Thursday, June 27, 2013

‘Mad Men’ should make you feel better about politics today

This from the start of the Mad Men season that just finished, ‘Mad Men’ should make you feel better about politics today "That was America, 1968. By comparison, the America of 2013 is downright quiescent. ‘No one is burning down cities,’ says author Rick Perlstein, whose ‘Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America’ is a history of the political convulsions of the earlier time. ‘The national guard isn’t shooting anyone. You don’t have thousands of people on college campuses pledging themselves to sedition against the United States. You don’t have civil rights activists being murdered or churches being bombed. You don’t have draft resistance. You don’t have a string of political assassinations. In that sense, what’s happening now doesn’t compare to the 1960s.’"

"The volatility of the 1960s is worth keeping in mind as we consider polarization today. America in 2013 is not more divided than it has ever been — just the parties are. And that’s a very different, and preferable, problem."

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