BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

At Hallowe'en, 1963, the New York Times editorial board lamented the coming redevelopment of Pennsylvania Station with an indictment of the times.

Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.

Pennsylvania Station was a symbol of the America that worked. Its loss, however, was a small visible symbol. The real destruction was the aggregation of small decisions. Taken together, however, the damage was much greater. New York Times guest columnist Judith Warner, a Thirteener, recognizes that much is broken. Her essay is devoid of any understanding of what worked, which testifies to how irretrievably the America that worked has been broken.

About seven years ago, not long after settling into a little house on a tree-lined street in a city neighborhood all but indistinguishable from the suburbs surrounding it, I developed a brief obsession with mid-20th-century American anomie. I read “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” and “The Organization Man.” I re-read “The Feminine Mystique.”

Round up the usual suspects. The cutting-edge mind-set of the late 1950s and early 1960s took the order and prosperity for granted and sought a corrective to a regimentation of private life born in Depression and Total Victory. (Perhaps there is material for further study?)

And I devoured Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road,” a then largely overlooked book that I found one day among the paperbacks in our local bookstore, snatching it up for what its jacket promised would be “the most evocative portrayal” of suburban “opulent desolation.” (“What in God’s name was the point or the meaning or the purpose of a life like this?” was the sort of gratifying payoff I found within its pages.)

I approached these books, I’ll admit, with a kind of prurient interest, a combination of revulsion and irresistible attraction, thoroughly enjoying the sad and sordid sexual repression, the infantilization of women, the cookie-cutter conformity imposed upon men. I couldn’t get enough of the miserable domestic underbelly of life in the period we like to call “the Fifties,” an era that spans the late ’40s to the mid-’60s. Some of the fascination was a kind of exoticism. More, however, came from the fact that, I found, in our era of “soccer moms,” “surrendered wives” and “new traditionalism,” the look and sound of the opulent desolation was eerily familiar.

The more things change? Or the loss of something good, for what?

Why is there such a desire, even a hunger, to recreate images from such an unhappy past? A past characterized by every possible form of bigotry? A past, furthermore, that people like the “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner and the directors of “Revolutionary Road,” “Far From Heaven” and “The Hours” can’t possibly remember, having been born, like me, in the 1960s?

“Part of the show is trying to figure out,” Weiner told The Times’s Alex Witchel last June, “what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are.”

Sometimes, those that do not know the past do not understand it. Perhaps in rooting out those perceived injustices came the destruction of useful traditions, a destruction that has contributed to the crudity of the Thirteeners.

Unlike the baby boomers before us, we “baby busters” of the ’60s never rebelled against the trappings of domesticity represented by our images of the 1950s. Many of us, deep down, yearn for it, having experienced divorce or other sorts of family dislocation in the 1970s. We keep alive a secret dream of “a model of routine and order and organization and competence,” a life “where women kept house, raised kids and kept their eyebrows looking really good,” as the writer Lonnae O’Neal Parker once described it in The Washington Post Magazine.

Perhaps the Thirteeners have lived all their lives blind in one eye, adapting as well as they can to the circumstances, yet comprehending that something is missing yet not understanding what it is. What is missing is the America that worked.

But that order and routine and competence in our frenetic world proves forever elusive, a cruel ideal we can never reach.

The fact is: as an unrebellious, cautious, anxious generation, many of us are living lives not all that different from those of the parents of the early 1960s, yet without the seeming ease, privileges and benefits. Husbands have been stripped of the power perks of their gender, wives of the anticipation that they’ll be taken care of for life.

How we seem to love and hate those men and women we never knew. What we would give to know their secrets: how Dad managed to come home at 5 p.m. to read the paper or watch TV while Mom fixed dinner and bathed the kids. How Mom turned up at school, every day, unrumpled, coiffed, unflappable. And more to the point: how they managed to afford the lives that they led, on one salary, without hocking their homes to pay for college, without worrying about being bankrupted by medical bills.

For that one-salary canard, go here. For the medical bills: consider a world without nuclear medicine or most of todays pharmaceuticals. For the rest of it: those ideas about anomie have consequences. No "seeming ease?" That was the America that worked.

How we make them pay now, when we breathe them back into life. Our cultural representations of them are punishing. We defile the putative purity of the housewives — those doe-eyed, frivolous, almost simple-minded depressives — by assigning them drunken, cheating, no-good mates. We discredit the memory of the organization men by filling them with self-loathing and despair. Each gender invites its downfall, and fully deserves the comeuppance that history, we know, will ultimately deal it.

That’s where the pleasure comes in. No matter how lost we are, no matter how confused, no matter how foolish we feel, we can judge ourselves the winners.

The comeuppance, however, is not to the America that worked. It is to the crude Thirteeners and indulged Millenials, who have lost the knowledge that would make it work. The ultimate monument that has been destroyed is in Ms Warner's judgement of her cohort as the winners.

TIME TO INTER THE CAMELOT MYTH.

