It's Not As Bad As You Think It Is
Lemann, Nicholas
It's Not As Bad As You think it Is Misguided handwriting about our society's decline distracts us from the real crises BY NICHOLAS LEMANN One of President Clinton's main challenges in his...
...Only now is the enormity of the social changes of 20 years ago sinking in among the American leadership-and these changes, after all, haven’t been completely reversed, but rather have drifted a little down from the high plateau...
...The proportion of children born out of wedlock has been holding steady since 1990...
...Finally, universalizing any problem makes it more difficult to fix...
...The surface feeling of American middle-class life has changed quite a lot over the last generation...
...If schools, generally, are the problem, then we have to throw up our hands, or think in terms of squishy, impossible missions like changing the entire ethos of the society...
...If you define the country’s big problem as being insufficient health care coverage, then the connection to government action is obvious...
...The whole society isn’t in crisis...
...We are at peace...
...grandchildren why the United States in the mid-1990s thought of itself in such a bleak way...
...What the policy-wonk community has fixed on as the one current trend most worth being alarmed about, rising income inequality- between 1977 and 1992, average family income for the poorest fifth of Americans decreased by 17 percent while it increased for the richest fifth by 28 percent, and for the richest hundredth by 91 percentis often written about, but almost never discussed by politicians in election campaigns in the way that social breakdown is...
...Metropolitanization, especially in the Sunbelt...
...Even if you take it as a given that Americans are going to pick something to hand-wring about, pervasive social decay is not the obvious choice...
...Saying that it is only permits the crisis that is going on not to be solved...
...Public schools are a good example...
...A stream of books about the fraying of the American social fabric has been published over the last few years...
...Household median income has begun to rise, and the poverty rate has begun to fall...
...When politicians use the easy, dramatic language of social crisis, it has a strange disabling effect on the government...
...The unemployment rate is relatively low...
...If a finite number of schools are the problem, then it’s possible to think of a solution...
...It isn’t that “public school” doesn’t work, it’s that some public school systems have been allowed to deteriorate dangerously...
...The reason is that cultural developments spread gradually from a few to the many: What dozens of young people in Haight-Ashbury were doing in 1967, millions of young people were doing (in watered-down form) in Omaha and Peoria 10 years later...
...The political system is stable...
...things far more precious to us-our children, our families, our values...
...The divorce rate peaked between 1979 and 1981 and has been declining modestly since...
...In fact, it has been a phenomenon floating free of reality, driven by no actual contemporary developments...
...doomsday views of the situation are an easy sell...
...They tend to be populated by people from surrounding small towns and rural areas who find themselves arrived in a much more permissive culture than they have been used to...
...A few possibilities come to mind: Delayed reaction...
...Our country is as triumphant as any has ever been...
...We are not in a depression or a recession...
...The perception of crisis is, in a sense, simply an acknowledgment of personal risk by the white middle class...
...Official social commentators didn’t catch this, because in the ’60s they had been focused on places like Haight-Ashbury and in the ’70s they were focused on the ’60s being over...
...It’s a problem partly of Ius own maluni In his 1995 State-of the Union‘ address, for example, delivered right on the heels of the big Republican sweep in the 1994 elections, Clinton said, “[Far] more than our material riches are threatened...
...All the attention given to the shrinkage of American cities obscures the steady, constant growth of metropolitan areas, which now account for more than threequarters of the American population...
...The world is a ghetto...
...The more central that government officials make social disarray appear to be, the less central government becomes as a problem-solving institution in the society...
...The biggest change, by far, is the replacement of the upwardly mobile male breadwinner and housewife as the dominant family type by the staying-afloat family of two working parents and a child-care provider...
...It cheapens the currency of political talk...
...Over the last 25 years, the prevalence of all these phenomena has risen, from a low base, in white America-much more than it has in black America...
...School completion rates are steady among whites and rising among blacks...
...It will be very difficult for us to explain to our NICHOLAS LEMANN is a national corespondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Compared to the run of American history, let alone world history, this is an unusually calm moment...
...17-year-olds d p g of AIDS, with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t read...
...The values that used to hold us together seem to be coming apart...
...America’s social and economic problems are heavily concentrated at the lower end of the society...
...He probably had been reading polls that told him such sentiments would strike a responsive chord, and even if he hadn’t, many other people were painting the same picture more luridly...
...None of the indicators in these areas is currently rising dramatically, and several are falling-most notably, crime rates...
...So whites are now much more aware of them, both as problems in the ghettos and as potential problems outside the ghettos...
...If you define the country’s big problem as “values,” it’s a way of signaling that the government is good and important (because it is alarmed) without making a commitment to government’s doing anything, except for small, symbolic gestures like promoting the V-chip...
...Another important change is the exponential wideningbeyond a fairly constructed, safe, wholesome band of programming material-of what’s available on television, in popular recordings, and in other cultural media...
...Everything seems different, and therefore disturbing...
...Newt Gingrich has a standard speech line that reads, “No civilization can survive with 12-year-olds having babies, with IS-year-olds killing each other, with...
...The biggest language guns are being hauled out, the deepest and most intimate connection to the public forged, with regard to a problem that government can’t do much about...
...The standard litany of our social problems is, roughly: crime, drugs, illegitimacy, deteriorating schools, divorce, welfare dependency, and poverty...
...In the South and Southwest, metropolitan areas are growing rapidly...
...It's Not As Bad As You think it Is Misguided handwriting about our society's decline distracts us from the real crises BY NICHOLAS LEMANN One of President Clinton's main challenges in his second term is going to be trying to move the United States away from a self-conception as a nation in crisis...
...This helps explain the popularity, in Sunbelt suburbia, of Pentecostal churches, and also of the Christian Coalition, which, because it is so good at turning out social-issue voters, has done more than any other single political force to put the perception of social breakdown on the national agenda...
...That was the speech in which he called for a New Covenant that would address America’s problems “above all, how can we repair the damaged bonds in our society...
...What can explain the popularity of the perception of a social crisis, then...
...Big changes by definition leave people feeling dislocated...
...All through the 1980s and up through the 1992 presidential election, the main national concern was with the economy, not the society...
...When there actually is a crisis, what will there be left to say that will rouse the nation, and not be discounted by a public that has been hearing inflated talk for years...
...You would think that if social concerns came to the fore during the past five years, it would be in response to alarming social developments over that time...
...Wild rhetorical overkill is bad in and of itself...
...We have no external enemies who pose a real threat...
...Social trends like crime, divorce, illegitimacy, dropout rates, and drug-taking, which we identify with the culture of the 1960s, all rose most steeply during the 1970s...
...But to understand why the feeling that our society is falling apart has taken hold is one thing...
...For most of the twentieth century, crime, marital instability, out-of-wedlock childbearing, drug use, and poor education have been very high in the self-contained world of the black poor, and much, much lower among whites...
...In saying this, Clinton was not imposing his own eccentric views on the rest of us...
...To pander to that feeling is another...
...How many 12-year-olds, really, are having babies...
...the current occupant of the best-seller list in this category, whose title says it all, is Robert Bork‘s Slouching Tmardr Gomowah...
Vol. 29 • March 1997 • No. 3
