1970s

The 1970s are treated as a decisive political and cultural threshold: the decade in which a backlash against the ideals of the 1960s prepared the ground for unrestrained capitalism, right-wing media culture, and the later return of plutocratic politics in the form of Donald Trump. Its significance lies less in a single event than in the formation of an ideological order whose beneficiaries are the Ownership Class and whose subjects are persuaded to mistake submission for freedom.

Political and Economic Turning Point

The decade is connected to the emergence of the reaction that would define the following era. John Carpenter described the late 1970s as the moment when a backlash against the 1960s had become unmistakable: ideals associated with that earlier period were under assault, while the figure of the yuppie appeared as a social type organized around money. Carpenter linked this transformation to Ronald Reagan, Reaganomics, and the cultural climate that made unrestrained capitalism appear triumphant rather than controversial.

The book reads this shift as more than a change of policy. It identifies the 1970s as the period in which wealth, hierarchy, and market power were increasingly treated as natural social principles. That interpretation later reappears in the claim that the Trump insurgency was “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” a restoration of far-right conservative rule grounded in racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. The decade therefore functions as an origin point for a political continuity extending from reaction against the 1960s to the politics of Donald Trump.

Formation of the Ownership Class Order

The period is also situated within a broader theory of domination. The book uses Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s master–slave dialectic to describe the relationship between the rich elite and the majority. The master is defined by a willingness to risk life and accept extreme consequences in the pursuit of power; the slave values survival more highly and submits in order to preserve life. Applied to modern society, this framework presents the 1% as people willing to use greater risk and force, while the 99% are portrayed as accepting domination because they prefer security, ordinary relationships, and the continuation of daily life to the struggle for control.

This account makes the 1970s important as a period in which economic power was not merely accumulated but culturally legitimized. The elite’s dominance depends on more than wealth: it depends on the majority accepting leaders who embody command, force, and hierarchy. The book presents this as a social desire for mastery from above, arguing that many people would rather be ruled by a rich elite than confront the effort and danger of ruling themselves.

Race, Resentment, and Political Allegiance

The decade’s reactionary inheritance is described through the later politics of resentment. The book argues that Trump supporters were driven by ressentiment, but that their resentment was directed downward rather than against the billionaire elite they supported. In this reading, white conservatives could tolerate being governed by the rich so long as racial hierarchy placed Black and Hispanic people beneath them. The desired political restoration was therefore associated with the Confederacy and with a return to the social order imagined as existing before civil-rights victories.

Donald Trump’s appeals are interpreted as dog whistles within this structure. His promises to restrict unwanted immigrants, build a wall, support the police, and make America great again are read as coded invitations to restore racial and gender hierarchy. The 1970s supplied the cultural and economic atmosphere in which the backlash against egalitarian change could merge with the celebration of wealth, allowing subordinated groups to imagine themselves elevated through the further subordination of others.

Media, Ideology, and Cultural Control

The 1970s also provide the historical background for the argument of John Carpenter’s They Live. Carpenter presented the film as an attack on yuppies and unrestrained capitalism, and later described it as a gesture against Ronald Reagan at a time when the ideals of the 1960s were being abandoned. The film’s hidden elite, engineered economic collapse, and near-enslavement of workers dramatize the book’s claim that domination operates through both material exploitation and false consciousness.

Within that allegory, the elite’s signal prevents ordinary people from seeing reality while feeding them messages that sustain obedience. Billboards and magazines conceal commands such as “CONSUME” and “OBEY,” while money is presented as a substitute for divinity. The book rejects far-right attempts to interpret the film as an allegory of Jewish control and instead follows Carpenter’s stated identification of its villains with Reagan-era yuppies and right-wing economic power. The decade thus becomes the prehistory of a media order in which propaganda, consumer desire, and political submission reinforce one another.

From the 1970s to Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s own trajectory is connected directly to this period. He came to Manhattan from the outer boroughs in the late 1970s and entered the orbit of Roy Cohn, whose methods shaped Trump’s later public style. Cohn’s influence is described through an ethic of loyalty over principles, refusal to apologize, refusal to back down, and the use of every available means to achieve an objective. Trump also absorbed Cohn’s tabloid instincts, media-cycle awareness, repeated verbal formulas, and theatrical presentation of himself.

That theatricality extends the decade’s transformation of politics into spectacle. Trump presented himself as a flamboyant playboy and later treated the presidency as a performance, declaring that “The show is Trump, and it’s sold-out performances everywhere.” The 1970s therefore marks both a personal beginning and an ideological one: it is when Trump entered Manhattan’s elite networks and when the cultural reaction against the 1960s began producing the political language of money, media manipulation, hierarchy, and revenge that would later define his movement.

The book’s final implication is that the 1970s should not be remembered as a closed historical interval. Its economic and cultural tendencies continue through the modern Republican Party, the weakening of the State, and the protection of capital from collective regulation. The decade is portrayed as the moment when an older Confederacy was translated into a modern form: less visibly organized around slavery, but still structured by ownership, racial rank, and the demand that ordinary people call their subordination freedom.