Saturday, June 09, 2018

Blame It On The Bossa Nova

With society evidently in decline, there is a growing cottage industry of folks doing a historical look and from that trying to discern the cause of that decline.

On the liberal side of things, the year 1980 has become focal, witness this recent piece by Paul Krugman.  The idea, in a nutshell, is that the election of Ronald Reagan ushered in the era of "Supply Side Economics," which largely proved to be a sham.  The tax cuts, deregulation, and hostility to organized labor didn't so much make the economy grow, as its adherents would have you believe, but rather created a boon for those already at the upper end of the income distribution, by shifting the return in income generation from labor to capital.  The rest, as you say, is an all too familiar history, featuring wage stagnation for families near the median in the household income distribution, and a variety of social ills that resulted once economic prospects for them appeared grim.  To a certain extent I have bought into this narrative, for example this commentary as rhyme entitled Trickle Down.  Yet I think there are issues with this story that focusing on 1980 tends to mask.  Some of this post is intended to bring those issues out into the open.

A different narrative has emerged from some conservative commentators and/or liberals who are critical of upscale voters and how insular they appear to be.   An example of the latter is this piece by Richard Reeves, Stop Pretending You're Not Rich.  He takes on the little tricks by which those who already are doing well preserve their advantage or better it and then pass on those advantages to their children.  A particularly pernicious way this happens, according to Reeves, is via zoning restrictions in housing that in not so many words are aimed at keeping the riffraff out, consequently denying these people opportunities that really should be open to them.  Many refer to this sort of behavior as gaming the system. The well to do are usually quite expert at such gaming.  They know how to make the system work for themselves.  Yet others complain (not just the riffraff but many people of more modest means) that the system is broken.   I wrote about this some years ago in a piece called Gaming The System Versus Design It, where I argued that even very accomplished people don't  know what a well designed system looks like. Then they tend to make an intellectual error and assert that the status quo is quite okay - because they do well by it.  So Reeves piece resonated with me.

David Brooks takes a somewhat different tack on the matter in this piece, The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite, though he comes to a similar conclusion as Reeves.  Brooks contrasts the current system, which he describes as a meritocracy, with what came before, where people of privilege - White, male, Protestants from families of means - ruled the roost.  Meritocracy is fairer and therefore a better system, according to Brooks, except for one thing.  In the old system, the people of privilege did learn a kind of social responsibility, a variant of noblesse oblige, which perhaps survives to this day in organizations like Rotary. The meritocracy seems deficient on educating people on social responsibility.  Thus, the gaming of the system is undisciplined by consideration of the consequences on others.  Brooks wants a meritocracy where the highly educated behave in a socially responsible way.

This point also resonated with me as I recently wrote a post, Sensitivity and Social Responsibility - Can They Be Taught?  I should note here that in college (and in K-12 as well) we do teach the students to game the system, though perhaps inadvertently.  The most obvious way where this shows up is in the rampant credentialism, which invariably gets the hard charging student to juggle more balls than is intellectually nourishing, for the sake of padding the resume.  The kids learn to care a great deal about their GPA and in far too many students that I see in the course I teach this overwhelms curiosity and intrinsic interest in the subject.  Thus, the students get a sense that adults are fundamentally instrumental about achieving ends.  It is this mindset which supports the gaming behavior, with no holds barred.

There is something of a puzzle here.  On the one hand, Krugman and his ilk, who focus on 1980 as the beginning of the decline, want to blame conservative Republicans and their anti-government bias.  Brooks and Reeves, in contrast, want to blame educated elites, who tend to be liberal Democrats.  It is their hypocrisy which is to blame.  Given the politics behind these competing narratives, one would think they are opposed to each other.  Yet, as I've said above, each of these stories rings true to me to some extent.  How can that be?  Is it possible they are actually the same story, but being told from different vantages?  I wanted to take on these questions below.

Sometimes in such circumstances I consider my own life events and try to view the circumstances personally.  Having done that I then see if I can generalize from my experience. Indeed, 1980 was a very important year in my life, as that fall I started working at Illinois as an Assistant Professor.  Actually, I was ABD at the time I was hired, but in my contract I got all the perqs of a new Assistant Professor - a course buy out in the fall, summer support the following summer, which was not conditional on finishing my dissertation, though I did get my PhD the following spring.  Conceivably, I could have stayed at Northwestern for another year and gone on the market with the degree already in hand. I chose not to do that.  There were many reasons.  The ones I want to focus on here were quite materialistic.  I was tired of living like a graduate student, in my dingy apartment with crappy furniture, particularly my bed with a way too soft mattress which was giving me lower back pain.  I wanted to make a decent living and have reasonably good things.  I never considered myself a yuppie.  But for that moment I shared with yuppies the view that quality of life is found in material things.

So I started to ask myself whether that yuppie perspective was itself a consequence of being tired about what had come before.  I'll get to that in a second.  First, I want to note some of the social changes I observed going from being an undergraduate at Cornell to a graduate student at Northwestern.  There are many possible explanations for these changes: college town versus (sub)urban university, students mainly from the Northeast versus students mainly from the Midwest, Ivy League versus an aspirant to be a peer institution, the various majors I saw as an undergraduate student (math, philosophy, poli sci) versus the econ majors I saw as a TA, and then the changing time in which we lived.  My definite impression, clearly not a scientific study but something I hold to quite strongly, is that at Cornell the ethos was somewhat anti-materialistic and heavily influenced by the counterculture.  The undergrads I had in my Econ classes at NU, in contrast, seemed far more materialistic - yuppies in the making, if you will.

