A Middle-Aged Decade

If the 1960s was a decade i which new forces were unleashed in American politics and society, the 1970s was one in which those forces were regularized and institutionalized. Perhaps the 1980s will be a decade in which some of those forces will be tempered and reconsidered.

The 1960s began with the violent death of a president and ended with the near-terminal illness of an entire political system. Owing to the coming of age of the "baby boom" of the postwar, era, it would have been a turbulent decade at best--young persons have boundless energy and immoderate passions, and thus are capable of extraordinary feats of both creativity and destructiveness. Their sheer numbers alone would have guaranteed that we would have had unusual fashions in music and art, abnormally high crime rates, and new social and religious movements. The war in Vietnam and race relations provided a special focus for many of those energies and imbued more of them with a political cast than might otherwise have been the case.

Not since the early decades of this century had there been such sweeping and lasting changes in the social order as in the 1960s. The 1930s was by comparison a period of merely institutional change--political power was to a degree redistributed, new public policies were adopted, but the essential value system was left intact. Crime rates in the 1930s, after a brief rise, soon levelled off, conventional moral standards were reasserted, and the traditional virtues of work and family remained strong.

The 1960s' lasting impact was on what many people, especially better-off people, believed. "Middle-class morality" had been assaulted many times before in our history, but rarely with such ferocity or along so broad a front. The virtues of individuality, of self-liberation, of "authenticity" in human relations were celebrated; the claims of institutions, of authority, of legal and moral codes were disputed or simply ignored.

Everyone has remarked on how rapidly calm returned to political and academic life by the early 1970s, after the war had ended and a president resigned. But the calm was, in sense, misleading, a surface tranquillity indicating spent passions but not altered felling. There was no reversal in the low public confidence in institutions; indeed, many suffered further losses in legitimacy. Behavior become more conventional but beliefs remained unconventional.

The cultural revolution begun by affluent youth was carried forward by ordinary youth Today, the placards and protests are less evident in the streets, but no matter-- the streets themselves have changed. An intellectually subtle celebration of authenticity, group solidarity, and political direct action has left in its wake (perhaps prepared the way for) a kind of mindless incivility, a pervasive ruthlessness noted by Joan Didion when she observed "the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which nonexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a 'right.' Kill, maim, rape--the reason is always the same: somebody is 'hassling' me.

During the 1970s, political elites converted the rage of the 1960s into settled convictions and organizational forms. Two convictions were of special importance: the United States shall abandon an interventionist role in world affairs and retard the rate of domestic economic growth. Military power should be renounced and industrial expansion denounced. It is not hard to sympathize with such concerns: ravaged villages in Vietnam and foul air over Los Angeles are not pretty sights or monuments to moral progress.

But lessons were too easily learned. Politics is as complex as society itself and we are now beginning to discover in the streets of Teheran and the closed factories in Youngstown, that peace is not an absolute value and that managing an economy is more difficult than we supposed. I am not arguing for the opposite of these policies: "send in the Marines" is as simplistic a principle as "no more Vietnams." But at a minimum, the 1980s should be a time when we re-evaluate the lessons of Vietnam and learn to distinguish the errors we made there from the general necessity that America participate in assuring some measure of international order. If we learned in the 1960s that having military force is no substitute for having an intelligent foreign policy, then perhaps in the 1980s we will have to accept the fact that a foreign policy without the willingness to use force in its support is no policy at all.

So also with economic growth: we must not react to stagnation by restocking Lake Erie with dead fish and industrial wastes. But neither can we continue to assume that economic growth can be purchased by inflating the currency, incurring federal deficits, and taxing personal initiative. Though most of us in universities do not like to think about economic growth--we profess our disdain for "materialistic" and "philistine" matters--we must bear in mind how dependent our social order and political system are on maintaining economic abundance. There is little prospect of continued improvement in race relations, the alleviation of poverty, the provision of public services, or the maintenance of a tolerant and accomodating political process if the rate of economic growth remains flat for a prolonged period of time.

Human affairs are complicated. I can imagine young readers turning away in weary disgust from such will be--ought to be--a "middle-aged" decade, one not driven by the immediate needs of youth, nor preoccupied with slogans, nor dazzled by the claims of self. The population, we know, will get older in the next ten years, and that will bring its own challenges. But if middle-aged folk lack the impulse for change and criticism, they may partially compensate for this defect by talents for making things work. And we live in a system that desperately needs to learn how to work again.

James Q. Wilson is Shattuck Professor of Government.