I commend Vincent Bugliosi's Reclaiming History as a well-researched, well-argued demonstration that Lee Oswald, and Lee Oswald alone, killed President Kennedy.  The introduction to his book, however, perpetuates the fatal conceit of  the Celebrity Presidency that is perhaps the most troubling inheritance of those five days in November.

Since Kennedy's death, the nation has not seen, in any of his successors, [as of the 2007 publication -- ed.] his cosmopolitan intellectualism or the oratorical eloquence with which he sought to lead the nation by the power of his words.  What is also beyond dispute is the way Kennedy, the first president born in the twentieth century, inspired the young of his generation by his youthful vigor and the bold, fresh initiatives of his New Frontier, such as his Peace Corps, civil rights, and pledge to put a man on the moon.  Idealism was in the air, and the nation's capital had never seen such an invasion of young people who wanted to change the world for the better.

Perhaps Mr Bugliosi believes such things.  Perhaps including them in his introduction is necessary, the better to express empathy with readers who have trouble squaring, as many people still do, the import of the deed with the tawdriness of the criminal. The editors of National Review offer a dissenting interpretation of those same impressions.

Kennedy did not transform the country, but he did transform the presidency – largely for the worse. Combining grandiose rhetoric with shallow policy, he established the modern template of president as media hero, beginning the conversion of the office of the presidency from that of chief administrator of the federal government to the modern grotesquery it has become. The main effects of his time in the White House were to make his immediate predecessor look like Cincinnatus by comparison and to unleash the ugliness of Johnson and Johnsonism on the republic after his martyrdom at the hands of a deranged Communist.

Unfortunately, Lee Oswald's fifteen minutes of fame coincided with an era in which unresolved social tensions became incompatible with their postwar integument.  As Strauss and Howe observe in The Fourth Turning (p. 170:)

The postwar High was spent; it could not last.  A new mood was necessary -- and coming.  The spark came on November 22, 1963.  From the standpoint of history, the events of that day were critical, but not essential.  Had Oswald missed, the specifics would have been different, but the saeculum would still have carved its path.

Many commenters hint at this argument, although they fall short of noting that correlation is not causation.  Let's start with Peggy Noonan.

We talk about JFK’s death because for the 18 years leading up to that point—between the end of the war, as we used to say, and 1963—America knew placidity. Many problems were growing and quietly brewing, but on the surface America was placid, growing more affluent, and politically calm. And then this rupture, this shock, this violence, this new sense that anything can happen, history can be ripped from its rails, that security once won cannot necessarily be maintained. That our luck won’t necessarily hold.

The rupture would have come anyway, if Strauss and Howe's hypothesis is valid, although it's possible that Johnson and Johnsonism -- this being the era in which the major networks began reporting from Washington rather than listing all the reporters in Washington sending material back to New York -- was the wrong policy response to those brewing problems.

And what followed—growing political unrest, cultural spasms, riots at political conventions, more assassinations and assassination attempts—was so different from the years preceding that we couldn’t help look back at JFK’s murder as the breakpoint, the rupture. After that, things turned difficult.

President Kennedy's murder came less than a month after demolition of New York's Pennsylvania Station began, which might have been the first symptom of the end of The America That Worked^(TM).

Camelot isn’t JFK. Camelot is the way we remember America before JFK died. Camelot is the America that existed, for one brief shining moment, before Lee Harvey Oswald began to shoot. a placid-seeming, even predictable place that we have not seen since.

Robert Samuelson notes "He was not a great president. He was somewhere between middling and mediocre." His elaboration, however, also focuses on the transition from The America That Worked^(TM) to the Consciousness Revolution and the subsequent coarsening of the common culture that goes on to this day.

Kennedy’s assassination shattered the illusion of control. Who could imagine an American president being shot? But many unimagined events followed: race riots in Los Angeles, Detroit and other cities; a powerful antiwar movement; the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King; a president’s resignation (Watergate).

Camelot was that brief interlude when we thought we could impose our will. That is its magnetism. It was less an innocent time than a simplistic one. We thought we could engineer the future and discovered that the future wouldn’t cooperate. Our continuing seduction by the Kennedy narrative presumes that had he lived, the future would have been better. He would have grasped the folly of Vietnam, embraced the new youth culture and advanced civil rights. This subtext sustains the Kennedy fascination.

And, I argue, leads directly to the disaster that the Obama Presidency has become.  Perhaps, with fifty years since the event, it is time for the country to move on.  Reason's Nick Gillespie, who introduces a libertarian dissent to the Celebrity Presidency,

And if we as a nation refused to grok fully the dark side of power prior to JFK’s assassination, everybody got it by the time the Warren Commission report and the Pentagon Papers came out, Dion scored his last huge hit with “Abraham, Martin and John,” Teddy Kennedy strategically donned a neck brace, and Dick Nixon flew off to San Clemente.

