THE
AGE OF INSECURITY
It’s
easy to talk a great deal of rot about when you start generalizing
about generations. Witness the recent mania regarding Tom Brokaw’s
beloved “Greatest Generation.” Yes, those individuals
who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II were
certainly courageous in guiding America through the two worst
crises it ever faced. But does that really make them any more
or less greater than, say, the generations that fought the Civil
War, or the Revolution, or who pushed the American frontier through
to the Pacific?
Just
what are we talking about when we use the word “generation,”
anyway? I’m sure that those older Americans who were around
in the 1930s and ’40s thought that they had something
to do with saving the country, too. For that matter, it used to
be that a generation meant thirty years, but with the pace of
change today, a generation—like a dollar—just ain’t
what it used to be.
The
famous “baby boomer” generation, for instance, refers
to little more than a demographic anomaly, a period of exceptionally
high birthrates that occurred from 1946-1964. To search for any
greater, common denominator that those dates is to venture into
some tricky waters. How much, for instance, does an individual
who graduated from college in 1967, really have in common with
one who graduated in 1985? Nearly all of their popular culture
reference points and tastes are different, which in modern America
constitutes an unbridgeable gulf. This type of generational confusion
can have all sorts of unintended consequences, as when many on
the right managed to convince themselves, for instance, that the
Clintons were feckless, amoral hippies. The rest of us tended
to recognize them as what they were, that much more common boomer
archetype known as the yuppie.
Yuppies,
hippies—can there any defining characteristic to
a “generation” that produced such disparate stereotypes?
Well, maybe there is: insecurity.
In
a recent article, New York Times business analyst Louis
Uchitelle examined the highly conflicted attitude many Americans
seem to have about how they live now, and what their future will
be.
“…can
it be that living standards are actually slipping in America?
No economist, demographer or historian would make that case,”
Uchitelle points out. “Living standards, after all, almost
never go backward, at least not in a material sense. Indeed, the
economy today is growing, consumer spending is plentiful, and
new technologies…make life better than ever, as they do
in every generation.”
Yet
Uchitelle also points out a central paradox of our time—and
generation. While nearly 90 percent of Americans cited in a Gallup
poll expressed themselves as “satisfied with their standard
of living,” some “25 percent of the nation’s
families also worry all or most of the time that they won’t
be able to pay their bills,”—a figure that has increased
sharply over the last few years.
Americans
are satisfied with how they live, but afraid they won’t
be able to pay their bills? Uchitelle attributes this seeming
contradiction to the circumstances of working life, in the age
of downsizing and “reinvention.” Job security, corporate
pensions and health care, and steadily rising wages are all increasingly
things of the past. Even the most basic, long-term economic trends
have become unpredictable. From 1973-1995, the nation’s
productivity was sluggish, and real hourly wages did not increase
at all. Since 1995, productivity has shot up—but since 2000,
wages have not kept pace. In the twenty-first century, median
family income has actually declined in the United States.
The
years the boomers grew up in, by contrast, were ones of almost
unprecedented wealth and security, in American life. The period
from just after the war until the oil shock of 1973, as Uchitelle
also points out, was one of nearly unbroken prosperity—and
a prosperity that was almost universally shared. Productivity
rose by close to 3 percent a year, with incomes not far behind.
There
were many reasons for this prolonged economic surge, including
the release of pent-up buying power from the war, cheap energy,
a steeply progressive tax code, and lingering protectionism. America
imported relatively little, and even if we had wanted to import
more there was nowhere to import import it from, what
with most of the globe still recovering from World War II.
But American capitalism has generally been dynamic; what was unique
about the postwar years was how sustained our economic growth
was, and how widely we shared in it. The boom was really a product
of a greater consensus than we have ever seen before or since
in American society. Business—especially big business—had
come to more or less accept the idea of a regulated economy. American
unions reached their zenith, as 35 percent of the industrial workforce,
and the bitter labor wars that had plagued the economy for some
seven decades were increasingly replaced by amicable settlements.
Corporate health care plans and generous pensions became commonplace.
Tremendous economic power passed over to the federal government,
and social welfare programs expanded exponentially. For the first
time, Americans had some real insurance against illness, old age,
unemployment. And even ostensible conservatives such as Richard
Nixon famously proclaimed that “We are all Keynesians now.”
