No Time for Nostalgia
Schudson, Michael
AMERICANS HAVE not been constitutionally prone to pessimism. We're supposed to be pragmatic, ingenious, and inclined to think that hard work and a little luck will fix just about anything. And...
...A safety net of social provision is under attack...
...Let's face it, in many neighborhoods Starbucks is a community meeting center...
...If the advance of norms and laws of non-discrimination in American public life is not related to the quality of our democracy, what is...
...Again, it was a signal event in 1974 when Betty Ford acknowledged her breast cancer, thereby saving many lives as tens of thousands of women were prompted by her example to go for cancer screenings...
...But the two sides of open discourse are not ultimately separable...
...There are both right-wing and leftwing versions of this tale of woe...
...It dropped more than 5 percentage points between 1968 and 1972, but has been largely constant in the 50 percent to 55 percent range since then, with a sizeable jump to about 60 percent in 2004...
...If this is not related to the quality of our civic life, what is...
...By example and by persuasion, we can try to sustain the good of our new culture of disclosure while reducing what is rude, vulgar, and venomous in it...
...9 8 n DISSENT / Winter 2005 By 1973, with the War on Poverty, continuing economic growth, and substantial new government provision for the elderly, poverty was cut in half, to 11 percent...
...3. New Avenues and Locations of Political Action...
...Right-wing nostalgia was a factor in the 2004 election, a longing for an era when a few essential certainties could be taken for granted ("marriage is between a man and a woman...
...If people knew about alcoholic housewives in the 1950s, they did not speak about them out loud...
...Third, since 1960, associations have emerged that do not lead ordinary citizens to sustained community participation of the sort that fosters political action...
...A great many of the sexual abuses now coming to light took place decades ago, in the hallowed 1950s and early 1960s...
...There's plenty to cringe at on television or in the movies, especially when the children are watching...
...Whether you look at the "mailing list" organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons, where membership means no more than sending in a check and receiving the glossy magazine, or twelve-step, self-help therapy groups, these successful new organizations do little to build community or "social capital...
...Health care costs are out of control...
...Americans so employed are engaged in serving the public good not in their spare hours but in their everyday work lives...
...These are dangerous times, and it is no wonder that nostalgia is appealing...
...We have a more individualized and expressive leisure, but also a more individualized and expressive politics...
...Still, in the good old days, one could make public remarks about blacks, women, and homosexuals, and for that matter Jews and Catholics, that would make almost everyone cringe today...
...Likewise, women have entered political office in large numbers...
...In New Hampshire, a recent report of the state attorney general asserted that fifty priests in that diocese were credibly accused of abusing minors over a period dating back to the 1940s and that in most cases "the diocese took inadequate or no action" when abuses were reported...
...2. The Rights Revolution...
...Home ownership, fetishized as it is, is a popular goal still attainable for millions...
...No one wants to restore that model of public discourse nor, for all the faults of the news media, would today's journalism, notably more aggressive and probing than the press of the 1950s, allow it...
...Among the useful organizations Nader helped develop is the very effective Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, established in 1982...
...In each of these domains, the outreach of the constitutional order spread ideals of equality, due process, and rights...
...Second, some great and good national civic associations, such as the National PTA, have rapidly lost members since 1960...
...In schools and in universities, in families, in the professions, in private places of employment, and not least of all in political institutions themselves, including the political parties, the rights revolution brought federal power and national norms of equality to bear on local practices...
...Nonprofit employment now represents 9.5 percent of total employment and has grown at a sharply higher rate than either business employment or government employment...
...It moved up to over 60 percent in presidential elections from 1952 through 1968...
...First, voter turnout today is lower than it was in 1960, lower than in most liberal democracies...
...For the right, the cultural revolution of the sixties set off the downhill slide—sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, long hair, Vietnam, bra-burning, short skirts, spitting on returning veterans, permissive child rearing, Miranda warnings, and the coddling of criminals...