Indeed, by the early 1970s, what American over or under 30 didn’t agree with the sentiments expressed in a 1971 New York Times Magazine story on youth politics co-authored by Louis Rossetto, the future cofounder of Wired magazine? “John F. Kennedy, one of the leading reactionaries of the sixties, is remembered for his famous line, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,’” seethed Rossetto and Stan Lehr. “Today, more and more young people are instead following the advice of [author] David Friedman: ‘Ask not what government can do for you… ask rather what government is doing to you.’”

then suggests that the torch be passed to a new generation.

But after 50 years, here’s hoping that particular fever is breaking. Not because Kennedy’s assassination wasn’t a horrible event or because questions around it and the world in which it took place still linger, but because no generation should monopolize the past, present, and future to the extent the boomers have tried. At the very least, we owe our literal and figurative children the breathing space to get on with their lives as free of their parents' shadow as possible.

Perhaps some additional parallels between President Kennedy and President Obama will help the next generation move on. Let's start with Mr Kennedy's application to Harvard. (Yes, read the whole thing, in those days, dropping names appeared to be the preferred mode of getting the thick envelope.)  Particularly telling is a passage in a letter that appears to be his father calling in a favor.

Jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested.  This is, of course, a bad fault.

I'm guilty of that differential ability to focus or to become bored, and I can relate fully to a father not wanting that held against his son. But that observation might apply to Our President, who seems more at ease campaigning than in negotiating.  Might it not be the case, though, that such a focus, commendable if not desirable in a professor, a Grandmaster, coach, or division superintendent, is not compatible with the contemporary Presidency, particularly in the Manage Everything "modern grotesquery" that seems to be today's job description, and even more so in the Herbert Croly - Franklin Roosevelt - Arthur Schlesinger paradigm for a Democrat?

ENVISIONING THE FOURTH TURNING.

During the summer, Ed Driscoll remarked on a series of space movies from 1995 that highlighted an America that Worked.

But in addition to looking back at the near-unanimous national approval of the moon landings in 1969 and ’70 even as the left’s culture war was about to accelerate to escape velocity, 1995′s Apollo 13 also reflects the era in which it was made. The Cold War was over — or at least undergoing an extended time out, and it was also concurrently a strange interregnum in the left’s culture war, when our “liberal” betters in Hollywood and in New York gave their enthusiastic blessings to an America that narrowly rejected moderate liberal George H.W. Bush and replaced him with moderate liberal Bill Clinton.

Put another way, once the Consciousness Revolution undoes the strictures of The America That Worked and entrenches itself, and the remaining structure unravels, there's an opportunity to look at the positive parts of The America That Worked as The Good Old Days.  Impeachment and global jihad and financial crisis are still in the future.  What's instructive, though, is that Mr Driscoll links to a Charles Murray essay in order to reinforce his thesis that consensus, or an America that Works, is fleeting.

Johnson’s own Great Society programs—plus Supreme Court decisions, changes in the job market, and the sexual revolution—would produce a lower class unlike anything America had known before. Changes in the economy and higher education would produce a new upper class that bore little resemblance to earlier incarnations.

Half a century after Johnson’s dream of a geographically and culturally homogeneous America, the United States is at least as culturally diverse as it was at the beginning of World War I and in some respects more thoroughly segregated than it has ever been. Today’s America is once again a patchwork of cultures that are different from one another and often in tension. What they share in common with the cultures of pre–World War I America is that they require freedom. In one way or another, the members of most of the new subcultures want to be left alone in ways that the laws of the nation, strictly observed, will no longer let them.

Yes, and after World War I came The Great Depression and World War II, and the emergence of that evanescent consensus.  Perhaps, once Global Jihad or Climate Change or whatever the next Grand Secular Challenge will be is resolved, there will be a new consensus.  Or perhaps the big cities are obsolete and the voters will self-segregate even more and national political consensus will be no longer possible.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

SOCIAL ORDERS ARE EMERGENT.

Any saecular order emerges as a consequence of collective actions, organized or otherwise, to deal with the most pressing challenges of particularly hard times.  Eventually, though, what worked, more or less, to settle those challenges, proves untenable to a new set of challenges, even challenges not particularly pressing.

THE HIPPIES' GRANDCHILDREN ARE IN THE SADDLE.

The 1960s version could get away with their foolishness because there was enough of The America That Worked^(TM) to either sell out to (as the 1980s yuppies) or to fall back on for relief.

A half century of deconstructing the cultural capital leaves those wild and undisciplined grandchildren in a bad place.  "The traditional bedrocks of the American system — a stable economy, energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities, a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal justice system — are dissolving."

SILVER BELLS ABOVE THE BUSTLE.

Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien correctly suggests, "Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown."

Well, yes.

Yes, with the kids making their list and checking it twice.  "Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant."  Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings, schoolteacher, school gift exchange, check, check, check.

My boyhood Christmas shopping was in downtown Milwaukee, after the streetcars. Mr O'Brien's Pittsburgh still had its Pennsylvania-gauge PCCs.

Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.

Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.

Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.

The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.

I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.

Milwaukee's Gimbel's had the same sort of narrower, wooden-step escalators on the upper two or three floors, including to the toy department on the top floor.  No overhead miniature train.  There was a kid-sized monorail orbiting above the Boston Store toy department.

