A COLLECTIVE SADNESS

...I think that all this was experienced most acutely by Catholics because their religious crisis was more extreme than that of other faiths...

...Young people publicly admitted that they were trying to avoid the draft...

...The professors become quite nervous when they are discussing the earnings of the garbage collectors...

...On top of this a sudden freeze comes down...

...People feel themselves on a tread mill...

...They are argu ing that profits are essential to new invest ment and increased production and must therefore be encouraged...

...The Harris poll, showing a pervasive uneasiness in this country, only confirms what all of us instinctively know...

...Robinson's paper was presented the year after the Nixon economic freeze of August, 1971.1 If it is successful it is to keep everyone in the position where he happened to be when the scramble for relative gains was brought to a halt and it will perpetuate the division of income between work and property that happened to exist when it set in...

...young couples publicly lived in sin together, and starlets had babies out of wedlock...

...But it is important to understand how difficult the task is and to perceive the new anxieties and frustrations that have contributed to our collective sadness...

...Here, too, the centrifugal forces seem to predominate, and there are even those, like Dean Burnham, who foresee the end of the American party system...

...A COLLECTIVE SADNESS...

...Then in the 1972 presidential election, nonvoters were a higher percentage than at any time since 1948...

...It will also make millions of people feel as if they are riding an endless merry-go-round...

...The result is that the established model of American political behavior is breaking down—and perhaps the party system with it...

...And just as the stern old pastors had said before the deluge broke, but not A COLLECTIVE SADNESS for the reasons they gave, once the morale of the Church went there was no stopping the forces of militant secularism...

...The top 20 percent of the American people own 76 percent of the society...

...But then Johnson and Nixon are only the names we give to two of the most wrenching and disillusioning experiences in the nation's history: our first truly unpopular war and our greatest political scandal...

...The auto workers' strike of 1970, for instance, was a bitter struggle to make up for the losses inflation had already caused and to anticipate, and head off, those that might come...

...In a kind of industrial feudalism, men and women become attached to their jobs and function politically, not so much as members of a class, but as partisans of an industry in alliance with all of its members, from the chairman of the board to the janitor...

...Hierarchical and meritocratic, this Church was a center of established truth—of a morality, a world view, a way of life—for tens of millions of citizens, particularly for urban white workers...

...Gradually, even the hawks were forced to the conclusion that the war was insane...

...in the other, they fight one another, each placing a particular interest over those of coalition...

...The myths of our invincibility and righteousness shattered...

...In terms of an old but still quite functional distinction, Shanker here puts the interest of the trade over that of the class...

...I 488 think that in the United States this element in Keynes was somehow swept under the carpet...

...And indeed most unions have political policies that move in this direction...

...This corrodes what solidarity does exist...

...Perhaps one of the most significant signs of the time in this area is the switch in policy taking place in the American Federation of Teachers...

...For the Catholics, the center of their lives was a belief in God and country...

...At any given moment these days, as I suggested in Toward a Democratic Left, two radically different scenarios seem plausible...

...All of these factors are at work in our collective sadness, but I will not linger over any of them...

...Joan Robinson described it in a brilliant address to the American Economic Association a few years back as The Second Crisis of Economic Theory...

...pornography came out of the stag parties and into the movie houses...

...The immediate cause was, of course, Vietnam...

...The death of God was clearly announced more than a century ago and Marxists (and atheistic humanists of every persuasion) predicted the imminent demise of that most Medieval of institutions, the Roman Church...

...the Democrats from the 1930s to the 1960s) . Realigning elections, in which a new majority coalition came into being, were seen as relatively rare occurrences...

...it failed to produce a single heresy of any consequence...

...And all of this under political circumstances where the majority coalition with a democratic Left program, which is so desperately needed, may be impossible...

...It is also, I believe, a source of the collective sadness in our society, for it is often destructive of solidarity, particularly among the great mass of people...

...There was folk music on the altar and new doctrines were preached from the pulpit...

...finally, there are new possibilities of political disintegration...

...so did mass transit...

