Decades, Part 2

The Eighties 

John Lennon was shot in 1980, which might be a convenient dividing point for the beginning of the next decade.  A personal turning point for me was the night of the Carter/Reagan debate and the day after.  That evening, my wife and I saw Carter embarrass Reagan.  The President wasn’t as glib as his challenger, but his understanding of the complexity of the problems we faced were highlighted by the simplistic worldview with which Ronald Reagan saw or, at least, portrayed the world.   We both felt a bit sorry for Reagan.  How odd, then, to find out in the newspapers and on TV the next day that most people thought that Reagan had won the debate rather handily.  

For its on-going impact on the future of U.S. policy making, our decision to elect Ronald Reagan as President is the clear beginning of the Eighties.  And here, finally, is the key thesis of this brief historical review: 

The Eighties began in November of 1980, and they haven’t ended!

As I write this, we are in the middle of the 35th  year of the Eighties.  I had real hope that the Eighties had ended when we elected the first black man as President.  He promised to be a transformative leader.  But he has not delivered on that promise.  While I am happier with Obama as President than the alternatives, he has shown himself to be a complete creature of the Eighties.  I believe the general attitude that makes up this horrible decade was not pushed aside.  For now, the Eighties continue on.
   
It is still a minority position to criticize Ronald Reagan.  A few years ago, the television viewing public selected Reagan as “The Greatest American,” over Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  (Other top ten nominees were Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey, underlining the need to not take these results too seriously.)  Reagan is given credit (inappropriately) for “ending the Cold War.”  He supposedly “revolutionized” our view of the role of government in our lives.  If he is the cardinal figure of the Eighties, how bad could they be?
   
But Reagan, his entourage and his disciples have left the country with an intellectual legacy that is highly problematic.  As a result, we have raised a generation of Americans who think that life is perfectible and we don’t have to make any tough choices, that all problems start and end with the actions of individuals, that the measure of our country’s success is how much money is left in each individual’s pocket, that our complex problems don’t require serious choices, but can be fixed with simple-minded solutions. 

Their absurd and disingenuous promises to balance the budget, lower taxes and triple defense spending pandered to the desire of citizens to “have it all.”  Their over-reliance on the marketplace as the solely acceptable mechanism for the distribution of goods and services fostered an unseemly measure of selfishness and greed.  Their decrying government as “the problem,” never “the solution,” defined all social ills as arising from individual behavior and subject only to individual corrections.  If the world was a dangerous place, it only needed to be threatened into submission, and peace would simply follow.

The “ambient” ideology of the Eighties

Ronald Reagan’s legacy is the “ambient” ideology of the Eighties, a legacy which remains largely unquestioned in policy debate today.  That ideology is based upon:

    1.  An extreme individualism
    2.  Uncontrolled selfishness or greed
    3.  Unquestioned glorification of the private sector
    4.  Demonization of collective action
    5.  Unquestioned faith in the perfectability of human endeavors
    6.  Simple-mindedness in proposed solutions
    7.  Disingenuousness in policy proposals

In the last 35 years of the Eighties, this ideology has become, in Daniel Quinn’s language, “ambient”; that is, it has been stated so often and by so many, that it is very difficult to notice its pervasiveness.  Poverty will be eliminated by poor individuals working harder to get jobs.  The economy will flourish only if we all pursue our own self-interests.  “Greed is good,” says the slick-haired, expensively tailored corporate raider, Gordon Gecco, in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. 

Our image of a hero is someone who “survives” made-up contests, set in a primordial locale, through deceit and dirty-dealing.   All problems have complete solutions, and no choices are difficult, as long as we maintain our faith in God, country and the marketplace.  You want to lower the federal deficits?  Cut taxes for wealthy shareholders.  You want to stimulate employment?  Cut taxes for corporations.  You want to clean up the environment?  Cut taxes for corporate polluters.

But isn’t this exactly what I was looking for in my youth?  Isn’t this a “good guy/bad guy” world that the Eighties is defining?  To a sad extent, that is true.  Sad, because it is a worldview that shares its lack of complexity with the simple, half-hour situation comedies and black and white horse operas that made such entertaining television in the Fifties.  But it is wholly uneducated by the lessons that we should have learned in the Sixties and the Seventies, that all of our big social problems are complex, that they are going to require shared sacrifice to address, that progress is achievable but slow, that, since these challenges are “group level” problems, we are all going to have to work together, as a community, to make that progress, and to make things better.  And that government is the legitimate agent of the community in addressing those problems.

One of the subtle and most pernicious messages of the Eighties is that “Doing Good” is somehow misguided.  If Gecco is right and “Greed is Good,” because it drives the engine of commerce, then altruism is suspect.  The dominant ideology of the Eighties teaches that we can care for our families, and maybe for our neighbors, but that caring for “the other” is just misplaced psychological need.  And when called upon to help, we rely upon voluntarism.  Calling upon the community to meet these “group level” challenges, through its agent, government, is very passé, so Sixties. 

One of the most pernicious consequences of Eighties thinking is how we react to those for whom the system has not worked.  If we are all running a race on an un-biased race course, to use the cliche, then whomever wins deserves to win.  The dangerous corollary, which we see expressed so often today, is that those who didn’t win are not deserving. 

Giving up or embarrassed silence

Ask a child of the Eighties why they want to get a graduate degree in public health or social work or education.  They will hem and haw, look down at their shoes, stumble through a half-hearted defense of “career advancement.” 

Don’t you want to do something Good for other people, you might ask.  Well, yes, they will say, but it is too hokey to put it that way.  Wanting to integrate into your professional life the doing of Good for others is now a source of embarrassment.  Welcome to the Eighties!

For us children of the Sixties, the seemingly endless Eighties make an almost convincing case for giving up.  For caring children of the Eighties with the moral imagination to see beyond the ambient ideology, the only worldview they have known embarrasses them into silence. 

One of the theses of these blogs is that there is a rich and powerful intellectual foundation for caring for “the Other,” for pursuing “the Public Good.”  Rather than give up or shrink in mortification, we should embrace these ideas and recognize the nobility of the calling to which we are responding.  Doing Good is a good thing to do, and I intend these postings to make clear why that has always been and why it continues to be true.  Rather than moving to the back of the bus, those of us who wish to be champions of moral priorities must demand that our leaders make the choices necessary to address the community’s needs.

But, I will argue, the public policy making institutions of our country have pulled back from the willingness to make moral choices, and that the consequences of that are severe and pervasive.

Rejecting the pervasive ideology that says Doing Good should be left only to individual behavior, to “a thousand points of light,” to enlightened self-interest as expressed in the marketplace, is a struggle to many of us.  But it is a struggle worth facing.  If there is an intellectual foundation for not giving up, for not being embarrassed, then finding it will empower that urge so many of us feel, the urge to care for the other.  The urge to choose the public good.
   
But this won’t happen without leadership.  The task of transformative leaders is to pull us out of the Eighties, and to establish a progressive center of policy debate that is respectful of community and governmental action.

Do you think that is do-able?  Is leadership powerful enough to get us to that point?  We will talk about that in the next posting.