THOSE WHO DENY FREEDOM TO OTHERS DESERVE IT NOT FOR THEMSELVES.

Despite all the attendees at Wednesday night's presidential^* address having received their Trump shots during the closing days of the Trump presidency, they were still wearing their Biden muzzles and sitting apart from their unclean colleagues.  And I'm not referring to the Republicans staying away from the Democrats by that.  Bizarre even by Twilight Zone standards, indeed.

Henry Payne used to be a libertarian-leaning cartoonist.  Of late his observations about Democrats have become blunter and more critical.

RECLAIMING THE AMERICA THAT WORKED?

A Washington Post story suggests that, behind the Donald Trump phenomenon, there are more than a few voters who remember The America That Worked^(TM).  Yes, I've been pointing out how all the social criticism aimed at the supposed excess conformity of the 1950s burdened all who came after with the fallout of bad ideas and symbolism over substance for a long time.  Good on the legacy press for recognizing that people see something lost.

Trump’s slogan is a tribute to a simpler time. “He could have said, ‘Make America what it was before’ and I would have voted for him,” said Jane Cimbal, 69, who lives in Winchester and signed up to collect signatures to get Trump on the Virginia ballot. “The last time we had good jobs and respect for the military and law enforcement was, oh, probably during Eisenhower.”

Unfortunately, there are no do-overs, thus no opportunity to leave racial and sexual minorities alone by limiting the powers of government to trammel free association, a development that might have made getting the military hamstrung in Southeast Asia more difficult.  But even among people with no living memory of The America That Worked^(TM) we perceive a sense that the new dispensation is unsatisfactory.

The crowds at Trump events tend to be older and whiter than the national population, but so is the party whose nomination he seeks, and so are frequent voters generally. If younger supporters don’t have firsthand experience of the Eisenhower, Kennedy or Reagan years, they nonetheless share the older generation’s sense of loss.

Instructively, it's not so much the trashy, splintery popular culture that comes out of these vignettes.

That free-floating sense of decline expresses itself in many different ways among Trump supporters. Some speak of a fading sense of mobility, a loss of the expectation that each generation will surpass its parents’ standard of living. Others focus on the loss of blue-collar jobs and a sense that only those with computer backgrounds can take advantage of the new digital economy.

Technical progress we always have. Ask the next switchboard operator or elevator operator you see. Social orders, however, can emerge, perhaps out of the wreckage of the current trashy culture.

ASSIMILATION IS A TWO WAY STREET.

I've long been of the view that there are Pareto improvements possible between immigrants and their new country.  "Give new arrivals an America to buy into, and an America that buys into the new arrivals, and we'll be OK."

That isn't always easy.

For many years progressive liberalism has asked us to believe something incredible: that the most important and admirable aspect of the American character is defined only by its openness and unlimited acceptance of diversity. A defined American character—devotion to republican principles, republican virtue, the habits and manners of free citizens, and self-reliance—would be impermissibly exclusive, and thus impermissibly American. The universal homogeneous state only recognizes openness, and devotion to diversity and acceptance as virtues. It must therefore condemn exclusivity as the greatest vice. It is the nation-state that insists on exclusive citizenship and immigration policies that impose various kinds of restrictions. Openness as a political virtue inevitably inclines to the support of open borders, and it would be utterly surprising to learn that the advocates of openness and diversity are unaware of this.

Witness in the first few sentences precisely that "America to buy into" and that "buy into new arrivals."  That's not the way things worked.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had finally put the destructive genie of race securely in its bottle; there was much work still to be done, but there were now legal remedies available for racial injustices. But as soon as that old racial genie had been secured, new prophets arose and said we can teach that old genie new tricks. We can teach him to give up his evil ways and be a force for good. We will turn him loose to do the work of racial reparations and racial equity based on racial proportionality.

There are myriad reasons why the Great Society failed.  An immigration reform of approximately the same age might have come along at precisely the worst possible time, if the intellectual current pushed deconstruction of those notions most essential for the new arrivals to buy into.  At the same time, might the new arrivals to the United States have been least equipped to buy into those notions?

Great numbers of immigrants came to the United States from the Third World, both legally and illegally, driven by the immense pressures of despotism and economic deprivation in their native countries. The stated purpose of the Immigration Act, according to President Johnson, was to “correct a cruel and enduring wrong” in United States immigration policies; the unstated purposes of the act was to change the racial and ethnic mix of the population of the United States, not only as compensation for past racial injustice, but also as a way of consolidating the administrative state by adding to its list of client groups.

Immigrants from third world countries have a more difficult time adapting to American customs, habits, and laws and show less willingness to do so. These immigrants are more likely to need the services of the administrative state, and it was only too willing to specify the terms and conditions for their adjustment to American society.

