but instead reaffirm heroes and histories of their own. As Malcolm X put it, just as a tree severed from its roots soon died, “a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.” 15Accordingly, African Americans advanced a new form of cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s that championed distinctive styles of black expression and celebrated accomplishments of prominent African American artists, intellectuals, and entertainers. Academics and athletes alike set models for cultural expressions of black power, as soul and funk musicians broadly popularized the theme. James Brown captured the mood in his 1968 hit, “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud!” Television, as always, both echoed and amplified the growing trend, most noticeably with ABC’s Roots, an eight-part serialization of Alex Haley’s best-selling family history. Broadcast over eight nights in January 1977, the series attracted the single largest audience in television history, with network officials estimating that 130 million Americans watched all or part of the program. Indeed, Roots was a national phenomenon. “It’s [the] Super Bowl every night,” marveled the Associated Press. “People are bringing TV sets to work, watching in airports and bars, leaving...’Taken from “Fault Lines,” Chapter Three, by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian L. Zelizer copyright 2019.BOTTOM LINEThis is an excellent companion to “Fifth Risk,” by Michael Lewis.Five stars out of five.

<I>April 2021 as I finally post this review:</I>I read this early in my dive into nonfiction and American history/politics and it really influenced me. Obviously they couldn’t cover the entirety of the last 50+ years, but they had a clear perspective on the trajectory that really felt right on target to me and informed my thinking as I continued on my nonfiction reading spree.<I>What I wrote originally when I read it in early 2019:</I>These guys are really good writers! They weave a lot of the facts into a smooth and really interesting narrative. Really good work. Interesting how they use popular films to illustrate trends. It really helps connect the reader to the material and brings it to life on another level.Really good book, all high school & college history students should read it.

Book was well written. It is basically 50 years of Newspaper headlines.

Fault Lines balances a wide angle portrait of recent historical trends with an abundance of thoughtfully selected data and specific details that help the reader ground the thesis in experiences he can relate to. Besides providing a wealth of information, it also does what a good history book should do: make the reader question the assumptions he or she has about how the current state of affairs came to be. “I hadn’t seen it quite like that,” was what I found myself saying most often. Something I hadn’t known, for instance, was that just when TV sitcoms moved from portraying happy, thriving families in suburbia to struggling working class families like that in "All in the Family,", opinion polls had begun to show that, Americans, for the first time in a generation, doubted, “whether it was possible for individuals to move up the economic ladder.” A small detail about popular culture, one might say. Except that as the authors show, such details-(this was the beginning of the growing divide between the very rich and everybody else) reveal the fissures which added one upon another, through several decades, to ultimately move the country to the fault lines we now see.I also found myself thinking about how civilizational fault lines occur anywhere: the intersection of economic malaise, cultural and demographic change, and nostalgia for a “golden past,” appears to be the recipe. That is a subject for another book. Meanwhile, this one made the recent American past come to life and made an ordinary reader like me, re-think the history I thought I knew.

"Fault Lines" is a good, brisk walk through the last 45 years. It's the well-told tale of how our social, cultural and political fractures brought us to where we are now -- the Age of Trump. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in modern American history or politics. Crisp writing by Princeton profs Julian Zelizer and Kevin Kruse (who's become something of a Twitter celebrity with his witty takedowns of history distorters) kept me hooked to the end. History-buff nerd-out: The bulk of the book covers the same ground as James T. Patterson's much longer "Restless Giant" but at a faster pace, with more of a stress on electoral politics and pop culture (think "All in the Family," "The Day After," and Tipper Gore's decency labels). The post-2000 section is more a straight news summary that, for me, refreshed memories and helped frame my understanding of what's happening now. Clearly intended for undergrad history students as well as general readers, "Fault Lines" addresses both audiences well. Five stars.

A comprehensive and succinct journey through the last 50 years of the ever increasing polarization of US politics. From the Great Society upheaval of the ‘60’s up to Trump in the present day. Worthwhile read

Read it almost at once. Very good and explains a lot.