...and on and on...

...People picked up hitchhikers in uniform and sometimes took them to their homes...

...And at more or less the same time, the second pillar of their daily faith—that America is the greatest nation on the face of the earth—began to quake...

...Within the Keynesian framework, Robinson writes, It was sufficiently obvious that if continuous near-full employment was maintained without any change in traditional institutions and attitudes in industrial relations, there would be an irresistable pressure to inflation...

...then there is the impact of what Joan Robinson calls The Second Crisis of Economic Theory...

...The building trades' attempt to keep pace with inflation—and it must always be remembered that the high hourly rates in this sector are necessary because of the seasonal character of the work and the chronic unemployment that results—are seen as an act of hostility toward prospective new homeowners...

...Are the centrifugal tendencies in Ameri can politics so great that there is no coherent majority coalition possible and that we will MICHAEL HARRINGTON therefore zig and zag into the unforeseeable future...

...But now that we have experienced stagnation, and periods of decline in real buying power (the AFL– CIO estimates that the effective demand of American workers went down by 3 percent in 1973), the distribution issue is posed again...

...But how, on that basis, explain the ex traordinarily erratic patterns of recent times...

...Add to this some five years of spectacular economic mismanagement carried out by an Administration whose constant prophecies of imminent great success became a horrible joke, like the light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam that was always being glimpsed during the Johnson years...

...At the least, they were not sure...

...the bottom 20 percent have two-tenths of 1 percent...

...They did not know what to believe any longer...

...Now both are in doubt and the question arises, by what values does one live...

...But it is also limited...

...For in the '40s, the war was genuinely popular...

...More often than not they did so out of disillusioned militancy rather than dovishness—if we didn't have the guts to nuke Hanoi or Peking, we had no business letting American soldiers die for Saigon...

...In the Robinson analysis, that is a structural tendency of Keynesian economics...

...According to that model, most elections confirm, or only temporarily deviate from, a basic alignment that lasts for a long period of time (the Republicans from the 1890s to the 1930s...

...The reasons for this view are clear enough...

...the truckers made their claims...

...The very ethical fiber of the country seemed rent and torn...

...Now it is clear that the income from property is not the reward of waiting but the reward of employing a good stockbroker...

...Here the working class did not defect, as it did in France and Italy, for there was not a nobility, or even a Catholic bourgeoisie of any consequence, on whose behalf the prelates could betray, and repell, the faithful...

...Implicit in that change is the admission: I was gulled and tricked by a scoundrel who may be, in his own immortal words, a crook as well...

...Indeed, this trend sets in motion a process that, with acknowledgment to Daniel Bell, might be called "situs conflict...

...Here there was a society in which, as Tocqueville understood long ago, religion was an important means of group identity...

...But it did not pass away, especially in America...

...The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the most progressive unions in the country, has rightly tried to deal with this problem by linking wage demands to increasing the quality of public service...

...Mrs...

...Policemen in New York fight to get more than firemen...

...During the height of the energy crisis in the winter of 1974, for instance, the workers MICHAEL HARRINGTON and the owners of the airlines industry felt a common stake in getting fuel for their department of the economy...

...An optimistic and confident nation whose Great Seal proclaims it a New Order of the Ages seems to have lost its nerve...

...but that wage in creases and social spending will augment demand before profits have accomplished their contribution to thecommon good...

...Today, they are also to be found in a new middle class (with a good number of the Irish in the vanguard) and in newly conscious "ethnic" groups (Italians, Poles, other South and East Europeans...

...As Shanker said during his election campaign for the union's presidency, "I favor building the AFT on teacher issues—issues which will appeal to all teachers regardless of their A COLLECTIVE SADNESS political views—and avoiding politically divisive issues" (emphasis in original...

...People can't believe in either their God or their country the way they used to...

...Their experience is unique in that the religious dimensions of the cultural crisis are dramatically present in their case...

...Archie Bunker, who sings of the days when there was no welfare state, men were men and Glenn Miller played, is their cousin even though that thought would startle his anti-Catholic prejudices...