In fact, the administrative state encouraged immigrants to retain their cultures by promoting multiculturalism. The administrators—and eventually the immigrants—demanded that America should change to accommodate those with different cultures. The old goal of the “melting pot” became mocked as a racist legacy in the new universe of multiculturalism. Indeed, demands that immigrants adapt to American habits and manners were derided as cultural genocide, a product of America’s overweening arrogance, an arrogance fueled by the anachronistic notion of American exceptionalism.

To author Edward J. Erler the way forward is a restoration of ... that mutual buy-in I keep endorsing.

Full acceptance of American principles as specified in the Declaration and the Constitution are a minimum requirement for becoming a member of the American polity. A useful occupation that contributes to the American economy should be another minimum requirement. Unskilled or low skilled labor only creates an underclass that shuts out Americans from entry-level jobs that provide the acquisition of necessary work-discipline and skills for economic advancement.

American immigration policy must seek skilled workers who can make an immediate contribution and who are needed to fill gaps created by a dynamic economy. Immigration driven by compassion is misplaced. Compassion is sometimes necessary in extraordinary situations, but as a general policy, it only exhibits weakness to the world. No one has a right to emigrate to the United States.

The good news is, the particularlists might not be winning the argument at home, immigration policy or not. Glenn Loury's recent interview in City Journal is ostensibly about lingering racism, but there are notes of individual agency, buying into those bourgeois virtues.

The removal of agency is a deep concern of mine. The tone of the conversation here in the U.S. in the last ten years has shifted to notions of systemic racism, white supremacy, and so on, as if those facts alone determine the outcomes in the schools and neighborhoods and prisons of America in the year 2020. I think that is a bogus argument, an argument of surrender, and it leaves one, oddly, petitioning the putative oppressor to save you from the consequences of his oppression.

There's a lot more, most of the conversation touching on the hot issues of the past summer. Look, though, at where it winds up.  "I want more integration, intermarriage, mixing. I want a ratcheting down of the intensity of the investment that we make in our racial identities, because that’s not the most important feature of our human profile."

What better way to produce Americans All?

THE SYSTEM IS THE RISK.

Christopher Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy opens with a Fourth Turning-like "America Feels Broken."  Book Review N^o. 12 will suggest that Mr Hayes may be taking the first steps toward a break with the Eastern Liberal Establishment.

JAW-DROPPINGLY DEVOID OF ECONOMIC CONTENT.

Some years ago, Historiann hosted a bull session on the curious aesthetics of one Susan Jacoby.   The culture-studies types put on a clinic every so often about how far you can go slinging big words around, and the now-ended Mad Men series provided lots of the material to be subjected to the usual theorrhea.  Start with Ms Jacoby.

Nearly all institutional power for 20 years after the war was indeed wielded by the war generation (and eventually by younger men born during the Depression). Yet a vast majority of men possessed limited power that could vanish swiftly if they committed the ultimate sin of failing to bring home a paycheck.

It was often said, as the feminist movement found its voice in the early 1970s, that most wives were just one man away from poverty. It would have been just as valid to say that most men were just one job away from poverty.

In 1960, about 25 percent of wives with children under 18 held jobs — many of them part time — and a disproportionate number of those women came not from the middle class but from the poorest fifth of American families. Throughout my childhood, “she works” was a pitying pejorative applied to women whose husbands had turned out to be “bad providers.”

The world of “Mad Men,” in which executives earn enough to pay for lavish hotel rooms for trysts with girlfriends, along with fur coats to pacify their wives, was unimaginable for most blue- or white-collar working men 50 years ago.

That's the cultural norms of The America that Worked^(TM) and the social milieu that the Serious Thinkers of the Day had to deconstruct.  Ms Jacoby is clearly conversant with Feminine Mystique and that line of reasoning, but, in the next few paragraphs her unfamiliarity with The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and The Lonely Crowd and Organization Man and the rest of the bad ideas about excessive conformity and anomie and all the rest that burdened the emergent hippies becomes clear.

My dad worked so hard that he wouldn’t have had time for routine adultery even if he had the desire. Furthermore, my supposedly powerless mother would have spotted any unexplained expenditure of more than $20 — not enough to rent a decent hotel room even in 1960 in Lansing, Mich. Some husbands certainly did exercise tight control over money, but the basic middle-class covenant of the time ceded power to women over everything domestic, including the family budget.

The cost of that covenant to women — the suppression of worldly opportunity — has been thoroughly told. The cost to men — in terms of stress, time lost with the families they were trying so hard to support and lack of freedom to pursue personal interests — has not been nearly as well documented.

Yes, and the "do your own thing" Sixties had behind all the posturing a strong expectation that the bourgeois economy would always be there to fall back upon, and somewhere in those early feminist stirrings to pry open the social clubs and the executive suites would be the opportunity for ambitious mothers to neglect their children the same way ambitious fathers did.  We're still too close to the beginning of that transition to come to any definitive conclusions as to gains and losses, and I suspect there's going to be more than mandated leave time or taxpayer-funded child care in the final analysis.

ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FIFTY YEARS AGO?

I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded.

I'm beginning to think I wasn't forceful enough.  Fortunately, others are up to the task.

