Chuck Todd: Will voters wake up by Election Day?

One of the memorable books I had to read in various political science courses in college was titled “It Seemed Like Nothing Happened” — a narrative-meets-textbook attempting to document the significant events of the 1970s.

The title is exactly what made it memorable to me. I remember my smug, 20-year-old brain thinking, as I was buying the book for a class, “If it seemed like nothing happened, then why write an entire book about it?”

Then, after realizing the substance of the book, there was another part of me that felt dissed, because of course the first decade I was alive was the decade the history geniuses decided was less meaningful! (There was actually a time in the ’90s, pre-9/11, when I and other colleagues of my generation lamented how relatively calm the world was during our lifetimes, which made what we were covering less consequential. With age comes wisdom, right?)

Obviously, the title was meant to be a tad tongue in cheek. Compared to the ’40s (world war), ’50s (massive growth, Korea, McCarthyism) and especially the ’60s (assassinations, Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, moon landing), the ’70s didn’t have the same cache to historians — yet.

For whatever reason, the ’70s, even with some 50 years of reflection, still has that “it seemed like nothing happen” vibe to it when you look at the decade through the prism of the entire 20th century. Certainly, other decades, whether from the point of view of the world or the point of view of just America, were home to far more consequential events.

But that decade’s comparative lack of world-shaking events doesn’t mean it lacked anything of consequence. And one of the more consequential aspects of the ’70s was the start of a notable trend of political disengagement.