...women's liberation and gay liberation challenged the holiest of verities about family structure and sexuality...

...She was right...

...Perhaps this is going to create a crisis in the so-called free-enterprise economy...

...A Supreme Court appointed by a pietistic Protestant president effectively legalized abortion on demand...

...but they are also typical in that their disenchantment is to be found, in other forms, throughout the working class and sectors of the middle class...

...Those of us who have always thought of Nixon as a devious, dishonest man sometimes forget the shattering psychological consequences when more than half of the people who voted for him in 1972 want to turn him out of the White House...

...Now we know, of course, that Joan Robinsons' prediction was accurate...

...The conservatives are preparing to fight for the status quo, of course...

...Rather it will add a political element to the distribution of bargaining power...

...Clearly, my analysis motivates me to action, not despair, to fighting for a "centripedal" strategy that will bring into being that new coalition...

...We are, Joe Lewis said in one of the popular aphorisms of the time, on God's side...

...The problem is that, for a complex of reasons which cannot be analyzed here, the most powerful drive within the labor movement is still that of each group of work 490 ers trying their best to fend for themselves in an impossible situation...

...There was a kind of siege comraderie throughout the society...

...The Kennedy-Johnson years witnessed the longest, uninterrupted peacetime boom in American history...

...If the politics of disintegration do indeed prevail, then the prospects is for an increase in the collective sadness of American life...

...Clearly, I do not take these things as inevitable...

...Two generations ago, American Catholics were almost all workers and they are still a major element in the labor movement...

...In one, the various elements with a stake in social change —the unions, the college-educated constituency, the minorities and so on—unite in spite of their differences...

...Moreover, there is no clearly defined enemy as there was in the Great Depression...

...And then it seemed that the crisis, which had so perversely delayed its arrival for more than a century, erupted into a decade...

...Right now, however, the dominant mood is one of scrambling to make the best of a bad lot...

...Suddenly masses of rank-and-file Americans, the Catholics most obviously, saw the religious foundations of their personal code begin to crumble...

...But that still meant admitting that the United States had lost a war...

...I do not single him out on this count simply because of my disagreements with him on other issues...

...this kind of thinking will, I suspect, become frequent in the coming period...

...people just don't know what to believe in at all...

...The religious crisis is characteristic of the sloppiness of history...

...Public employee wage demands seem to be raised, not against the "boss," but against the taxpayers, i.e., in considerable measure against other workers...

...the trains and buses were jammed to bursting with millions of men and women who faced constant uncertainty and the possibility of youthful death: yet the spirit was good...

...Then along came a bewildering combination of recession-inflation...

...Then there are more traditional, but now exacerbated, struggles for money that set workers against workers...

...In each case, there was a vertical integration of management and the employees in a de facto struggle with the other blocs of management and employees...

...Now, suddenly, they don't seem to be so at all...

...Indeed, one explanation of why American workers in recent years have been so moderate in their wage demands is that they have bought the argument that big increases will only generate higher prices, which will take their new buying power back from them before they have had the chance to use it...

...She was comparing this shock to the First Crisis, the Great Depression of the 1930s...

...But I suspect that the factors I have defined here as elements of a particularly Catholic sadness are to be found, in one way or another, among millions of other religionists in this society...

...Nixon lifted the controls, which had come under increasing attack from both labor and business...

...Let us hope that will change as the full import of the new situation becomes apparent to the union leaders and members...

...In an analysis that makes no pretense at being complete, I want to treat three other (but related) aspects of the Curren malaise...

...In her opinion it was a fundamental event comparable to the Depression, one that challenged the basic assumptions of the society...

...So if people were puzzled in the presence of new cultural forces, they could always fall back on that most fundamental of American convictions: next year's living standard will be better than this year's...

...What is obviously required is an offensive by the labor movement aimed, not simply at bettering the position of this or that seg ment of the working people, but at changing the rules of the game so that there can be some kind of rational solution to the infla tionary challenge...

