I mean, I suppose maybe if you went all the way back to Eisenhower, who had his own whole of issues to boot anyway, you could say they were still respectable and had values, but like Nixon started the whole “Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.” shit.
…and you’d still have to be ignoring how absolutely bigoted most average people in the US were most of it’s history. Like what about the Disco Demolition Night riot in 1979, a fevered rejection of an art form that was primarily made by minorities by young white men? It wasn’t just the leaders who didn’t have good values.
Rolling Stone critic Dave Marsh described Disco Demolition Night as “your most paranoid fantasy about where the ethnic cleansing of the rock radio could ultimately lead”. Marsh was one who, at the time, deemed the event an expression of bigotry, writing in a year-end 1979 feature that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks, and Latins, and therefore they’re the most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.”