Rick Perlstein | The Nation

Allow me a further deepening of my Nation article, reposing now on newsstands, on the continues between conservatives of decades past and today. It concerns the historic entanglement of big-business and conservatism. A recent media narrative suggests signs of a divorce between the these longtime lovers. “Business Groups See Loss of Sway Over House G.O.P.,” reports The New York Times—so they’re thinking about primaries against Tea Party congressmembers. “We’re looking at ways to counter the rise of an ideological brand of conservatism that, for lack of a better word, is more anti-establishment than it has been in the past,” says a lobbyist at the National Retail Federation. “We have come to the conclusion that sitting on the sidelines is not good enough.” ThinkProgress broke out the champagne: “GOP CIVIL WAR ERUPTS!!!!”

Just kidding. No all-caps, and no exclamation points. But still: calm down. The Nation’s magnificent Lee Fang has ably debunked the growls of these paper tigers: the big-money boys said the same thing in 2011 during the first debt-ceiling standoff, and did nothing except spend untold millions electing and reelecting Tea Partiers, and there’s no evidence that anything different will happen in 2016. And yet our media elites, ever scanning the horizon for sensible, moderate “adults in the room,” have alighted this time on the pirates running the United States Chamber of Commerce—yet one more frightening indication of how far to the right America’s ideological center has become.

The fact of the matter is that the relationship between business and the modern right has never been simple—and yet, despite some stutter steps backward, it has always advanced in the exact same basic direction: toward romance.

Let’s go back to the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism was entering its period of maturation. What were once known as “robber barons” were making their accommodations with an increasingly liberal, activist state, but in a way that historians on the left taught us to distrust. Books like the late historian and publisher James Weinstein’s The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (1969) and Martin Sklar’s The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (1988) argued that corporate owners and managers and high government officials cooperated more than they clashed. Rather than despising regulation as such, business “captured” the regulators, creating a smoothly functioning integrated economy relatively free of ideological conflict.

Thus, even the baseline condition for a business community out of sync with the laissez-faire right is still pretty conservative. At the same time, these historians missed or exaggerated the extent to which large pockets of business were outright reactionary.

Consider the former president of the US Chamber of Commerce who wrote in The Nation’s Business in 1928 that “a thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive…. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is and the longer he stays the greater the danger.” Not a big fan of state power, that guy—and his type never went away, even after the Great Depression ushered in the New Deal with major buy-in from the biggest American corporations, first in the National Recovery Act, which appointed businessmen as active partners in a “corporatist” scheme of regulation before it was outlawed by the Supreme Court, then in any number of state initiatives after that. But as the political scientist Thomas Ferguson has argued for decades, generally speaking, it was certain kinds of businesses—big capital intensive multinational corporations and the investment bankers who financed them—who bought into the new liberal center. Another type—smaller, more labor-intensive, less cosmopolitan, often family-owned companies—never did. As I wrote in Before the Storm, imagining the world from the perspective of one of these latter sort of businessmen,

the New Deal threw money at everyone and everything—everyone and everything, that is except you and your plants. You thought it was a godsend to industrialists who managed thousands of workers, instead of hundreds, and their friends on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration authorized executives in every industry to regulate their own. The men he picked were inevitably from the biggest companies, no one you knew. You had no say when they set floors so high that they destroyed the only edge you had over in accessing the market—you could no longer undercut their prices. You had no say when your taxes ballooned to pay for Roosevelt’s deficits, which you knew would only bring inflation.

Bigger companies licked at your heels all through the Depression. Government regulations—whose application was the same for large and small firms, but which invariably fell heavier on the small—began to feel more burdensome to you…. You felt like a victim.

