Politics & Power Quote by Tom Wolfe

Wolfe christens an era with the swagger of a headline that knows it will stick. Calling the 1970s the "Me Decade" is already a jab: a suggestion that after the collective fervor of the New Deal and the moral seriousness of the civil-rights period, America pivoted to self-involvement dressed up as liberation. The sly move is the next clause, where he frames that narcissism as religion, not merely lifestyle. He is arguing that the collapse of shared institutions did not produce secular coolness; it produced substitute faiths, with the self as altar and therapy, diet, jogging, and self-help as liturgy.

The phrase "upward roll" matters. It sounds like a wave you can surf, but also like an unstoppable natural force, an indictment of how easily Americans baptize their own appetites in grand language. By tagging it the "third great religious wave", Wolfe borrows the authority of historical cycles (echoing the First and Second Great Awakenings) while quietly mocking the idea that encounter groups and personal growth seminars deserve to stand in that lineage. The subtext is cultural: if religion is no longer primarily about God or community, it can still thrive as ritualized self-attention.

Context sharpens the bite. Post-Vietnam cynicism, Watergate rot, economic stagnation, and the fraying of trust made institutions feel like bad investments. Wolfe reads the decade's inward turn not as private retreat but as a public reformation: America, allergic to emptiness, inventing new forms of belief to fill the vacuum left by discredited authority.