I start from an unusual place.  Joy Reid, one of the MSNBC stable of conscience-cowboys, issues a predictable virtue-signal in her reaction to Our President's speech Tuesday night.  "Church ... family ... police ... military ... the national anthem ... Trump trying to call on all the tropes of 1950s-era nationalism. The goal of this speech appears to be to force the normalization of Trump on the terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for."  Put another way: the institutions of The America That Worked^(TM).  Gosh, you'd think that after fifty years of Social Progress or Inclusion or Higher Consciousness or whatever, there would be some emergent understanding of the ways in which we are all Better Persons For It, and Better Off and therefore we miss all those American High traditions about as much as we miss inner-tube tires on our cars.  Evidently, though, there's more at work.  As one Twitter participant quipped, "Vote Democrat. Because we stand against Church, family, police, the military and the national anthem."  There's more piling on at Info Wars (yes, dear reader, consider the source.)  Among those links, there's this reaction by Becket Adams for the Washington Examiner.

Is she under the impression that the desire for strong families and robust church communities is some post-World War II phenomenon? Does she not realize that these things aren't exactly unique to "Leave It To Beaver" era? Millions of Americans enjoyed and advocated for these things long before the 1950s, and they've been enjoying them and fighting for them long since.

Trump isn't doing some sort of retro throwback to a time long passed. He's appealing to almost universally popular issues. How scandalous.

Perhaps this sounded clever in her head. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that passes for trenchant analysis in her apparently cloistered world. But there’s a big world out there, and many of the people in it are genuinely confused by the idea that church and family could be nationalistic tropes.

Indeed, she characterizes church, family, etc., as if they are problematic; as if Trump is trying to use the allure of strong families and church communities to pull the United States back to the dark ages of....back when she thinks strong families and church communities were popular? Uh, okay.

In her bubble, perhaps such things as patriotism and bourgeois virtues are racialized: "To many Americans, being patriotic means being white."  That doesn't have to be the case.  Moreover, to the extent that talking heads racialize patriotism, or bourgeois virtues, or civilization itself, they risk antagonizing people who might otherwise be sympathetic to the unfinished business of the Civil Rights era, or of the Great Society.

You don’t need a University of Toronto study to understand that when you call people who disagree with you a bigot, you just piss them off, and cause them to see “bigotry” as a concept whose only real meaning is to stifle dissent, as “communist” was used in the McCarthy years.

The point is this: if you cannot tell the difference between Ross Douthat and Richard Spencer, you’re not marginalizing Ross Douthat, you’re mainstreaming Richard Spencer.

That's Rod Dreher, at the end of a long essay, and you might be wise to read it in full and follow the links.

That's also too complicated an argument.  There's a simpler way to proceed.  Ask the brain-brothers of Ms Reid to explain, in a hundred words or less, exactly how we are better off than we were a half-century ago, and how deconstruction of the mediating institutions of church and family and patriotism contributed to getting there.

That's not the only good news for today.  Corey Schink enumerates the fruits of fifty years of what passes, these days, for feminism.

Devastatingly low birth rates, high divorce rates, relationship dysfunction, and a war against the biological basis of male-female roles have resulted in the collapse of traditional society. And it can be traced back, in a variety of ways, to the feminist ideologues of the 20th century and the Marxist intellectual environment they emerged from. Like the 'bearded schizoids' of the 19th century, feminist ideologues have poisoned the well of traditional society in order to provoke revolution from within.

Polemical, yes, and yet, what he's asking is whether the human condition is better than it was fifty years ago.

Feminism is only "commanding the world's attention" of late because, for the first time in decades, if not ever, its tenets are being publicly challenged. If the counter-culture seems to have increased in popularity of late, that's only because it has been prompted to kick back, via its dominance of state organs, against the rising tide of 'counter-counter-culture'.

That's part of a longer essay, and there's a lot in it that might better be taken on with great care.  In essence, though, in that invocation of a counter-counter-culture we might be seeing an understanding that the old moderating institutions might have served a purpose, and might better be restored to a state of good repair.

PROJECTION.

A recent Ipsos poll comes close to blaming the voters for their discontent.

Trump’s candidacy taps into a deep, visceral fear among many that America’s best days are behind it. That the land of freedom, baseball and apple pie is no longer recognizable ; and that ‘the other’—sometimes the immigrant, sometimes the Non-American , and almost always the nonwhite—is to blame for these circumstances.

In the article, it's the nativism.  That's not quite as nasty a slander as "cause"+phobia, but it's nasty all the same.  And possibly unfounded.  Nativist sentiment, in the pollsters view, is agreement with one or more of these propositions.  More and more, I don't identify with what America has become.  These days, I feel like a stranger in my own country.  More and more, America is not a place I can feel comfortable as myself.  As the article does not offer elaboration about questions that might elicit confounding sources for people agreeing with those propositions, while it does show that less than half of the people agreeing with the propositions identify as Republicans, Tea Party, Democrats, or live in the south while more than half of the alleged nativists are white or older than 45 years, we might be simply seeing a reaction to the trashy, splintery popular culture, or corporate America's casualization of its work force, or cheating scandals in sports.  The discussion suggests some of these possibilities, but still, this is projection of the Old Liberal Establishment's beliefs.