...We also have a society where traditional suspicions of government action have been renewed and reinforced, where the affluent get so much of what they want in life through the marketplace that they can withdraw their support for state solutions to public problems, where racial animosity and fear still divide us...
...Under presidents George H.W...
...Twenty-two percent of the population lived in poverty in 1960...
...The enormous expansion of federal law, especially laws banning discrimination against women and minorities, has opened up public transportation, workplaces, schools, and even private homes as locations for the expression of FAMILY POLITICS civic life...
...We are a more inclusive society...
...They also actively recruit a vast number of volunteers...
...MICHAEL SCHUDSON is professor of communication and adjunct professor of sociology at the University of California, San Diego...
...No wonder concerned citizens are also alarmed citizens...
...We need an effective war on terrorism, which is challenging enough, without having to extricate ourselves from a fake one...
...Even so, this does not amount to a crisis, either political or moral...
...The church and other authorities quietly set these matters aside...
...In the 1950s, people did not say the word "cancer" out loud, and doctors would often not even say it to their patients...
...Volunteering an occasional hour or even a regular hour or two on a weekly or monthly basis is something an increasing number of Americans have been doing in the past decades, including young people, in part because the growing army of nonprofit organizations asks for their help...
...They are right, of course, not to be smug in recounting the advances of the past half-century...
...The great champion of civil litigation as a political resource has been Ralph Nader...
...Nor does the litany of decline give a fair account of the major developments and changes in public affairs over the past half century...
...Poverty was reduced during the Clinton years and has climbed again under the second Bush...
...What is there to be smug about...
...But we have new resources, too...
...We are a society with a wider range of political tools for citizens who want to be involved and a wider range of points of access to political power...
...The civil rights movement of African Americans and the rights movements for many other minorities and for women have transformed American life in public institutions, private institutions, and families...
...Democracy was vital, voter registration drives were alive and well, mass demonstrations could be mounted again and again, students talked politics among themselves and argued with their parents vigorously enough to shatter family peace, there were hints of worker-student alliances and millenarian optimism in the Peace Corps, blacks and whites walked hand in hand, and ancient verities were questioned in the name of equality and in the hope of worlds yet to be born...
...Consider on the other side these signs of progress: 1. The Reduction of Poverty...
...The number of human service organizations has grown enormously in the past generation...
...in 2003 the figures were 80 percent and 85 percent...
...He is the author of The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life...
...So in 1985, when Robert Bellah and his colleagues in Habits of the Heart lamented the hyper-individualism of American society, and when Robert Putnam a decade later struck a similar note in Bowling Alone, the left, such as it had become, without Marx, without socialism, willing to countenance the market in its place but unable to think through what that place might be—this chastened, cautious, and exhausted left took solace in jeremiads that, between the lines, told us there wasn't much we could do...
...The courthouse, then, as well as the voting booth, became an avenue for political action...
...And yet, we are told in myriad ways that we have been sliding steadily toward disaster for decades...
...And then, somehow, it all shut down—the War on Poverty stalled in the distress of the Vietnam War, the expanding beneficence of government became a target of revitalized Republicans and frightened Democrats, civil rights shattered the New Deal coalition as the solid South of the Democrats became the nearly solid South of the Republicans...
...Car ownership, even more widely distributed and obviously a serious environmental hazard, affords millions a cherished liberty whose appeal must be acknowledged...
...A "due process" revolution, as historian Lawrence Friedman calls it, changed private institutions as well as public ones, spreading the norms of Fourteenth Amendment-based legal culture throughout society...
...Bush and Ronald Reagan, it crept up again to 14.8 percent when Bill Clinton came into office...
...For the left, the Golden Age came just a few years after the time the conservatives celebrate, when the country was the civil rights movement and anti-war movement writ large...
...Congress in 1960, fortyone by 1996...
...But these figures exaggerate the decline in voting because they compute turnout as the number of people who vote divided by the number of people of DISSENT / Winter 2005 n 97 FAMILY POLITICS voting age, thus including in the denominator felons and ex-felons in states where they are ineligible to vote, along with legal residents who are not citizens and thereby also ineligible to vote...
