By Kenneth S. Baer
Sunday, July 13, 2008; B01

Everyone seems to be telling us that if you want to understand 2008, you have to look back 40 years to 1968. "It's the year that changed everything," wrote Newsweek last November. Seen through tie-dye-tinted glasses, Iraq is the new Vietnam, Barack Obama is the new Bobby Kennedy, and bloggers are the new student activists.

But are we commemorating the right year? If we really want a time that defined the way we live now, we should look back not to the romance and trauma of the '60s but to the gloriously tacky '70s, to the year that made modern America -- 1978. Look beyond the year's bad disco and worse clothes; if you peer deeply into the polyester soul of 1978, you can see the beginnings of the world we live in today.

Start with politics. Two weeks into that year, on Jan. 13, former vice president Hubert H. Humphrey died, but it took six more months before the big-government liberalism that he embodied was buried. In June, California voters backed Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and capped tax increases, thereby marking the start of conservatism's rebirth -- and the beginning of the long end of New Deal liberalism.

People had good reason to be irked at Washington, too. Voters were fed up with rising tax rates (heavily fueled by inflation) and an inefficient government that was seen as wasting their dollars. The Yankelovich poll found that 78 percent of Americans agreed with the statement, "Government wastes a lot of money we pay in taxes," an 18-point jump from 1968.

This anti-government sentiment propelled successful efforts to limit taxing and spending in 13 states and prompted 23 state legislatures to call for a constitutional convention to consider a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. The sour public mood, especially after the passage of Prop 13, triggered a stampede of elected officials to the right, and those who didn't dart quickly enough were run over -- such as Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, who lost his party's gubernatorial primary.

In fact, it was in November 1978 that the modern Republican Party -- which had been on the verge of extinction after Watergate -- was born. In the midterm elections, the GOP gained three Senate seats, 12 House seats and six governorships. The anti-tax, small-government worldview of its right wing was suddenly ascendant -- and has dominated American politics until the present day. (Note that, even with President Bush and his party on the ropes, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Rodham Clinton was willing to back the sort of nationalized health care that every other industrialized democracy enjoys or mention raising taxes to get rid of the massive deficit that Bush is leaving behind.)

Our year also set the contours of today's civil rights battles. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that rigid race quotas for university admissions were unconstitutional but that affirmative action policies designed to ensure a diverse student body were not. Americans have battled over the implications of this decision ever since, but we have come to accept diversity as a virtue in universities, corporations and throughout American life. That began with Bakke in 1978.

Of course, today's most contentious civil rights battles aren't over race but over sexual orientation. Here, too, 1978 was pivotal. As the year began, a handful of communities had ordinances on the books banning discrimination against gays in employment and housing. But as these measures passed, opposition mobilized, often led by the singer Anita Bryant. In 1978, the citizens of Eugene, Ore.; St. Paul, Minn.; and Wichita, Kan., voted overwhelmingly to repeal these gay-friendly laws. Even in liberal New York, Mayor Ed Koch's effort to expand a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation for municipal hiring never got out of the relevant city council committee.

But the most bizarre and important incident happened, perhaps unsurprisingly, in San Francisco. The city had passed its own anti-discrimination law in March. On Nov. 27, Daniel White, the lone city supervisor to oppose the ordinance, walked into Mayor George Moscone's office and shot him dead, then proceeded to the office of Supervisor Harvey Milk -- the country's first openly gay official of any consequence -- and killed him, too.

More than 30,000 San Franciscans took to the streets to mourn Milk and Moscone, blaming their deaths on the anti-gay backlash. One person held a sign stating: "Are you happy, Anita?" If this didn't galvanize the gay community, the light sentence that White received did. That year, the gay community's first Washington lobbyist was hired, and its long struggle for equality was underway.

Politics wasn't the only thing that began to change in 1978. Are you reading this article on your BlackBerry? That's only possible because, in 1978, Illinois Bell rolled out the first cellular phone system -- a radical new technology that promised to break the 10-year waiting list for mobile phones. That same year, the first computer bulletin-board system was created, and the first piece of e-mail spam was sent over the ARPANET, the forerunner to today's Internet, inviting users to a computer company's product demonstration. (No word on whether it promised to enhance the attendees' virility.)

Computers were quickly becoming more pervasive, too. VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet program, was introduced in 1978 and quickly became the first commercially successful piece of software, giving personal computers mass rather than just geek appeal. "Eventually, the household computer will be as much a part of the home as the kitchen sink," Time magazine boldly predicted in February 1978.

E-mail spam went largely unnoticed at the time, but the year's advances in biotechnology certainly did not. Late on the evening of July 25, in the small city of Oldham in northwest England, the first "test-tube baby" was born. Louise Brown's arrival after in vitro fertilization, touched off a worldwide ethical debate about whether and how we should be fooling with Mother Nature. Thirty years later, IVF is commonplace, and genetic science has leapt astonishingly forward, but the scope of the debates -- now focused on stem cells and cloning -- remains the same.

Other eerily familiar issues from today's headlines first appeared three decades ago. Wiretapping and national security? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- whose overhaul triggered a contentious debate last week on Capitol Hill -- was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in October 1978. Skyrocketing gas prices and national reliance on foreign oil? The country's first comprehensive national energy program was signed into law at the end of 1978 -- but only after 18 months of contentious logrolling in Congress.

You can find the roots of some of today's biggest foreign policy challenges in 1978, too. A Middle East roiled by Islamist extremism? Nineteen seventy-eight marked the beginning of the end for the shah of Iran, soon to be swept aside by the Shiite radicals led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- a man whose example would help pave the way for a new generation of Sunni fanatics also angry about the U.S. role in the Middle East. But while 1978 was a rotten year for U.S. efforts to prop up the shah, it was a far better one for Arab-Israeli peacemaking. Not only did the otherwise hapless Carter help broker the watershed Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty at Camp David, the summit also produced "A Framework for Peace in the Middle East," a much more ambitious document explaining how Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians would work out their own conflicts over the next five years. That time horizon proved a little ambitious, but a precedent had been set: Since 1978, Arabs and Israelis have expected the U.S. president to be personally and deeply involved in any painful deal-making.

Then as now, the Middle East got the most headlines, but it was what was happening in the Far East that would most radically shape the world. After years of near-total isolation, China decided to join the rest of the world, setting out on what its rulers called a "New Long March" to become a world power by the end of the century. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, Mao's heir, China ratified a peace and friendship treaty with Japan and reached out to its traditionally wary Asian neighbors. At home, it took momentous early steps toward capitalism by beginning to dismantle its agricultural communes, allowing peasants to sell their crops and pocket the profits.

The most dramatic sign of China's new openness was announced simultaneously in Beijing and Washington in December: The United States formally recognized China, broke its longstanding recognition of Taiwan and normalized relations with the communist titan. This momentous decision helped propel China into the modern world, turn it into a rival -- if not an enemy -- of the United States and intertwine the two countries' economies. Last year, U.S. trade with China was $386 billion, up from $1 billion in 1978. There is not a person reading this article who doesn't own a Chinese product.

The rise of China may not be as sexy as the student uprisings of 1968, and the passage of Prop 13 may not pack the same emotional punch as the tragic campaign of RFK. But from politics to technology, from civil rights to foreign policy, 1978 marked the start of the age we live in. Thank God, disco didn't survive.

dajoi@democracyjournal.org

Kenneth S. Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is co-editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.