Fighting Old Fights

British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is probably best remembered in the United States for coining the phrase, “A week is a long time in politics.” What do you think he would have said about a generation? Fewer than thirty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration’s effort to foster détente with the Soviet Union, but it seems almost like forever. So many of the hopes, fears, and verities that dominated the outlook of intelligent, even wise people then turned out to have been meaningless, irrelevant, or false.

Twenty-five to thirty years ago the world as a whole and the United States in particular seemed in grave danger politically, economically, and socially. A nuclear war that could end civilization and perhaps human life was a real possibility. Even if, through good luck and extraordinary effort on the part of diplomatic experts, governments could put a lid on a dangerous arms race, the future looked bleak. Many thoughtful people found the globe a crowded and dangerous, dirty place, running out of energy, food, clean air, and water. At home in the United States, people seemed angrier, more frustrated, and pessimistic than they had been in years. Public opinion polls indicated that pluralities of Americans believed that the future would be worse than the past and that the next generation would do worse (whatever that meant) than their parents. The American war in Vietnam, the duplicity of the Nixon administration in foreign affairs, and its outright illegality in Watergate were supposed to have seriously, maybe even permanently, eroded people’s trust in public institutions.

The 1980s saw a revival of expressions of public patriotism, but critical observers of the Reagan years remained unconvinced. Indeed, many of the manifestations of a newly assertive American nationalism appeared to be evidence of how fragile was the ordinary American’s genuine confidence in traditional sources of public authority. The grand, belated welcome home parades for Vietnam veterans in cities and towns across the country, the huge American flags waved at college football stadiums every fall weekend, the deafening, triumphant cheers of “U.S.A., U.S.A.” at the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles, the popularity of the Rambo movies, and President Ronald Reagan’s relentless invocations of a monochromatic and totally invented American past convinced many skeptics that social and political conditions in the United States were just about as bad as the gloomiest of them had imagined in the previous decades. These expressions of the rawest emotions indicated that millions of Americans had no real hope for the future and little confidence in the present. They barely masked their trembling anxieties in adolescent bravado.

Then the Cold War ended, European communism collapsed, and the Soviet Union disappeared. Total nuclear war between the superpowers no longer seemed like a real danger. U.S. military spending, which once threatened to overwhelm the public finances, remained flat from 1985 until 1997. The work of a phalanx of authors who had described the United States as a society in decline, losing influence in international politics and unable to order its affairs at home, was outmoded and wrong barely a decade after it was written.

The prolonged expansion of the American economy after 1990 suggested that the optimists of the 1970s got the story right. People who wrote about the bounty of a post-industrial order had been lucky enough to have seen the future more clearly than had the pessimists who explained that a deindustrialized America would inevitably be poorer in the twenty-first century than it was in the middle of the twentieth century. Moreover, ordinary people who did not write and rarely read books, also seemed more confident in themselves, their institutions, and their future. In the mid-1990s, pluralities polled now affirmed that...