Now let's get to why the yuppies turned inward.  The antecedents that tired people out were the Vietnam War and then Watergate, but I view them as one bigger thing or two jumbled together.  Had there been no Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the Democrats would have held onto the White House in 1968 and our history would have been entirely different. It seems to me that Krugman, Reeves, and Brooks should all consider the consequence of the Vietnam War and ask if it really is a better "first cause" to explain America's subsequent decline.

Again I'm going to personalize this and use 1968 as another focal time.  I became a teenager in January of that year and then started high school that fall, which was also the time of the big NYC Teachers Strike that closed the schools for a couple of months. The thing is, initially I went to the wrong high school, Bayside High, because my mother thought that would be better for me.  But it was a disaster and I soon transferred to the local high school, Cardozo.  The experience marked a change in my relationship with my mother.  I became aggrieved and untrusting of her, insofar as her making decisions on my behalf.  I concluded that if an authority is to make choices for us, the authority must justify the choice and demonstrate it is good and proper.

Indeed, this was my main lesson about the Vietnam War.  The government made extremely poor choices, often doing so under false pretenses.  From that, quagmire followed.  The war divided us - the hard hats versus the hippies, in a kind of division that has morphed some but still survives to this day. The show that best captured this divide was All in the Family.  Archie Bunker became America's favorite bigot.  He worked the loading dock and was a Nixon supporter. The Meathead, his son-in-law, had the long hair that hippies wore and was much more liberal in his views.

I can't say how much of what we associated with hippies - dope, love, and rock music in addition to the long hair - would have happened anyway as a matter of course.  But peace became a crucial part of the mix and because it was so long in coming it hardened the view that authority couldn't be trusted.

This sense that authority couldn't be trusted and that the country was dividing us wore people out.  Who could possibly want to be concerned with social responsibility.  It didn't get us anywhere, or so it seemed.  After Watergate concluded, many people must have felt, couldn't we just get back to normal?

I don't have an adult sense of what normal was like.  The TV shows I watched as a kid, Leave It to Beaver and Gilligan's Island I will offer up as emblems of a lot of other programming, presented a Caspar Milquetoast alternative reality, but I wonder if many thought the world largely safe in the way those shows presented it.  Were there strong divisions between liberals and conservatives in the late 1950s and early 1960s or was a unified world view far more common then?  I don't know, but if so we lost that as a consequence of Vietnam and never really got it back.

Sometimes this division existed within families.  Would hippies as teens and young adults stay as hippies for life?  Or might some of them abandon it all and then become yuppies?  The show Family Ties captured this tension with a light touch.  My sense of things is that there are many who were hippie types in the early to mid 1970s who became conservative when Reagan was President and more conservative as they grew older.

Now let me make two more conjectures.  One is that the Vietnam War crowded out the good elements of LBJ's Great Society, particularly with regard to civil rights.  If achieving racial equality, legally and as a practical matter as well, had been the only issue to occupy the national attention because there wasn't a Vietnam War, I believe we could have made a lot more progress.  To be sure, George Wallace was a candidate for President in 1968 and there clearly were forces of reaction that wanted to block progress on civil rights.  But a much more concerted effort for progress would have been made, and if Democrats had retained the White House in 1968, there wouldn't have been a Southern strategy so evident in changing the political realignment.  Our politics might then have become more earnest and far less cynical.

The other conjecture is based by juxtaposing the film Easy Rider with the current furor about the NFL banning players taking a knee during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, which one might use to remind ourselves that some people react very strongly to the symbolic behavior of others when they deem it disrespectful and inappropriate.  Many people held hippies in contempt, as a threat to their own way of life.  That contempt created a strong negative reaction that served as enabler of the hard right development in our politics.  Without the Vietnam War, even had their still been hippies, I believe they'd have been seen as a curiosity, perhaps, but not a real threat.  Drugs did scare people, certainly. But I believe it would have been considered far more benign, had there been no Vietnam War.

So I'd argue for the Vietnam War to be blamed as the cause in the country's path to decline  You can see the selfishness of the educated elite as a consequence.  You can see that anti-tax mood of Republicans from Reagan on also as a consequence.

* * * * *

Let me wrap up.  There is always a difficulty in trying to identify a first cause and use that to absorb the blame, when we know that history didn't start with that.  A case may be made for the JFK assassination being primary.  If JFK had remained as President, with his prior faux pas at the Bay of Pigs, he may have learned from his mistake and we might have then avoided a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.  LBJ didn't have that prior experience.  So he stepped in it, the biggest pile of poo ever.

And, because I like to end on a light note, perhaps we should consider an antecedent to the JFK assassination.  This gets me to the title of my post.  The song performed by Eydie Gormé came out earlier in 1963. It has the word blame in the title so was useful for my purposes. And it serves as a reminder that temporal precedence is not sufficient for causality.   In any event, surely we've made many mistakes along the way.  Focus on a first cause only as where we should concentrate our blame doesn't get us to ask why we didn't rebound better but instead descended into the abyss.  That sounds like a topic for another post.

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