What
brought about this grand consensus? The Americans of “the
greatest generation”—the baby boomers’ parents—had,
in John Kennedy’s words, been “tempered by war, disciplined
by a hard and bitter peace.” The Great Depression and World
War II had, however painfully, impressed upon many Americans the
need for cooperation. The Cold War made it a habit. The fight
against communism was used to justify everything from the building
of the interstate highway system, to federal backing for the civil
rights movement, to increased science education in the public
schools.
Politics
did not stop, of course. Politicians from Kennedy, with his non-existent
missile gap, to the odious Joe McCarthy, with his fifty-seven,
non-existent State Department communists, tried to exploit the
Cold War in one way for another. There were critics of the grand
consensus at both ends of the spectrum. Conservatives, about to
embark on the long march to Reaganism, took to quoting Friedrich
von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and warned direly that liberalism
was only a way station on that serfdom road. John Kenneth Galbraith,
in his 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, made the
liberal argument that the mere consumption and “increased
production is not the final test of social achievement, the solvent
for all social ills,” and that we would be better off putting
more of our immense, new, private wealth into public purposes.
Cultural critics saw new menaces lurking in the shadows of all
those new suburban ranch houses, everything from comic books,
to feminizing mothers, to good old-fashioned indolence. Books
and movies from The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, to
Revolutionary Road, to From the Terrace, to
A Letter to Three Wives,to On the Road, worried
that we were becoming a nation of faceless company men, wondering
with Jack Kerouac, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy
shiny car in the night?”
The
answer was to the suburbs, and quite delightedly so. After years
of deprivation and self-denial, Americans were thrilled with their
new affluence. It may seem remarkable that an age lived under
the constant threat of nuclear annihilation can be looked back
upon nostalgically, but so great was the sense of security provided
by the grand consensus that this is indeed the case for most boomers.
It was all good, at least as long as the money lasted. And so
great was Americans’ newfound sense of confidence that they
felt emboldened to scrutinize their core beliefs and values as
they never had before.
For
the first time, American culture, and especially all those skeptical
American artists and writers, became the predominant influence
in the world. In a stunning expansion of human freedom, Americans
launched grassroots movements that expanded the rights of women,
ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor, and even prisoners. The
President of the United States himself, Lyndon Johnson, advocated
the creation of a Great Society that “is not a safe harbor,
a resting place, a final objective, a finished work…but
a challenge constantly renewed…” Americans came to
challenge the grand consensus itself, seriously questioning a
government they had previously trusted implicitly, along with
all of its leading, institutional allies—corporations, universities,
organized religion—and even the most deeply held customs
and mores of their parents. Following Galbraith’s exhortations,
the baby boomers set out to find something beyond than the carefully
regulated, Keynesian utopia of ever-increasing production and
consumption…
…and
marched right into the Republican party. The singular characteristic
of the baby boomers is how, in their coming of age, they have
turned away from the security that their parents so labored to
provide for them. This was in part out of necessity. The oil shocks
of the 1970s brought the good times to an abrupt halt, and a revived
and ferociously competitive world has deeply eroded our economic
advantages. Yet twenty-first-century America, still dominated
by the baby boomers, has embraced globalization much more eagerly
than any other developed, First World nation. We have largely
shucked off everything from trade barriers—once a staple
of American life—to unions, to those corporate health care
and pension plans, to reliable jobs and raises. The boomers have
come to envision themselves, at least, as the ideal Republican
entrepreneur, ready to compete in a brave new, winner-take-all
society, mistrustful of any collective or governmental solutions
to anything.
In
practice, this new, conservative/libertarian consensus remains
somewhat inchoate. The strong opposition to administration proposals
to privatize Social Security indicates that Americans might not
be quite ready yet to abandon all of their old security net. Further,
generational entitlement battles loom on Medicare and Medicaid.
There is probably an inevitable conflict between social libertarians
and the religious right in the offing, and we are slowly, painfully
re-learning that a sense of public obligation can be extremely
useful for some tasks, such as winning a war. We have not abandoned
the old Keynesian dream of ever-more production and consumption—but
now we feed it with ever greater public and private debt, a course
that must also have its endpoint.
Ironically,
the baby boomers started life in a society where a great, material
security provided the foundation for a series of daring cultural
upheavals. In their maturity, they have used a dynamic culture
to demolish that security. This is all they have in common, and
ultimately they will be judged as all generations, and all individuals,
are—by their ability to reach some synthesis between the
idealistic dreams of their youth, and the appetites of their maturity.