By no means were these whiners the wretched of the earth. Many had towns named after them—like Kohler, Wisconsin, where the famous bathroom fixtures manufacturer fought a 1950s organizing drive so viciously the Senate Labor Committee sent a team of investigators. It wasn’t about money but, as it were, dignity. Men of great possessions who feel dispossessed, powerful men feeling suddenly less powerful, can generate some pretty wing-nutty resentments—Tea Party–level resentment. Like this imperishable quote in a fundraising pitch from their political mastermind, radio broadcaster and former Notre Dame law dean Clarence Manion: “Many gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution, have fallen under the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists and Communists. Much of this vast horde of money is being used to ‘socialize’ the United States.” Remember that, because it will be important when we get to the 2008–09 bank-bailout part of the story.

Folks like these got even more resentful as the culture, and the masters of the political economy, came to see them as less and less relevant to the main direction of American economic development—as big business began to accept negotiating with big unions as a matter of course, as a good way to keep their workforces disciplined and efficient. They more and more bought into the Keynesian consensus that government social spending goosed the consumer economy in ways that redounded to their own bottom line. But the other guys, the conservative industrialists (I call them “Manionites” in my book), only got madder—and formed the core of the coalition that nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964. Even as big business formed a crucial part of the coalition that crushed Barry Goldwater in the general election. (If you’re interested in hearing just how copacetic the relationship was, listen to Lyndon Johnson’s conversations that year with Robert B. Anderson, the former Eisenhower Treasury secretary from Texas who was the president’s political liaison to big business.) They loved Johnson, even with his War on Poverty and Great Society, and feared Goldwater; at a LBJ speech to the US Chamber of Commerce, he was interrupted by applause sixty times. Can you imagine that happening to Barack Obama?

But plenty of big businessmen never got aboard the Great Society-Keynesian bandwagon and never would. The finance chairman of Goldwater’s campaign, for example, Ralph Cordiner, was the recently retired CEO of General Motors.

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Soon enough, though, by the 1970s, the liberal center in corporate America no longer held, and most multinational executives started feeling and acting like Manionites. It followed a period of extraordinary liberal hegemony in the federal government, even, famously, under President Nixon. A bill he signed in 1969 increased the tax burden on businesses, and not just by a little bit; The New Republic called it “far and away the most ‘anti-rich’ tax reform proposal ever proposed by a Republican president in the fifty-six years of the existence of the income tax.” One of the things the new government revenue was being spent on was new regulatory agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (created by the most stringent federal mining legislation in US history) and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Aggressive Naderite advocates—whose “brilliant young staff members who mistrust or totally disbelieve the attributes of the enterprise system,” Barry Goldwater said in 1974—shuttled up and down Capitol Hill, testifying before congressional committees, as often as not tying up their business adversaries in knots. They were winning.

Tomorrow I’ll write about what happened next with business’s relationship with the right: flaming hot romance, accompanied by public displays of affection unlike any Americans had ever seen.

Rick Perlstein notes the parallels between today's Tea Partiers and conservatives of decades past. 

This past weekend I was thrilled to attend the second annual Great Lakes Bioneers conference in Chicago, which has been a wonderful introduction for me this year and last to the remarkably dedicated work citizens are doing around the concept of “resilience”—a word frequently used in psychology to refers to people’s ability to bounce back in the face of life challenges and which environmentalists have adopted into an umbrella term for practices centered around how communities can create a sustainable future within an unsustainable present—to build a new world in a shell of the old. In 2012, I learned about one of the movement’s coolest big ideas, “biomimicry”—the concept of better design through imitating nature. This year I learned about “food forests,” which is amazing stuff too—“a gardening technique or land management system that mimics a woodland ecosystem but substitutes in edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals.”

I also learned something horrifying. Please allow me to share.

You know something about tar sands, those petroleum deposits sedimented within mineral layers, concentrated in the Canadian province of Alberta. They can be converted into crude oil via a highly disruptive refining process, then transported to market via a process that is even more disruptive: overland and underwater pipelines. You know about tar sands, no doubt, because of the Keystone XL controversy. At Bioneers yesterday I attended a strategy session led by tar sands activists who were glad that the Keystone XL controversy has focused attention of the whole ghastly business; XL, because it crosses an international border, requires presidential action, which has provoked activists to launch a highly visible pressure campaign aimed at the White House. But they were worried about that attention, too—because “XL” serves a distraction from other, more proximate pipeline crises unfolding now, today, perhaps beneath a waterway or across a county near you, that you might be able to help stop now, through grassroots action.

