The question is … are things at home (the U.S.) or around the world better or worse than when my generation came of age in the post WWII era. I have waffled hopelessly on this issue since first raising the question several posts ago. Why the dithering?

Partly because the answer is conditional. I would give a different response is I were responding from my personal situation, or that of people like me or close to me, or from viewpoint of some larger perspective (e.g., society). It is the old ‘where you sit determines where you stand’ conundrum. But there are so many other factors that might condition my response. Are we talking about creature comforts, or the strength of society (assuming we knew how to measure such), or our prospects (valid or presumed) of the future. And there lies the rub in all such vague queries … so much depends upon the character of the initial question posed. This was a point I sressed with my policy students. If you don’t get the policy question right in the first instance, solutions will elude you.

In part, my confusion lies in the fact the question is unanswerable as posed. All comparative assessments, like this one, are inherently subjective. Sure, we can drum up a set of quantitative measures and hope we have decent, or at least comparable, data across time. But, as suggested in a prior post, these thrusts at some empirical answer are far less rigorous than one might imagine. That’s why we can get an outcome in Wisconsin where Green Bay is rated as a more desireable place to live than Madison. Other than a few die hard Packer fans, I cannot imagine too many real people agreeing with this ranking.

One thing I do know. When I chat with my neighbors and acquaintances, there is an overwhelming feeling that things are worse off now than when they were young, and we are all old farts. Now, these are a group of highly educated, professional folk (retired doctors, lawyers, engineers, academics, and such). They are all financially well off and most have enjoyed long and successful marriages with children who are, on balance, doing well. These are our success stories, folk who should be optimistic and hopeful. That said, our regular discussions on this matter suggest they are not optimistic in the least. They are deeply pessimistic about the future.

So, let me start there. Why do these more successful senior citizens evince such dark opinions on the state of society and the future we have before us. Time and again, I hear the refrain that they are glad they are old and that they are desperately fearful of what their children, and particularly their grandchildren, face. Given this, I have pushed myself to think back to my youth. The people in my long-ago world were far removed from those who now surround me, at least in terms of status and economic success.

Back then, my family (and our neighbors) had no luxuries. In my early years, I lived in a cold water flat, my mother washed clothes by hand, we took buses everywhere, and there was no central heating. I can recall seeing my breath in winter since my bedroom was far removed from the space heater we employed to keep us from freezing. But there’s the thing. That seemed normal to me. I didn’t feel put upon or disadvantaged. Everyone around me was in the same boat, or leaking raft if you will.

If I had cast my attention upon the broader world then, I would have seen war, felt the real fear of imminent nucear annihilation, saw extreme racial divisions, sensed oppression and exploitation of all kinds of groups including members of the LGBTQ community. I would have heard stories such as the fate of Alan Turing, the British mathemetician and logician some call the father of the computer age and the breaker of the Enigmal Code during WWII which saved untold allied lives. He was driven to suicide by the hateful manner he was treated for his sexual preference, including being jailed. I also would have known that we incarcerated thousands of Japanese Americans in concentration camls during the recent War for no greater sin than their heritage, a fate spared those of German and Italian descent. If I had cared, I would have been aware rather widespread poverty in many parts of America where people still lived without indoor plumbing and electricity, a reality that shocked Senator John F. Kennedy as he toured rural West Virginia seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

But here’s the thing, and there is aways a thing, underlying all the bad news, and there was plenty of that, was an undercurrent of hope and optimism. Fascism, which recently had seemed unstoppable, had been smashed, at least in the places that counted. The other totolitarian form of governance remained a menace, but by the 1960s had attained the zenith of its reach, though would hang on for another generation before collapsing from its own internal contradictions. For three decades after the end of WWII, the American economy grew and, because of progressive policies remaining after the New Deal, was shared by all Americans. Every quintile of the economic pie had doubled its income in real terms, after inflation. Inequality had fallen to historically low terms so that, by 1979, the top 1 percent of Americans had less than 10 percent of the pie, an historically low figure. Beyond that, a host of ‘rights movements’ were confronted, and then rolled back to eliminate the legal impediments to full participation in society. And America stood alone as the most powerful country in the world.

None of this was accomplished easily or without trauma. The traditional elite never forgave FDR for leveling the playing field, for introducing regulations and limits on what had previously been a largely laissez faire approach to the economy. Slowly, and tentatively at first, they began a counterattack that would continue into contemporary times. Those who clung to a feudal notion of white nationalism were not about to give up their privileges easily, attacking and bombing and lynching those whom they saw as threats. And the left, enraged by what they saw as American overeach in its military adventures, struck out with their own form of nihilistic violence. By the 1960s, no one could put a pretty face on what was happening in America. I can yet recall sitting in my remote site in rural India in the late 1960s while thinking … the bloody country is falling apart.

And yet, despite all that, there was a sense of optimism amongst my generation, and even the generation before us. I can recall my father-in-law saying many times that things had gotten better for working men like him over his lifetime. I can recall the lives of my own parents improving demonstably as they could afford more creature comforts over time. There was a sense of movement and hope and progress despite all the pain and temporary anguish that inevitable accompanies dislocation and change.

My father was a damn smart man. Yet, schooling beyond high school was never an option. I never showed much promise as a youngster. In fact, I was lumped with the slow kids one year in grammar school. Still, going to college was always a given to me, even though my parents could not contribute much at all to financing my education. It was doable and, if you wanted it, you could go get it. Yet, we did not emerge from our self-directed path to success as adults with any sense that we were better than others, at least not the guys and gals with whom I associated. No, we focused on ways that we might reach back and bring others less fortunate along with us. We instinctivley realized that we were not special. There were many smart and talented kids just like us who faced additional barriers or were not as fortunate. There were many ‘diamonds in the rough’ who needed just a little push or perhaps a helping hand to get going.

