With all the talk about social issues here I wondered...

[BlackmanX]

has there ever been a time in modern American history since the 1930's where we have had simultaneous social and economic liberalism or social and economic conservatism? It seems like when we have one the other is just the opposite because in the 1960's the general social culture was pretty conservative but the economics were pretty liberal.

[Betsy Ross]

1. Hippies were conservative?

The pill that started the sexual revolution? The civil rights and antiwar movements? Didn't the ecological movement come out of the sixties. I always think of the sixties as a time of cutural awakenings. In the US, liberalism was seen mostly on the coasts, but it had a major impact on thye whole country. I think of the seventies as being more conservative, the pendulum swinging back to the right.

[BlackmanX]

2. It doesn't count the hippies were the counter culture but the mainstream culture was firmly

conservative. I'd consider the 1970's a socially liberal decade but economically Nixon, Ford, and Carter were pretty conservative. There was no big idea government expanding policy coming from any administration during the 1970's. As a matter of fact Nixon did his best to overturn the great society's spending programs. Ford and Carter were fighting inflation by trying not to spend money and people generally didn't have as much money as they had in previous decades.