It’s not just the record number of pipelines that are being built. There is also the newly flourishing and massively risky practice of reversing the directional flow of existing pipelines, often in conjunction with massive increases in pressure that the pipes were not designed to withstand (here’s a story about a pipeline reversal in which the volume will almost triple). That was almost certainly a major reason for the disastrous rupture of ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline last March in Mayflower, Arkansas, which you may have heard about—or which you may not have heard about, given that the Federal Aeronautics Administration, in a suspicious move made in cooperation with ExxonMobil, immediately banned flights above the spill from descending below a floor of 1,000 feet, while inquiring reporters on the ground were told by local sheriff’s deputies, “You have ten seconds to leave or you will be arrested.”

One of the most monumental reversal-and-construction projects is taking place on a 485-mile pipeline that used to transport petroleum drilled in the Gulf of Mexico to the Midwest—but beginning in the spring of 2012 began moving tar sand-derived crude from Cushing, Oklahoma (the “Pipeline Crossroads of the World”), to the Gulf Coast for transportation onto the world market (a key concept—the world market; none of this has anything to do with American “energy independence”). It’s called the Keystone Pipeline Gulf Coast Project, and it has been the obsession of one of the remarkable panelists I heard last weekend. Earl Hatley, a Native American from Oklahoma and legendary environmental activist, was a principal in a lawsuit, dismissed by a federal judge last month, to keep that monstrosity from being completed. An exceptionally experienced observer of the wicked ways of the corporate carbon cowboys now deforming the North American landscape, he offered some shrewd assessments of the current state of play based on what he learned from that process.

The clever lawyers for the pipeline company TransCanada, you see, had devised a shifty way to get pipelines reversed, built or both, before opposition can have time to gel. They get a special kind of expedited permit from the Army Corps called “Nationwide Permit 12,” which is supposed to be limited to projects that disturb less than a half-acre of wetland in a “single and complete project.” But companies claim, in clear violation of the intent of the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, that each crossing of a body of water (there are more than a thousand for the project in question, adding up to 130 acres of high-quality forested wetlands) is a “separate” project, each falling below the threshold of scrutiny. That way they can avoid public hearings, avoid filing a environmental impact—can avoid any accountability at all, really. “It’s not a public process,” explains Hatley. (Nope. Only the lands are public.) Or, actually, processes—for what the NWP 12 scam allows is for pipeline companies to overwhelm the system, as the legal complaint from the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Future Oklaho ma explains, by “piecemealing” what is obviously a single project (even though you obviously can’t have a pipeline if it’s in pieces), “into several hundred 1/2-acre ‘projects’ so as to avoid the individual permit process.” So it is that Army Corps of Engineers, the named defendant in the suit, gets to mete out little chunks of permission every eleven miles or so, in secret, the public and the planet be damned.

The plaintiffs be damned, too. In a ruling early last month that is simply staggering in its bald deference to dollarocracy, an appeals panel ruled that because “the harm an injunction would cause TransCanada was significant,” and because $500 million had already been spent on the project, it was “undisputed that further delay [would] cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each day.”

That’s right: the plain intent of US environmental law could be contravened because it would cost a corporation. A court actually said this.

And get this. The court also said that the plaintiffs, the Sierra Club and Clean Energy Future Oklahoma, couldn’t have their injunction because—well, there’s only one way to put it: because they weren’t wealthy enough. As the AP article on the decision put it, it was impossible for the lawsuit to go further because “the Sierra Club and the other groups could not post a bond to cover TransCanada’s losses if the pipeline builder ultimately wins the lawsuit.”

For activists like Hatley, it was back to the drawing board. Sad news? Of course. You see why expedited permitting and construction are so important to oil companies: like Israel’s occupation on the West Bank, once they establish their “facts on the ground,” the process feels impossible to reverse. This process, by the way, was personally endorsed by President Obama, who traveled to Cushing last year to sing hosannahs to building more pipeline. (After all, the National Security State needs tar sand crude to maintain a viable imperial presence around the globe. That’s why they call oil a “strategic commodity.”)