Trump’s rise in the polls can only be understood in context of the profound economic and cultural change in America.  And his strength, like that of the tea party, is emblematic of deeper felt concerns within the Republican party.  On the one hand, many people are scared about their economic future and that of their children as the rate of economic displacement increases with the globalization of cheap labor and technological innovation. The America Dream for many is a distant, foreign concept.

Yes, and it doesn't help to turn "land of opportunity" into a micro-aggression.  Just saying.  Or to demonize people who remember The America That Worked^(TM) and who get that in difficult times, the tough get going.

[Political correctness] doesn't hack it in war.  PC is a rich liberal's plaything, a luxury item. It works best as a subject for ridicule on South Park.  And it's not the way we really think.  It's the way we pretend we think.   So just who is it that is blowing innocent people to smithereens in Paris, Beirut, Sharm, and Mali, and who knows where else next?  Zen Buddhist monks?  The Little Sisters of the Poor?

Everybody knows who it is. Islam has a big problem and although people want to be polite or deliberately lie about it to look "good" to their neighbors or to their cousins at the Thanksgiving table, when they get into a voting booth, many of them are guiltily going to be pulling the lever for someone with the you-know-what to put an end to this global homicidal insanity -- and it's not going to be John Kasich or Rand Paul or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.  It's going to be Donald Trump.  And if not Donald, possibly Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, both of whom seem to be able to find Raqqa on a map. And none of these people are racists, not even faintly, no matter what some NBC reporter wants to imply.

All of which will make for an entertaining eleven months, as much of the rainbow coalition would be first to go should the jihadis ever get control of the United States.  But perhaps the rainbow coalition understands at some level the implications of that portion of the remnant of mainstream America that is armed and likely to give any band of jihadis a really bad day.  Plus there are places in mainstream America where a jihadi is likely to be shot by a girl.  No paradise for you.

YOU DON'T BETTER MANKIND BY ENSLAVING IT.

That might be the real answer to Jim Jump's question, "Did the Ivy League Really Break America?" in Inside Higher Ed.  (Should I refer to him as Coach Jump?)  He's reacting to David Brooks's "How the Ivy League Broke America" which begins with this potted sociology.

Every coherent society has a social ideal—an image of what the superior person looks like. In America, from the late 19th century until sometime in the 1950s, the superior person was the Well-Bred Man. Such a man was born into one of the old WASP families that dominated the elite social circles on Fifth Avenue, in New York City; the Main Line, outside Philadelphia; Beacon Hill, in Boston. He was molded at a prep school like Groton or Choate, and came of age at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. In those days, you didn’t have to be brilliant or hardworking to get into Harvard, but it really helped if you were “clubbable”—good-looking, athletic, graceful, casually elegant, Episcopalian, and white. It really helped, too, if your dad had gone there.

Once on campus, studying was frowned upon. Those who cared about academics—the “grinds”—were social outcasts. But students competed ferociously to get into the elite social clubs: Ivy at Princeton, Skull and Bones at Yale, the Porcellian at Harvard. These clubs provided the well-placed few with the connections that would help them ascend to white-shoe law firms, to prestigious banks, to the State Department, perhaps even to the White House. (From 1901 to 1921, every American president went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton.) People living according to this social ideal valued not academic accomplishment but refined manners, prudent judgment, and the habit of command. This was the age of social privilege.

Social privilege there might have been, and yet that introduction does nothing, nothing, to support his assertion, "The meritocracy isn’t working. We need something new."  Note how the titans of industry, the masters of Great Lakes steamers, the engineers that laid out the railroads as well as the engineers who ran the trains might have been able to live their lives without ever encountering a Harvard man, let alone worrying about being "clubbable" outside the local Brotherhood, Grange, or Masonic lodge, or after the overseas wars that those Clubbable Men started getting the country into, the American Legion or the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

IF YOU WERE THERE, YOU WEREN'T THERE.

It might be better for historians without any lived experience of the 1960s to attempt to come to terms with them.  Me?  I was there and I didn't like it.  "The America of the 1950s was an America that worked. The counterculture that followed did not. It's more accurate to describe aspects of it as alien, immoral, and destructive."

Let's yield the floor to Chapman historian Luke Nichter, who is probably young enough to have pored through the newspapers and scholarly writings without attempting to square what he found with his own experience.  In The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 he presents a few surprises, which he obtained in conversations with people who were there, and have since crossed the final summit.

Let me open Book Review N^o. 6 by noting that, unlike depressingly many recent political histories, Year that Broke is not a hair-on-fire reaction to Donald Trump's 2016 win, or to the strength he seems to be showing again this election season. That concentration on the year, and the events of that year, are even more commendable given the opportunities to foreshadow the various forms of populism, the Summer of Rage, and futile nation building wars that still seem to structure an impossible politics.  Nor is it the focus of Year that Broke to point out how Reliance on National Politics to Solve Problems is never going to end well.  It's going to take each of us to figure that out.

