The 1960s backlash

Sean Collins, writing in the latest spiked review of books, makes an important point on the conservative backlash against the 1960s counterculture in America. Many working class Americans supported the backlash in response to liberal condescension, including on the question of mass affluence. Collins quotes Rick Perlstein as arguing in Nixonland that:

“The liberal capitalism that had created this mass middle class created, in its wake, a mass culture of consumption. And the liberals whose New Deal created this mass middle class were more and more turning their attention to critiquing the degraded mass culture of cheap sensation and plastic gadgets and politicians who seemed to cater to this lowest common denominator.”