Front Porch Politics: The Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in the 1970s and 1980s
Activist-academic Foley offers a thoughtful alternative to stale conventional wisdom about what happened after the mid-twentieth-century’s decades of activism: both the “conservatism triumphant and liberalism vanquished” meme, and the “retreat from civil life” explanation. What did convince Americans to take action in the 1970s and ’80s? What Foley calls “front porch politics”: a sense of threat, an emotional reaction to that threat, and a search for practical solutions. Those threads, he argues, link the struggles of family farmers facing eviction and workers devastated by deindustrialization to the women’s rights and gay rights movements (and the pro-family movement that developed to oppose them); environmental battles from Love Canal and “No Nukes” to a new focus on environmental justice; and demands by people too poor to own a front porch—tenants, the homeless, people with AIDS—that their needs be addressed. Sadly, Foley suggests, many twenty-first-century Americans retain only “two of front porch politics’ least useful elements: rage and a thoroughgoing distrust of government.” Carefully researched and vividly written. --Mary Carroll