But look here: there is (as a certain presidential candidate used to like to say) hope. You can’t have a pipeline, after all, if it’s in pieces. What if We the People found a way to break the chain? To, as it were, perforate the pipe?

That was the most exciting part of the Bioneers session for me. Look at the map above. That’s the Flanagan South pipeline project being planned by TransCanada’s rival Enbridge (slogan: “Where energy meets people”), set to run 600 miles from Flanagan, Illinois, to Cushing, Oklahoma, sending some 600,000 barrels a day across states of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Which makes for lots of disrupt-able links in the chain. And here’s where the disruption could come from. A model one of the activists in the audience at the session pointed to, the Tar Sands Free Town campaign, “[builds] on model resolutions already adopted in Bellingham, Washington, [in which] individual municipalities can pass resolutions that keep fuel from tar sands refineries out of their towns.”

Those burgs that dot the map from Flanagan to Cushing: Caney and Humbolt and Lynn in Kansas; Gum and Concordia and Key and Shelby in Missouri; Goodfield and Florence and Rush and Quincy in Illinois—those are the towns Enbridge will be eyeing for colonization-via-fossil fuel pump stations and refiners. What will happen when the colonizers arrive? Hatley described his own observations from Oklahoma: arrogant out-of-town oil men will refuse to patronize local businesses, break promises to provide local jobs, condescend standoffishly to local citizens. “You go through the cafes…. You stand up, and you start having rallies. You let people know.” And, he said, people respond.

Another panelist, MacDonald Stainsby, who is based in Vancouver, told an extraordinary story about the time he visited a village in Africa. The people there were amazed when he recited to them, as if he were a clairvoyant, exactly the history of double-dealing and mendacity and environmental abuse they’d suffered when an oil multinational came to town. How did he know? they asked. Because, he replied, that was exactly what they did to towns in Canada—and everywhere else. Which is why, Hatley explained, activists should try to “catch the process before it goes forward,” from the bottom up. That is where the hope lies.

Organize with these facts from the pipeline-rupture epidemic, which have flown largely below the media radar. A Koch-owned pipeline spilled 400 barrels in Texas last week. “Details are scarce regarding the cause of the spill,” Alternet reports, but that’s nothing compared to what happened a few weeks earlier: “a pipeline that spewed over 20,000 barrels of crude oil into a North Dakota wheat field went unreported for eleven days until it was discovered by a farmer harvesting his wheat. A subsequent Associated Press investigation found nearly three hundred oil 300 oil spills and 750 oil field incidents have gone unreported in the state since January 2012 alone.” According to a report from the watchdogs at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the office at the Department of Transportation in charge of regulating 2.6 million miles of pipeline spends three times more hours hobnobbing at industry conferences than it does responding to spills, explosions and other incidents on the ground.

And how do the companies respond when evidence of a crisis emerges? Hatley said that when the monitors at Enbridge’s far-off headquarters spied low pressure in their pipe flowing below Mayflower, Arkansas, they didn’t shut down and look into the possibility of a rupture. They amped up the pressure instead—three separate times. Meanwhile a pipeline safety expert with forty years’ experience predicts that the chance of rupture of a pipeline repurposed for tar sands that runs through the most populated part of Canada and crosses waterways providing drinking water for millions of Canadians is… “over 90 percent.”

