Invocations of “since the 1970s” pepper Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, making the decade one of the few punctuating moments in Piketty’s otherwise glacially paced account of the patterns of wealth distribution. Since the 1970s, as Piketty’s data starkly demonstrate, private wealth has spiked upward in the West at the expense of income growth, returning us to a social landscape close to that of the fin de siècle; the Me Decade wrote the epitaph for an exceptional postwar period of relative equality that looks to be unrepeatable. In more avowedly Marxist treatments of the decade, it appears as a decisive period — one in which crucial struggles were taking place over the Big Things: the factory floor, financial markets, and global military power. Giovanni Arrighi, in The Long Twentieth Century, reads the Seventies as the moment when labor audacity in the West and decolonization in the South forced Western governments into prioritizing the interests of private high finance, which enabled them to maintain economic hegemony even as it set the stage for a long-term decline and significantly greater, and more frequent, monetary crises. Robert Brenner’s The Economics of Global Turbulence stresses the role of global manufacturing overproduction, which precipitated a vicious cycle of devaluation and cost-cutting in which workers bore the burden of austerity, a cycle that may have altered somewhat but can scarcely be said to have ended.

These competing theories present similar pictures of the decade: global tectonic shifts produced a neoliberal tsunami. Social historians naturally focus on the innumerable ground-level fights that precipitated the deluge. Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge locates a brief moment between the onset of Watergate and the Bicentennial — coincidentally, the moment depicted in several of these novels — in which a national reckoning suddenly became possible and just as suddenly was traduced. The dense, novelistic detail of Perlstein’s books has a purpose: to remind us of a friable, dispirited, suspicious country, more skeptical of its own myths, that now seems unimaginably distant. Part of that distance is due to the disappearance of the working class that still, in the mid-Seventies, commanded political and institutional power and drove mass-media representations. Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class is a narrative of the fall from class into identity; for Cowie, class becomes “identitarian” in the course of the Seventies, largely as a result of the brilliantly managed Nixonian strategy of co-opting labor by selling it cultural politics — a strategy that worked, as Cowie shows, even better than its architects could have hoped. By severing “culture” from material interests it hollowed out the identity that the white working class got as a consolation prize, leaving it resentment as its nourishment — and classically confused archetypes in its wake, such as Archie Bunker or Sonny in Dog Day Afternoon.