If imdb's movie /year/1979/ list is to be believed, there was a lot of self loathing going on in films in the late 70s (i.e. Vietnam).
Here's imdb's biggest films of 1979 by US box office:
http://www.imdb.com/search/title?at=0&sort=boxoffice_gross_u...
Alien is thrashed by Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Moonraker. Apocalypse Now is thrashed by The Muppet Movie.
One of my favourite 70's quotes is from the quite brilliant book "The Medieval Machine" by the Anglo-French historian Jean Gimpel, published in 1976 (which really is a very good history of Medieval technology):
"The economic depression that struck Europe in the fourteenth century was followed ultimately by economic and technological recovery. But the depression we have moved into will have no end. We can anticipate centuries of decline and exhaustion. There will be no further industrial revolution in the cycles of our Western civilization."
These words were written at the same time as Jobs, Wozniak, Gates and Allen were all hard at work. This smug bastard was just one voice amongst many telling the world that we were in the grip of a permanent, inexorable "malaise" that could at best be accepted passively, which there was no point in fighting, which had to be simply taken as given, unstoppable, forever.
At the same time people like me were being told by teachers that we would never be able to image the disk of extra-solar stars or discover extra-solar planets, and so on [1]. Gleeful murderers of hope were desperately trying to crush any spark of innovation, creativity or freedom. And it was happening the world over. A relentless, ruthless, assault on the Enlightenment, the rule of law, and the industrial revolution.
They failed.
A lot of it was funded, ultimately, by the Soviets, who generated an enormous amount of propaganda that was intended to make people believe these things. One of the notable things that happened after the collapse of the Soviet Empire was the stunning pall of silence that fell over the Left in the West. It was almost as if the lifeblood of the whole enterprise had been cut off.
Part of that was simple empiricism: it was hard for Leftists to hold up their pathologically insane ideas as "better" when their poster-child had just endured a complete and spectacular collapse, including the freeing of a large number of vassal states, all because some shipyard workers in Poland had laid down tools a decade before.
But part of it was also that funding for a bunch of stuff that Comintern paid for (mostly by indirect means, in the same way the US government funds stuff through NGOs today) vanished.
Today, hyper-capitalist brands like Naomi Klein are attempting to resurrect some of the old zombie Soviet ideas, but it's a pretty pathetic effort, full of contradictions and gibberish. They won't have a lot of influence, at the end of the day, and it is my firm belief that we are entering into a century of progress that will make the 19th century look staid and the 20th century look stupid. Having lived through the '70's, this is a good thing to see.
[1] We have done both, and more: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/astronomers-image-lowest...
Wow, I never knew they were so pessimistic about that. I thought the science for visualizing extrasolar planets had always been there, they just needed the equipment built.
Now I wonder what ideas today's pessimists have that will be disproven. Maybe Interstellar travel is really possible?
You're correct that the science has been there for quite some time and astronomers have been lobbying and popularizing the idea of building the necessary detection equipment for quite a while. There was even quite a good book written on the topic in 1966, a collaboration between a young American astronomer and an accomplished Soviet astronomer/astrophysicist [1]. It's a very interesting read, especially today now that we have accomplished some of the things they theorized about on the planets in our solar system and through observations of our stellar neighbourhood. I highly recommend it.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-life-universe-I-Shklovskii...
Also, the feeling of inevitable doom from resource depletion, pollution, technological stagnation, and political dystopia was quite palpable to many of us growing up in the time. By the mid-80s when I was a teen, it seemed like the way to bet was that no human would leave LEO for many decades, if ever.
Charlie Stross puts it quite nicely about the UK Labour party - who were the creators of that enduring socialist endeavour of the UK NHS:
The Conservatives hated and feared the threat of Soviet communism; the Labour Party leadership hated and feared the Soviets even more (as first cousins once removed in the family tree of left wing ideology, they were seen as class traitors by the first generation of Bolsheviks).
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...
To simply equate socialism with Soviet control was always simplistic and a worldview that caused untold grief - possibly being a contributing factor to the start of the Vietnam War, as argued in A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan.
Edit: The ultimate expression of those on the left as an "undifferentiated mass" was probably the original SIOP which would have attacked all socialist countries even those that weren't on particularly good terms with the Soviets. And even that approach didn't last long - the head of US Marine Corp described attacking people you weren't actually fighting as "This is not the American way".
This idea allowed the CIA to overthrow democratically elected leftwing governments in South America while permitting and cooperating with rightwing nondemocratic murderous governments.
IMO, and it's probably just me, the Bircher thing rose out of the central American tendency towards isolationism. Pearl Harbor ended that; the rest was secondary. The US simply wasn't prepared and hadn't really thought about it. Most of the things we find ... dissonant now are of design by Eisenhower, who was simply our best bet for dealing with it after having been the Supreme Commander in WWII. Thrown in with the brothers Dulles, most of those things were extremely messy. 1953 in particular was very sticky. We had living memory of the nationalization of the oil fields in Mexico.
Americans tend to believe against central planning. The idea is presented quite well in an otherwise flawed "Liberal Fascism".
So right on the face of it, you're just flat wrong. And then you go right off the rails screeching about Communist influence as though this were anything but raving paranoia.
I'm a liberal Quaker (Quakerism far predates Communism) and - you know what? - I seem to have been left off the distribution list from Moscow.
Basically, all I can think when I read this is that you need to get back on your meds. "Pathologically insane ideas," my ass. How anybody can view liberalism as an attack on the Enlightenment - when it is the Enlightenment - is frankly flabbergasting.
Proof enough that the Liberalism of which you speak is stuck well and truly in its new authoritarian roots.
Oh, wait.