And last summer, the National Wildlife Federation sent divers down to inspect the sixty-year-old pipelines Enbridge operates beneath the Straits of Mackinac—a major tourist area in Michigan—after the company (and the federal government’s Pipeline Hazards Safety Administration) refused for two years to release information about their safety and integrity or even their location. You can watch the video here to see what they found: “pipelines suspended over the lakebed, some original supports broken away (indicating the presence of corrosion), and some sections of the suspended pipelines covered in large piles of unknown debris.” Among the cities with refiners that receive tar sands from this eminently admirable company, according to Clean Energy Future Oklahoma, are Joliet, Illinois; Whiting, Indiana; St. Paul, Minnesota; Toledo, Ohio (they have two); and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Enbridge began construction this summer on Flanagan South, using the obnoxious Nationwide Permit 12 process. The fact that you’ve heard of Keystone XL but not this, even though the route might nearly snuggle up to your front porch—it comes within twenty miles of Peoria, Illinois, to take one example—has nothing to do with size: according to Midwestern Energy News, the project will carry “600,000 barrels a day initially for the Flanagan South, and 783,000 barrels per day once combined with the Spearhead, an existing pipeline that largely runs parallel to the proposed Flanagan route,” compared to 830,000 barrels for Keystone XL.

Midwesterners, let’s get to work. It won’t be easy: reports the NWF of its underwater adventure, “despite having cleared our dive work with the U.S. Coast Guard, several Congressional members, and Homeland Security, our staff and the dive crew had uncomfortable interactions with Enbridge representatives. As soon as our team set out on the water, we were quickly accompanied by an Enbridge crew that monitored our every move. This monitoring did not stop at the surface: Enbridge also placed a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) into the water to watch our team.”

I’m sure Enbridge had only the most public spirited of intentions. Reports the company website, “Government regulations for the approval and maintenance of pipelines are transparent and rigorous. With our focus on safety, and our commitment to adopting state-of-the-art technology, Enbridge meets and often exceeds those regulations—and that has earned us recognition as an industry leader. But we know that’s not good enough. Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our pipelines, our communities, and the environment. We continue to strive in the areas of monitoring, prevention, response, and new technology for a delivery record of 100%.”

What liars. Sounds like a villain worthy of your most mighty attention.

Zoe Carpenter highlights another under-reported environmental crisis: coal mining in the Powder River Basin.

This summer I put together a three-part series on American conservatism and its passion for “Multi-level marketing” (MLM) systems like Amway—pyramid schemes, in so many words. I promised a fourth part as a conclusion but never got to it—other issues pressed. (A wingnutologist’s work is never done….)

Here was part one, on how MLMs (don’t) work.

And part two, on how the Bush administration crushed the regulation of Amways et al by hiring one of Amway's lawyer to the post in charge of regulating Amway.

And part three, on how MLM fleecers saturate conservative politics, buying off, for example, the state attorneys general responsible for (not) prosecuting the frauds.

Allow me to return to the series, belatedly, for part four—on why this all matters for understanding the American right as such. It might not seem topical, now that conservatives in Washington are so busy preparing the next chapter in their project to bring the nation once more to the brink of fiscal apocalypse unless their lunatic vision of the American economy is given full rein. Indulge me, though: that is why understanding the right-wing affection for pyramid schemes is so important right now. It helps explain where those lunatic economic visions grow out of: the fantasy about how the world works that beats in right-wingers’ hearts, from Main Street all the way to United States Capitol.

I’ll start with a story. When I was in Tampa, Florida, reporting on the 2012 Republican convention for The Nation, I happened upon a nice fellow, a Mormon, named Walt. (Utah has the most network marketers per capita by far; “MLM,” Utahans joke, stands for “Mormons Losing Money”; Mitt Romney is implicated in the hustle from his Mormon head to his Mormon toes.) He spoke of his affection for Romney and the Republican Party (he’d seen my press pass, and asked how he, a lowly cellphone salesman, could get inside the convention); he talked about Obama’s passion for giving free money to lazy, shiftless slackers (“That’s Obama’s thing: entitlement.”). We reached an impasse when I tried to argue him out of his Fox-fed propaganda, and we started talking about taxes instead. That was when he told me, “Anyone who doesn’t have a home-based business is ignorant.” I asked him what kind of home-based business he had, which was when he revealed himself as a passionate MLM devotee.

Ignorant? Oh, really. As I quoted in part one of my series, according to a study of 22,281 distributors for an MLM company called Trek Alliance, “Under several optimal scenarios in which the distributors do exactly what is needed to obtain the rewards proposed by the Pay Plan, approximately 98.8 to 99.6 percent fail to achieve any earnings,” and “in all likelihood more than 96 percent of Trek distributors experience business failure.”

