About Thirty-Five Years Ago

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Many people have asserted that something went wrong with the USA “about thirty-five years ago.”

USA Conservatives think that there was a turn to the Left, likely caused by “the hippies,” and are yelling “STOP!” They see “America” in decline and say they “want their country back” and perceive an increase in communism and threats to their individual freedom.

USA Progressives, like ElizabethWarren, say there was a turn to the Right:

And then about 30 years ago, our country moved in a different direction. New leadership attacked wages. They attacked pensions. They attacked health care. They attacked unions. And now we find ourselves in a very different world from the one our parents and grandparents built. We are now in a world in which the rich skim more off the top in taxes and special deals, and they leave less and less for our schools, for roads and bridges, for medical and scientific research — less to build a future.

I think it is true that something happened about thirty-five years ago and have given it a lot of thought during that time, particularly because it was the reason I left my primary career teaching sociology and social psychology. I was interested in social problems and issues but my students and colleagues turned consciously and committedly selfish. I had been involved in civil rights and the anti-poverty program and the community college idea and anti-war activities, but my students, their parents, administrators and my colleagues distanced themselves from all that. It became clear to me after sufficient battles and blood on the ground that I didn't belong there. I think the straw that finally broke it all for me was one of my fellow sociologists saying to me, “Val, you're right, but you can't ask me to stick my neck out, I have a family to support.”

It seemed to me at the time that the country had rejected decency and concern for the others, particularly for the vulnerable, and had made a turn to desultory and even hostile selfishness. But the sanctimonious selfishness thing had always been there, of course, hidden behind “fine Christian teachings” and such – all I needed to do is remember Huckleberry Finn.

Fascinatingly to me, I recently saw a young student in the seat beside me on a train reading Howard Zinn's “A People's History of the United States, 1492 to the Present” and learned that it is now a widely-used textbook!

I think that what happened “about thirty-five years ago” was not a turn to selfishness – selfishness has always been there, hidden by self-serving, hypocritical rhetoric – but rather that there were many widely-publicized events that made selfishness more conscious. Elizabeth Warren is correct in that there was a conscious commitment to selfishness, exemplified in the works of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and the Malthusian/Social Darwinian ecologists. And the Conservatives are correct in that one of the necessary concomitants of any consciousness is differentiation from the contrary view: in this case, by consciously exalting selfishness there has been a concurrent understanding that this means the destruction of the most vulnerable among us, perhaps even 99% of us. Consciousness of the reality that somehow “we are in this together after all” is in fact a “loss” of the country as it was.

Here is a short list of some of the events of “about thirty-five years ago” that made the selfishness question more conscious:

• “The civil rights crowd,” as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas calls us, brought about desegregation and many other social changes despite widely-publicized resistance, beatings, riots, killings, and assassinations.
• The resistance to the Viet-Nam war succeeded to the point where even Robert Macnamara admitted that he “was terribly wrong,” from a time when Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening were the only Senators who voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The domestic and world-wide effort to stop that war succeeded, despite highly-publicized beatings, jailings, insurrections and killings.
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  And, Yes, “The Hippies,” if by that I may designate all the visionaries in the arts, especially in popular music, film, and literature; people who spoke out, who stuck out their necks, who came out and said No, this can not go on, life doesn't have to be like this, this is wrong. Neil Young's “Ohio” immediately comes to mind, and Daniel Ellsberg, and so many others. The counterculture has been so successful that there is now the possibility that, in some States at least, innocent and responsible people will not be given mandatory jail sentences for personal use of marijuana.

Much more could be said on the subject of what happened “about thirty-five years ago” and why both Progressives and Conservatives both see that as a critical, crucially consequential time. I will be spending a lot more time thinking it over, so if you have any observations that you think will help, please leave a comment!