...Can the left acknowledge the legitimacy of the longing for a bedrock of values while insisting that it can be located in the faith in moral equality and moral striving that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech exemplify...
...Unlike many on the left, I do not believe consumerism is neces-, sarily degrading and therefore evidence of moral decline...
...Think of the issue that has electrified American churches over the past several years: sexual misconduct of the clergy, particularly sexual molestation of children by Catholic clergy...
...We are a more honest society...
...But concomitant with the decline in etiquette has been a rise in frankness, individually and institutionally...
...According to Independent Sector, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, employment in nonprofits rose from 6 million in 1977 to 12.5 million in 2001...
...The goal is to find a path back to the folkways that made America great—the self-sufficient family, the strong-jawed young man ready to take up arms in defense of the country, the firm conviction that God is on our side and that regular church attendance will secure God's blessing...
...Both of these populations have increased markedly in recent decades...
...The percentage of the population holding membership in churches, civic clubs, Parent-Teacher Associations, and many other organizations, at unprecedented levels in the 1950s, receded to the level of the early 1940s by the 1990s...
...It reached lows of 49 percent and 50 percent in the 1920s...
...Many teachers are demoralized as school funding favors high test scores rather than authentic learning...
...Meanwhile, George W. Bush pursues a reckless and destructive vendetta that masquerades as a war on terrorism...
...It was shocking for a president's wife—Betty Ford—to talk publicly about her own alcoholism, as she did in the late 1970s...
...Public entertainment and public discourse have grown more coarse, vulgar, and rude than in the 1950s...
...Let me cite just a few figures: in 1959, 21 percent of African Americans aged twenty-five or older were high school graduates compared to 46 percent of whites...
...Today, openly gay and lesbian politicians serve in Congress, state legislatures, and other offices...
...WHEN LEFT and liberal thinkers join in the longing for yesteryear, they are leaning on a rhetorical crutch that DISSENT / Winter 2005 • 99 FAMILY POLITICS does not strengthen progressive causes...
...We are a society where minorities and women have a greater influence in political life than ever before...
...But they don't...
...Somewhere back in the Leave It to Beaver days, we had it just about right and have witnessed nothing but moral degradation ever since...
...Even so, in 2003 only 12.4 percent of the population lived at or below the poverty line...
...I do not have a map of the way forward, but I know it does not start with a U-turn...
...One result has been a vast new set of opportunities for employment in the helping professions and in the nonprofit sector generally...
...People still discriminate against minorities and women, but the rights revolution yielded authentic victories, and the extent of the changes is astonishing...
...Add to this the privatizing tendency of television and other in-home entertainment that keeps people happily in their living rooms at night rather than at community meetings or visiting friends and neighbors, and you have to wonder where democratic participation will come from...
...This is also related to cutbacks in governmentprovided social services, so that the thousand points of light can keep flickering where once federally funded beams shone...
...Only leaders with cowboy hats and cowboy boots can set things right...
...Meanwhile younger people turned careerist, headed for business school, or just tuned out in front of their favorite cable channel, while those old enough to recall the sixties worried about getting tenure...
...Even with one hundred million more Americans on the planet in 2003 than in 1960, the total number of people living in poverty is lower than it was forty-three years ago...
...SOME THINGS must be conceded...
...There were four blacks in the U.S...
...People traded in citizenship and service for comfort and consumerism...
...If you add in state legislators, mayors, and other elected city or county officials, there has been an increase from 103 blacks in public office in 1964 to 9,040 in 2004...
...This included the poor and disorganized, who, thanks to the rise of public-interest law firms and the aggressiveness of trial lawyers, could sometimes get their day in court, pursuing government or corporate culpability on everything from environmental issues, smoking, and health to suits against Swiss banks and German manufacturers that had profited from the Holocaust...
...4. A More Frank and Open Public Discourse...
...the best days lay behind us...
...Poverty persists and a larger percentage of the poor are children...
Vol. 52 • January 2005 • No. 1