So why do MLM distributors do it? And why do they proselytize that you should, too? Well, it’s easy to explain the proselytization piece, in part: recruiting new distributors is what old distributors have to do in order to try to make money. But I don’t think my friend Walt in Tampa had any illusions about recruiting me. His passion came straight from the heart. And where did this passion come from?

Walt was wearing his work uniform: he was a middle-manager at a a major national cellphone company. But when I returned to the arena for the evening’s convention session, I heard nothing that might speak to cubicle drones like Walt. Or at least it seemed that way, on the surface. Instead, I heard the same theme over and over again from the Republicans onstage—deconstructing Obama’s famous, out-of-context line, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Remember?

A small-town mayor (from Utah!) running for Congress: “This is the America we know, because we built it.”

A country singers crooning a brand-new ditty he wrote for the convention: “I Built It.”

Janine Turner, who played Maggie on the TV show Northern Exposure, saying “President Obama, I’m here to tell ya, government didn’t build it. God and the American people built it!”

As I wrote from Tampa, according to its entire rhetorical thrust, “If you’re not among the small percentage of Americans who own a business, or don’t aspire to become one, you were invisible to that convention.” You had no moral claim the rest of us were bound to respect. Indeed you were hardly American at all. And this, as much as the false get-rich-quick promises companies like Trek and Amway”—short, naturally, for “American Way”—offer, is why they prove so seductive to those of a right-wing bent: by letting folks like Walt “buy” a “home-based business” off the shelf, MLMs let nine-to-fivers style themselves as members of the only caste of Americans that matter on the right—entrepreneurs.

As critic Robert Fitzpatrick, author of False Profits: Seeking Financial and Spiritual Deliverence in Multi-Level Marking and Pyramic Schemes, told me this summer, “MLM is presented as an ‘alternative’ to the conventional economy that is portrayed as entrapping, uncaring or closed off, a place for losers and wage slaves.” (That’s my friend Walt all over: a wage-slave, struggling to escape.) Fitzpatrick continues, “Conservative ideology of the Randian bent has a lot in common with the culture of MLMs. Both fail to acknowledge that such a thing as privilege exists, and perpetuate the fiction that someone’s success is only due to their gumption and their willingness to work hard. No, success in their world has nothing to do with the wealthy, educated family they were born into, or their inborn privilege of the ‘right’ race or sex, or any other type of help, most especially not governmental help such as Social Security death benefits. In MLM, this translates to ‘anyone can be successful!’ And if this rich dude trotted out in front of the crowd at every MLM convention, and on every piece of their promotional material can do it, so can you! Except that rich dude? Yeah, he doesn’t earn most of his money the way you would have to. But they never tell anyone that.”

In other words this is right-wing economic ideology in its purest, heroin-like form.

And it is at the same time such a nice con. As another accomplished MLM critic, Douglas Brooks, told me, “One of the paradoxes of MLM is that many of the victims do not complain. We speculate that among the reasons are the sense of shame, that the MLM conditions participants to believe that if they fail it will be their own fault.”

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Sound familiar? “Beyond sucking $10–$20 billion out of Main Street each year,” says Fitzpatrick, this industry’s “main impact is intellectual and political. MLMs promote a radical individualism, hatred of government and a strange twist on economics in which preying on a neighbor is called ‘marketing.’”

Does the notion of such an intimate connection between the grifters and the mainstream conservatives sound a bit far-fetched? Consider that the DeVos family, the owners of Amway, all but owns the Michigan Republican Party. And consider this goofy little detail. In 1982, Amway funded a traveling puppet show to teach kids about the virtues of “free enterprise.” A UPI article at the time described it: “The tale has Tom Smith, a successful hard-working bread-maker in the land of Mist and Myth, battling meaningless fees and excessive taxes and regulations imposed by the Chancellor of Rules and the Ambassador of Gobbledygook. Smith is forced to raise prices so high he goes out of business and lands in jail. Children viewing the film are told their applause will save him. Saved, Smith not only succeeds in making bread to feed the hungry but also turns enough of a profit to take the honeymoon he never had.”

