The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture

Until the 1960s, scarcity and the struggle to clothe, feed and employ the nation drove most of US political life. From slavery to the New Deal, political parties organized around economic interests and the often fervent debate over the best allocation of political and economic rewards. But with the explosion of the nation's economy in the years after World War II, a new set of needs began to emerge. Employing Abraham Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs, Brink Lindsey offers a complete re-interpretation of the latter half of the 20th Century.Suddenly, the tumult of racial and gender politics and the conservative revolution of the 1980s and 1990s can be seen in an entirely new light. Once the struggle for survival has been resolved, a new set of divisive issues emerge. In a sweeping tour of American history since World War 2, Lindsey establishes that both left and right have contributed important ideas to our political culture. Indeed, by showing that we have conquered poverty, Lindsey is able to describe the politics of abundance as conflict between those who want to defend the fruits of prosperity - the freedoms that the US enjoys because of it's dynamic economy, including gender equality and alternative lifestyles - and those who want to defend the institutions that created abundance - the family, traditional values and religious certitude.