America in the 1970s is an interesting puzzle. Within recent memory, the United States had been economically and geopolitically dominant. And it was to return to economic and geopolitical primacy soon after the decade ended. But the 1970s represented a trough, a low point, a period of pessimism and malaise. It was also a time of unexpected turbulence in world order once again, sandwiched between decades of relative peace, prosperity and stability.
In the midst of what seemed to be decline and even chaos in America’s domestic and international politics, however, transformative new forces and factors were emerging. Many of them came from the largest state in the Union, facing the great Pacific Ocean: California. Some of these dynamics were technological and economic, such as the rise of Silicon Valley and its dominance in computing, or the emergence of the great California shipping ports, like Los Angeles and Long Beach, on the back of growing trade with Asia and new shipping container technology.
Other examples were more in the realm of how people ate, laughed, and thought about their bodies and human sexuality. While the causal origins of many of these forces are mysterious and their consequences uncertain, something very important, if elusive, took place during the 1970s – in some of the most basic categories of human potential, expression and freedom – symbolised by changes emerging from the so-called Golden State.
It is important to review the standard narrative of the United States and world order in the 1970s. The picture was bleak. Geopolitically, the Cold War competition had settled into an uncomfortable stalemate. While strategic arms control and détente lessened the possibility of a great power war, such stability had come at a cost: recognising the political and moral equivalence of a communist, authoritarian and often ruthless great power, the Soviet Union. The Helsinki Accords had accepted the post-war boundaries of Europe and implicitly acknowledged a pressing Soviet empire in the once independent states of Eastern Europe. Western Europe, mired in its own political and economic frustration, increasingly distrusted the policies of its transatlantic patron, the United States. While the threat of a great war receded, murderous interstate and intrastate conflict raged on every continent.
The international economic order was in even greater disarray. The Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, backed by dollar-gold convertibility, was unilaterally suspended by the US in 1971 and abandoned in 1973. Resource shocks, especially in dramatic increases in the price of oil, acted like a cancer on growth. Currency volatility, debt crisis, inflation and stagnation were all worsened by a lack of global coordination, and protectionism and economic nationalism increasingly framed politics. Global institutions set up to manage these crises, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and even the United Nations, were sidelined or seen as unimportant.