I thought that story sounded familiar. Then I realized I’d heard it from the mouth of Ronald Reagan—who told it (and re-ran it often) when he did a daily radio show in the 1970s, which I researched at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. But you don’t have to travel to Stanford. You can watch a film version of “The Incredible Bread Machine” on YouTube, introduced by no less than former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon.

America is a strange place. The American right is stranger. These are the people who shut down our government and almost caused the United States Treasury to default. These are Barack Obama’s negotiating partners.

Michael Sheen as Dr. William Masters and Lizzy Caplan as Virginia Johnson in the new Showtime series "Masters of Sex." (AP Photo/Showtime, Craig Blankenhorn)

“Sexual intercourse began/ in 1963/ (which was rather late for me)/ Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first LP"  goes a famous little ditty by Philip Larkin. Maybe in Merrie Olde England. But a better argument can be made that sex was invented in 1966. The milestone was the publication of a book by two scientists. Two married scientists. Two married scientists whose research involved watching people have sex in laboratories—and then describing precisely what gave people pleasure, and how women could more efficiently do unto themselves, and couples unto one another.

How big a deal was William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Response—and the 1970 followup Human Sexual Inadequacy? Well, early in 1973, when the Vietnam War ended and hundreds of prisoners of wars were repatriated from Hanoi, the Today show devoted its entire two-hour program to what a POW Rip van Winkle who went to war in 1965 and returned in 1973 would have missed: from feminism (“They walked in picket lines, they badgered congressmen, they formed pressure groups”) to the “federal legislation [that] brought the vote to 2 million more blacks,” to the serial assassinations of politicians and civil rights leaders—and, getting pride of place with all of that: Masters and Johnson. Yes, the invention of oral contraception in 1960 made it possible to women to have sex absent the consequence of pregnancy. But only to have sex. For women to demand sex as something to be enjoyed—that was Masters and Johnson’s veritable invention, and thank the Goddess for that.

I loved Thomas Maier’s dual biography of the couple Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of Wiliam Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love when it came out in 2009. I’m thrilled that Showtime has now turned the book into a miniseries. Tonight is the second episode, and in an interesting marketing strategy, you can watch the entire premier from last week on YouTube. (Viewer discretion is advised!) I loved the Maier book so much, in fact, that for the volume I’m finishing now on the politics and culture of America in the years between 1973 and 1976, I made it a priority to convey his most important theme—how profoundly his subjects changed what sex could and should mean in the contemporary world, and how much that in turn changed expectations about the balance between such fundamental issues as liberty and duty, pleasure and sacrifice, in people’s everyday lives—a real historical shift, and one that we are still reckoning with all the time.

I use those returning POWs as a case study. On the front page of The New York Times on February 5, 1973, you could meet Alice Cronin, dressed in faded hip-hugging bell-bottomed jeans and no shoes, smoking cigarettes, hair flopping loose, posing outside her San Diego home as movers unloaded the fashionable puffy white leather couch she bought “for the return of her husband, a Navy pilot held by Hanoi for six years.” But she was worried: “Mike married a very traditional wife…. Now my ideas and values have changed…. I can’t sit home and cook and clean house. I’m very career oriented, and I just hope he goes along and agrees with that…he’s missed out on a lot—liking a more casual lifestyle, being nonmaterialistic.” She hoped he understood why she didn’t trust a single thing the administration said about Vietnam. She also hoped he would go along with something else: “shifting sexual mores, the whole thing about relationships not necessarily being wrong outside of marriage. I know myself really well sexually, and he’s missed out on a good deal of that.” Knowing myself really well sexually: an unimaginable utterance before the publication of Human Sexual Response.

