To look for America:Spiro Agnew and the politics of cultural change

This chapter explores the context for, and the implications of, Spiro Agnew’s denunciation of music lyrics, as promoting illegal drugs, while he was vice president of the United States. The episode offers a case study of the political response to 1960s social and cultural change. The administration of Richard Nixon actually pursued a more moderate approach to policymaking than the rhetoric suggests. Nixon and Agnew nevertheless continued to believe in the electoral power of polarising rhetoric, with consequences for policy debate (with Nixon’s advocacy of a “war on drugs”) as well as for the political arena.