...Clearly something like that happened in 1968 when many in the Kennedy-McCarthy movement failed to rally to Humphrey and in 1972 when George Meany and his associates turned their back on McGovern...

...American Catholicism was democratic in practice and ultramontane in theory...

...After the elections of 1964 and 1972, the overwhelming majority of the American people who had named Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as their president were forced, almost against their will, to turn upon the man for whom they had voted...

...Yes, it is possible...

...It may have staved off a trend toward immiseration, as John Strachey and others have argued, and if that is the case, it is a real accomplishment...

...But it does not seem likely that it will be as successful as all that...

...In the political bargaining going on under the conditions Joan Robinson describes, where a person works becomes extremely important...

...These people, George Meany remarked, would have said that the Titanic stopped to take on ice...

...Everyone can see that his relative earnings depend on the bargaining power of the group that he belongs to...

...In the established model, voting habits—and therefore the party system— were normally consistent and fixed...

...Although I must add that the UAW's rejection of a protectionist policy for the auto industry at its convention last June is an encouraging example of the opposite, and to me infinitely preferable, policy...

...By far and large, the crisis of God and country took place in the '60s within a prospering economy...

...Forty years ago, the New Deal created a welfare state, which may, or may not, have been accompanied by a very modest redistribution of income...

...An antiwar movement that was absolutely right on the basic issue sometimes delighted in the most infantile contempt for symbols, like the flag, which other Americans took as holy...

...Thus the new political power, which the workers and other groups acquired during the '30s, has not been able to affect the relative shares in the economy...

...some fled to Canada, others deserted...

...Under Albert Shanker, its new president, the union is moving away from its earlier social democratic style toward a much narrower, situs-oriented approach that has so long characterized the most conservative forces in the labor movement...

...Within a mere eight years, the voters gave landslide mandates to the candidates of dif ferent parties—and within a few years of having made that choice, they turned by an overwhelming margin on the man they had picked...

...it privatizes social struggles and it makes people sad...

...And then Vietnam...

...And then, later in her essay, she notes that experience of inflation has destroyed the conventions governing the acceptance of existing distribution...

...First, there is a cultural crisis that represents the explosion of epochal contradictions within the daily life of just a few years...

...If everyone contributes equally to the fight against, or suffers equally from, inflation, that will perpetuate our intolerable division of wealth...

...Independents now constitute the second largest voting bloc, •behind the Democrats but ahead of the Republicans...

...Since then, practically everyone (including the Council of Economic Advisers in their Report this year) agrees, there has been no significant change in the distribution of wealth...

...we are back to a scramble for relative earnings based on bargaining power...

...Two themes abstracted from her intricate argument are particularly relevant to this sketch of America's collective sadness...

...I do not think it personal ethnocentrism if I take the crisis of American Catholicism as the point of departure for an impression of a culture crisis that affects the entire society...

...But finally, the most perplexing thing about this situation is that, if one accepts the present distribution of economic and political power as given (and therefore legitimate), then there is no solution to these problems...

...We will find ourselves in the unprecedented position of suffering a cultural crisis that shakes the confidence of millions in the values by which they have lived while at the same time confronting a new academic challenge, one that is perhaps more profound, and certainly more elusive, than that of the Great Depression...

...Priests and nuns left their vocations—and married and had children—and there was a catastrophic fall in new recruits to the religious life...

...The militancy in the public sector is a special case in point: for here workers have had to fight to make up for the generations of second-class economic citizenship that had been forced upon them...

...As long as there were relatively steady increments in the absolute standard of living, most people did not bother about the "abstraction" of fairer shares...

...It also creates the basis for a similar disintegration in our political life...

...Those old enough to remember World War II know how extraordinary the events of the '60s were...

...A11 of this has a saddening—and frustrating— effect for a number of reasons...

...And to make their misery abject, the nation of plenty had to wait in line at the gas pumps last winter and, though most of them are not aware of it, still face massive dislocations because of the outflow of an extra $60 billion from the industrial West to the oil-producing nations...

...And some of the causes of this mood are painfully apparent...