In the interim, thanks largely to Masters and Johnson, America had gone orgasm crazy—a development, it turned out, quite salubrious to the publishing industry. Dr. David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask was only the first pedagogical bestseller of many. (Its areas of instruction included something called “69”: “She feels the insistent throbbing of the organ against their lips and experiences a slightly salty taste, as well as the characteristic but not unpleasant odor of the sudoriferous glands of the area…. By simultaneous cunnilingus and fellatio every possible sense is brought to a fever pitch and a mutual orgasm occurs rapidly.”) Other volumes littering the bedside tables of suburban couples: The Sensuous Woman, by “J.” (it was parodied in newsweekly ads for the Japanese automobile manufacturer Datsun: “The Sensuous Car, by ‘D.”), “the first how-to book for the female who yearns to be all woman.” My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies, which consisted of the answers its author, Nancy Friday, had received from an advertisement she took out reading, “female sexual fantasies wanted by serious female researcher. Anonymity guaranteed.” Chapter titles included “Insatiability,” “Pain and Masochism, or, ‘Ouch, Don’t Stop!’ ” and “The Zoo.”

Couples flocked to films like Deep Throat (it made $25 million showing in seventy-three cities, despite or perhaps because of the criminal court judge in New York City who proclaimed it a “feast of carrion and squalor”), and Behind the Green Door, which began its run as the highest-grossing sex film ever at a gala Manhattan premier, the social event of the season (the projectionist showed the reels out of order; no one noticed). The cover of a book called Loving Free advertised, “For the first time, a real couple tells how they broke through their inhibitions to develop sexual excitement and joy in marriage.” Not to learn do so, men discovered, was to risk being drummed clear out of the marital bed, perhaps via a no-fault divorce. The authors had first published Loving Free anonymously, the preface explained, “because of the effect this frankness might have on the lives of their children” (“Making love standing up kills your arches!”… “Now that we’ve mentioned vibrators…”). Then they changed their mind, surprised to learn none of their children’s friends cared—being of a generation that had already relieved themselves of their sexual innocence by sneaking copies of said volumes from the nooks where their parents believed they had hidden them so well. They undertook a publicity tour, beginning in their conservative home town of Milwaukee, where they gave presentations in living rooms—what I hope were chaste presentations, for I learned from an inscribed copy (forgive me, dear siblings, for revealing this) that one of those presentations took place before my own quite square parents and their friends.

For some of those POWs it was agonizing. Sex: who could have imagined its verities could change? One of them, in an op-ed, described revisiting his old favorite cocktail lounge one Friday afternoon. “The couple at the next table were having a heated discussion which ended abruptly when the woman shouted an obscenity and commanded, ‘Buster, get out of my life.’ The red-faced dude and the attractive, though somewhat foul-mouthed, young lady turned to me…. ’You look like a nice guy. Want to come over to my apartment for a little while?’ ”

“‘I’ve got a date in an hour,’ I said.

“‘Hell, that’s plenty of time.’”

But Captain John Nasmyth was out of step in his perturbation. Researchers at the Kinsey Institute had carried out a massive new survey in 1972, learning that four-fifths of men surveyed—and no less than 100 percent of women—thought the idea of the woman initiating sex was just fine. They also found 75 percent of men and even more women thought schools should teach sexual education, that only 8 percent abjured masturbation, 85 percent approved of cunnilingus and only 5 percent of men over the age of 24 were virgins.

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The aim of their work, Masters and Johnson explained in an interview the following summer in the Los Angeles Times, was to disassociate sex from sin; sexual pleasure, they said, was simply, “natural.” By 1976, even evangelicals had come (Beavis and Butthead: heh heh heh…) to agree. Beverly and Tim LaHaye (author, later, of the “Left Behind” series) published The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, still in print and selling in the millions, which explained of the clitoris that God “placed it there for your enjoyment,” and excoriated the husband “who told his frustrated wife, ‘Nice girls aren’t supposed to climax.’ Today’s wife knows better.”

Showtime subscribers: learn how “today’s wife” learned—even the square ones. The rest of you: read the book.

Jessica Valenti speaks out against parental consent laws and the war against young women's bodies.