As I mentioned elsewhere, cognitive biases can distort history, or at least how we see the past. Change happens slowly and reluctantly, hope can be illusory in the short run. The Grimke sisters, who were raised in the ante-bellum South in a slave holding culture rejected slavery passionately. As adults, they moved to the North to fight against what they considered an abomination. Abby Kelley, who grew up in Worcester and environs, my home town, joined the Grimke sisters in speaking and organizing to promote both the abolitionist cause and, simultaneously, the rights of women. When they started their campaigns in the 1830s, they were reviled for both their liberal views on race and their wilingness to challenge traditional gender roles.

It was not an easy path. It would take another four decades to end slavery and another century to smash apartheid in parts of America. It would take almost nine more decades to get women’s suffrage and some seven score decades before restrictions on women began to seriously fall. Yup, change doesn’t come easy, nor absent patience.

Yet, these early abolitionist females persisted despite the dangers and personal sacrifices. Why? Perhaps they were batshit crazy. OR, they had this core of optimism and hope that was not easily extinguished. Most of these pioneers continued, and there were scores of them, even when they realized their goals would not be achieved in their lifetimes, or when it became apaprent that success would only come at a horendous cost. The number of deaths attributable to our civil war cannot be known for sure but some plausible estimates put the total at over 700,000 from battle and disease.

As I think back to my early years, I was not some cock-eyed optimist by any stretch. As I’ve oft repeated, I was burdened with the Irish black cloud. Despite that innate disposition, I came around to this belief that things would get better. Our generation, my generation, was better than those that came before. We saw the possibility of a more inclusive and better world, one that would reach out to all irrespective of accidental attributes such as color or ethnicity or sexual preference. We even saw a world where some dimensions of the good life might be assured … like access to health care and education and adequate nutrition. This would not be accomplished at the expense of personal responsibility, not by a long shot. It was more like giving all in our national community a relatively equal chance at doing well in life. The unfairness of the birth lottery, where privileges are inequitably distributed and not earned, would be muted. That was the dream that drove us … the vsion of a more equal and fairer world.

Obviously, that did not happen. Many things are better, immeasurably so. But at least two things frighten us to our core. One reality is that the sense of inevitable progress is gone. Our dream of a bright future stalled, and then gradually faded. Let me touch briefly on this theme now (more in the future). The explicit counter revolution against the spirit of the New Deal can be traced back to the 1950s, William Buckley’s National Review and the Virginia School of Economics, a conservative think tank based on Jeffersonian principles and public choice theory launched by James Buchanan. Its tenets slowly picked up steam resulting in the Reagan evolution of 1980 after the two parties had sorted themselves out into distinct liberal and conservative camps. Yet, even then, Reagan could reach across the aisle to work with Democratic speaker ‘Tip’ Oneill. The culture war was simmering but had not ignited.

That era of sound and rational government came to a bitter end with the Gingrich Revolution of the early 1990s, a period to which I was close enough to witness. Now, Republicans were ordered to oppose the opposition at every point (there were some exceptions like NAFTA). Compromise was deleted from the political lexicon as a dirty word. More than that, Republicans now were expected to demonized the opposition in vicious and personal ways. They were given colorful words to use when referring to Democrats and anything the so-called radical socialists proposed. A good Republican friend of mine told me how the systems of Party fines and penalties for those collaborating with the other side worked. Those refusing to go along were labeled RINOs and driven from the party.

A whole new communication world emerged, starting with Rush Limbaugh in 1988. But it gained steam with the Drudge report in 1995, Fox News in 1996, and Newsmax in 1998. Talk radio exploded from 2 stations in 1960 to 1,130 in 1995, with 70 percent pushing a conservative viewpoint. With big bucks to be made, Limbaugh was followed by Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Carlson, Coulter and other stars of the hard right. Evangelicals like Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson had no trouble convincing gullible Christians that they and their beliefs and especially their culture were under attack.

Suddenly, rather than coalescing around a common vision and national narrative, we were being torn apart culturally with personal or ad-hominem attacks. Cooperation and bipartisanship across parties became virtually non existent, a harsh reality not seen since the equally volatile period just before our Civil War. The parties, which had seen much cooperation in my youth, had divided categorically into a hard conservative and a more liberalish camp.

This cultural divide, or chasm, is best represented by what are called ‘trifecta’ states where the three branches of governemt are held by the same party. There are 17 such Democratic and 22 such Republican states. These two camps are racing away from one another … one toward and inclusive society focusing on oppotunity for all and the other on a more feudal vision of society where the goodies go to the strongest and leadership is concentrated at the top. That’s overly simplified for now but represents a burgeoning reality.

The second reality confronting us is that our newer challenges seem particularly catastrophic. Okay, nuclear annihilation would have been catastrophic but that was within our control. We had to do something pro-active to incinerate ourselves. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine how a civil society can survive a climate catastrophe which will happen unless we do something to stop it. It also is easy to imagine the social stresses emerging from the AI revolution, or the nightmare scenario where humanity is threatened by its own technological wonders. And there are the conventional dangers like hyper-inequality. How can society reverse course when more and more of the goodies are accumulated into the hands of a very few. Is there a point where hyper-inequality increases exponentially according to some inherent dynamic laws. If so, the end of a civil society may be in reach.

And there is the rub. My peers see an evaporating hope. They see a governing system incapable of responding to the harsh realities before us. We are too divided by a cultural war that must appear frivolous to outsiders. Oddly enough, only war, the kind with bullets, has brought us together in the past. Might we come together again in the name of a positive vision … like combatting clmate change and saving the globe. Perhaps!

Unfortunately, our record does not suggest much optimism is warranted.