Review: Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson R. Cowie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Saturday Night Fever is a 1977 American dance drama film directed by John Badham and produced by Robert Stigwood. It stars John Travolta as Tony Manero, a young Italian-American man who spends his weekends dancing and drinking at a local disco while dealing with social tensions and disillusionment in his working class ethnic neighborhood in Brooklyn. The story is based on "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", a mostly fictional 1976 New York article by music writer Nik Cohn.

He wrote the 1976 New York article "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night", which was the source material for the movie Saturday Night Fever.[1] In 1996, Cohn revealed the article to have been a complete fabrication, based only on clubgoers he knew from his native England.

From the INtro

From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10
The mercurial nature of the politics of ’72 was such that when Wallace was eliminated from the race, Dewey voted for the most left-leaning candidate of any major party in the twentieth century, Democratic senator George McGovern. The choice did not come easily. The autoworker was genuinely stumped about whether incumbent Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority or challenger George McGovern’s soggy populism best represented his interests. It would be a betrayal of everything he stood for to vote for a Republican, he believed, but he had grave concerns about McGovern and his entourage of student radicals. He also sensed a “meanness” creeping into McGovern’s campaign after he threw vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton off the ticket due to his earlier problems with mental illness. Much of the labor movement, especially the hierarchy of the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), could not stomach McGovern’s New Politics with its anti-war positions, youth movements, and commitment to open up the Democratic Party to wider spectrum of Americans. The labor federation, fearing for its traditional kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, fought the McGovern insurgency with every scrap of institutional power it could muster.11
Meantime, Richard Nixon, taking his cues from Wallace, was designing his own heretical strategy to woo white working-class voters away from the party of Roosevelt. His plans to build a post-New Deal coalition—the “New Majority” he liked to call it—around the Republican Party in 1972 was based on making an explicit pitch for white, male, working-class votes by appealing to their cultural values over their material needs. His targets were men like Burton, who had first been dislodged from the Democratic mainstream by George Wallace. Despite Nixon’s courtship of Dewey’s vote, the autoworker remained suspicious of Nixon’s loyalties. “Nixon hasn’t proved anything to me when he raises the prices of new cars and freezes the wages of the people who build them,” Burton explained about falling back on bread-and-butter Democratic politics with his vote for the left-leaning McGovern. “I really don’t think McGovern will win,” he finally concluded. “But maybe if we vote for him we can show Nixon what we want, what the working man wants.” The majority of white working-class voters disagreed, selecting Nixon...

The remobilization of the business leadership was one of the most dramatic shifts in postwar policy history, recasting the legislative landscape for generations to come. If the New Deal was the revolution, this was the counter-revolution. Having contained labor policy for the entirety of the postwar era, corporations lost key legislative battles during the Johnson and Nixon years, fought to a stalemate during the transition period from 1975-77, and, by 1978, got reorganized and stood poised to win almost every battle on taxation, spending, regulation, and inflation for decades to come.28


II
Despite the draconian demands of policy makers, few working people were immediately abandoning the Keynesian ship—there was not a large-scale lurch to the right in popular economic thinking. The conservative movement made substantial inroads into white workers’ cultural identity in the late sixties and early seventies, but it was still a long way from scoring points on economic grounds. This is where Nixon’s groundwork on wooing working-class voters paid off, and where conservative strategists began to learn what country musicians already knew. Economics may have broken the policy levees and convinced policy elites, but it was the social issues that delivered working people to the new political waters. As the New Right’s media guru Richard Viguerie noted, “We never really won until we began stressing issues like busing, abortion, school prayer and gun control. We talked about the sanctity of free enterprise, about the Communist onslaught until we were blue in face. But we didn’t start winning majorities in elections until we got down to gut level issues.” In a similar vein, Pat Buchanan continued his earlier work for Nixon, plowing terrain and sowing seed for a working-class right—often consciously setting the poorer and the more affluent elements of the New Deal coalition off from one another. The future of the Republican Party, he argued, would be as “the party of the working class, not the party of the welfare class.” The federal government and know-it-all cultural elitists were well on their way to eclipsing the bosses as the workingman’s enemy. As M. Stanton Evans, the president of the American Conservative Union, put it, the key was finding a common ground of anti-statism: “some of them reach their political position by reading Adam Smith while others do so by attending an anti-busing rally, but . . . all of them belong to a large and growing class of American citizens: those who perceive themselves as victims of the federal welfare state and its attendant costs.”29
William Rusher, in his 1975 book The Making of the New Majority Party, argued, like Tom Wolfe, that the politics of old class divisions were over. An odd cross-class coalition of business, industrialists, blue-collar workers and farmers stood in opposition to a McGovernite “new class led by elements that were essentially non-productive” members of the chattering classes—like academics, intellectuals, government bureaucrats, and the media elite—who claimed to know what was good for the nation. The modern welfare state, Rusher argued, “exists simply as a permanent parasite on the body politics—a heavy charge on both its conscience and its purse, carefully tended and forever subtly expanded by the verbalizers as justification for their own existence and growth.” Although strategists like Rusher and Viguerie had hoped that they might be able to entice former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan as the standard bearer for a new Conservative Party (sharing a dream ticket with George Wallace, they hoped), Reagan finally rejected the tactic of a new party but fully embraced the white working-class Republican ideal. In 1976, Reagan failed to win the nomination of his party for the presidency, but he was en route to capturing its soul.30
As Reagan told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1977, “And let me say so there can be no mistakes as to what I mean:The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club-big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.... The Democratic Party turned its back on the majority of social conservatives during the 1960s. The New Republican Party of the late ’70s and ’80s must welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members but as leaders and as candidates.


The New Right’s coalition linked worker and businessman, shop floor and Wall Street, tavern and country club, cultural conservative and economic libertarian. Roosevelt’s famous “Forgotten Man” was becoming a Republican, his enemy less the “economic royalists,” the class elites, against which Roosevelt inveighed in his landslide 1936 victory, than the cultural elitists who would look down on the politics and culture of blue-collar America. Not all of even the white, male working class joined the New Right, of course, but certainly enough to make a viable coalition on the margins where elections are won.

"It's the economy, stupid!"

The cultural exhaustion crept in alongside the decline in union victories. “Maybe Vietnam, the civil-rights thing, Watergate and all the rest of it wore me out,” she continued. “I worry more now about the price of a head of lettuce than the issue of who picked it.” The decline was hard to take.

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