“It is in this sense that every age in America has been the Age of Nixon.”
p.176 The Age of Nixon
It’s tempting to say Trumpism began with the housing crash, or the Tea Party, or the 2016 election. But the raw material, paranoia, racial grievance, betrayal disguised as bootstrap virtue, was all there fifty years ago. The psychic architecture of today’s right was laid down in the 1970s, as the post-war American dream rusted in real time. Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive and Carl Freedman’s The Age of Nixon show, in different registers, how class disintegration and cultural backlash set the stage. What we now call populism started in the ashes of union defeat and the scramble for identity amid collapse.
Cowie’s story orbits Dewey Burton, a Ford worker from outside Detroit, a New Deal Democrat turned Reagan voter. A man who hated his job, loved his cars, and saw himself, by the end, as someone to be left alone. “Something’s happening to people like me,” he told a reporter in 1974, “and it isn’t just that we have to pay more for this or that… it’s like more and more of us are sort of leaving all our hopes outside in the rain and coming into the house and just locking the door.” It’s a line that could’ve been spoken last week.
Rage Without Direction
The 1970s weren’t apathy and decline. They were full of motion. There were strikes, wildcats, slowdowns, walkouts. There was anger on the shop floor. Lordstown. The UAW. But the rage was unfocused, fragmented. Management knew it. The unions feared it. “People wanted to kick the machine,” Cowie writes, “but they didn’t want the machine to stop.” Without a collective vision, grievance curdled into resentment.
And into race. Busing in Detroit became the battleground, the proxy war where class was made to fight itself. “If a Black mom and daddy buy a house here and send their kids to my son’s school, that’s fine,” Burton says. “But busing’s baloney.” He wasn’t an open bigot. That was the point. He didn’t hate Black people. He just didn’t want to give up what little security he’d managed to grab. Racial justice, arriving right as the floor dropped out of the industrial economy, looked to him like loss. The same was true across the Midwest. There was no surplus to share, no trust in the system to deliver it. It was a zero-sum moment. And white workers knew which side they were on.
This wasn’t inevitable. The early seventies were full of openings, rank-and-file rebellion, cross-racial shop-floor organising, cultural churn. But every route out was blocked. Employers offshored. Democrats triangulated. Unions circled the wagons. Meanwhile, the material basis for solidarity was being structurally dismantled. The Volcker Shock crushed inflation by crushing wages. Capital flight sent whole sectors overseas. Finance began to replace production as the core of the US economy. Working-class power wasn’t just attacked, it was rendered obsolete. And as productive labour became precarious, Americans were told they’d have to borrow to live. Credit replaced wages. Risk replaced stability. Class was still there, but disorganised, dislocated, and easier to redirect.
What’s often left out of these narratives, both scholarly and political, is the Black working class, which faced the same collapse without the same myth of prior entitlement. If Dewey Burton saw the seventies as a loss, many Black workers experienced them as a betrayal of promises never kept. The Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers fought not just bosses, but white union leadership. Their vision wasn’t nostalgic. It was radical. But the Left, still framed around the white industrial worker, failed to integrate these struggles. And so, as Black labour militancy was buried beneath the backlash, the vacuum was filled not by class politics but by culture war.
Enter Travis Bickle. Taxi Driver wasn’t a warning. It was an invitation. The alienated white man with a gun. “Someday a real rain will come,” he says. He shoots pimps and thugs. Becomes a hero. The fantasy sticks. In Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse walks the same streets, with the same look on his face, the same sense of holy mission. Shoots three people. Gets applause. A handshake from the judge. A job offer from Congress. From Bickle to Rittenhouse, the vigilante never left. Just changed clothes.
Cowie shows how popular culture in the seventies didn’t escape this logic—it expressed it. All in the Family. Dog Day Afternoon. Joe. These weren’t liberal catharsis. They were symptoms. Everyone knew something was breaking, but no one knew how to fix it. Not the unions. Not the parties. Not the Left. What they did have, however, was media. And as the decade wore on, media stopped being a mirror and became a machine: talk radio, tabloid TV, Reader’s Digest, and later Fox News didn’t just report working-class grievance, they structured it. Politics moved into the domain of mood. Facts didn’t matter; feeling did. The culture war became the entire war.
Grievance Becomes Power
Freedman, in The Age of Nixon, gives this affect a name: ressentiment. Nixon, he says, is not just a man but a type. The petty-bourgeois psyche, obsessed with order, haunted by slights, driven by revenge. The man who channels his own paranoia into national myth. He didn’t need charisma. He had grievance. And that was enough.
What Nixon started, Reagan mainstreamed. What Reagan refined, Trump performed. If Nixon was paranoia masked as policy, Trump is pure spectacle. But the base is the same. The affect is the same. The system that made Nixon, white backlash, Cold War fear, declining wages, never resolved. It just changed channel.
Mark Fisher saw it coming. He knew the seventies were the hinge. Not the end of something, but the switch. From futures imagined to futures foreclosed. From solidarity to spectacle. From action to nostalgia. “It’s deep,” Burton said, “and hard to explain.” That’s the tragedy. They knew something was wrong. They just didn’t have the words.
And in that vacuum came the culture war. Against Black schoolkids. Against feminists. Against queers. Against “coastal elites.” Against history. Against the future. Nixon’s “silent majority” became the voting base for Trump. Their sons and grandsons are still out there. Still angry. Still convinced someone else stole the country.
There’s a moment near the end of Cowie’s book where Burton, once a shop-floor rebel, has made it to the skilled trades. The strikes are over. The plants are closing. “Don’t give me no more promises,” he says. “Let me try somebody else’s promises for a change.” He votes Reagan. By then, the unions are shrinking. The movement’s lost its voice. The war’s over. The Right won.
And we never really left that moment. The economy never recovered. The culture only got noisier. The Left never found its footing. The anger metastasised. The fantasy deepened. Nixon is still with us. So is Bickle. Burton’s grandson is livestreaming himself cleaning his gun. Everyone’s waiting for the rain.
Until the Left finds a new language for pain, a language that doesn’t flatter nostalgia or mimic grievance, we’ll just keep watching reruns.
“First we stopped noticing members of the working class, and now we’re convinced they don’t exist”
p.365-366 Stayin’ Alive
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