RECLAIMING THE MEDIATING INSTITUTIONS

There's a lengthy Yuval Levin meditation in The Wall Street Journal, "The Next Conservative Movement," which addresses the way in which the old saecular order fractures, and the major political parties are inadequate instruments for dealing with the fracture.  He starts with a consideration of what A Good Polity looked like.  That is, why did an America That Worked come apart?  And why are the major parties still haunted by those days?

Both Democrats and Republicans often appeal to such a sense of loss. For Democrats, the peak came in the 1960s, when cultural liberalization seemed to coexist with a highly regulated economy. For Republicans, it came in the 1980s, when economic liberalization was accompanied by a resurgence of national pride and a renewed emphasis on family values. By now, American politics is largely organized around these related modes of nostalgia, and the two parties address voters as if it were always 1965 or 1981.

That's all familiar turf. The appeal of the Civil Rights movement was that of removing legal impedimenta preventing people, on the basis of race, from participating in the fruits of victory. The Best and The Brightest thought there were enough fruits to create a Great Society at home and contain Communism abroad.  It takes more space than I want to devote to detailing the ways The Best and The Brightest messed up, but mess up they did, and the appeal of the Reagan years to Republicans is in the partial rolling back of the administrative state, plus the laughing of the Soviet Union into oblivion.

PUTTING HIS MONEY WHERE HIS MOUTH IS?

No matter how many times I point out that independent left wing talk radio is at least as soporific as the same stuff on public radio, they never get the message.  Case in point: Thom Hartmann, who has a radio show, the tone of which ranges between irritated and scolding.  "The GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable, but Democrats must get into the talk-radio game before ever more damage is done."

MISSING WHAT'S IN PLAIN SIGHT.

Charles Homans asks readers to contemplate a "post-middle class" politics.  Here's why he's thinking that way, ringing the changes on themes that will become more familiar as the old saecular structure fractures.

America’s self-­image as a middle-­class nation is so deeply ingrained in the country’s politics that we don’t often stop to think what, precisely, that means: whether it defines a concrete socioeconomic identity — a country where most people are neither very rich nor very poor — or an aspiration, the notion that if you “work hard and play by the rules,” as Clinton put it the first time she ran for president, you’re entitled to at least a modest prosperity. “Everyday Americans” was an attempt to acknowledge that the gap between these two ideas has widened to the point that ignoring it seems out of touch. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill ­equipped American politics is for a post-­middle-­class nation — how deeply the way the country speaks of itself is tied up with these aspirations, even as more and more of its citizens come to see them as out of reach.

There's much for contemplation here.  We could consider, for instance, what happens when working hard and playing by the rules becomes a formula for privilege-shaming.  Mr Homans is thinking about something else, namely the consequences of the peace dividend that too many pundits don't fully understand.

When people spoke of the middle class in the years immediately after World War II, they were typically talking about the group identified by the sociologist C.Wright Mills in his 1951 book, “White Collar”: the usually college-­educated, deskbound employees of a newly technocratic, corporate economy. It was only a few years later that the definition was generally extended to include skilled blue-­collar workers, who were now earning solid incomes on account of a booming postwar industrial economy and of unions that made sure their members got an equitable piece of it.

The confluence of these two groups — a vision of insurance salesmen and machine operators, mowing the lawns of adjoining split-­level ranches and talking about Sunday’s game — felt extraordinary even in its own time, seemingly incontrovertible proof that American capitalism worked.

Yes, that's The America That Worked^(TM) and it came apart for a number of reasons, many of which involve the political economy of globalization and the workings of comparative advantages as what used to be advanced technology tasks became routine.  But the last Democratic candidate who had the opportunity to propose that the government remove the racial barriers while preserving bourgeois conventions was Bill Clinton, in 1992.

“The one thing that it’s going to take to bring this country together is somebody’s got to come back to the so-­called Reagan Democratic area and say: ‘Look, I’ll give you your values back. I’ll restore the economic leadership, I’ll help you build the middle class back.’ But you’ve got to say, ‘O.K., let’s do it with everybody in this country.’ ”

For which he took stick from the identity-politics part of his coalition.  Thus, it's been a bad quarter-century for bourgeois convention.

Why are they allowed to do things that we’re not allowed to do?

Thus the popularity of one Donald J. Trump.

The aspirational idea of the middle class spoke to the notion that even if Americans were in various stages of prosperity, they were all understood to be heading in the same general direction. But what happens when that’s no longer true? On one end of the “middle class” spectrum is a dream inexorably receding from view; on the other is a pair of socioeconomic blinders obscuring the harsher economic realities of those further down the scale. “The upper middle class are surprised by the rise of Trump,” [Brookings analyst Richard] Reeves told me. “The actual middle class are surprised we’re surprised.”

That generalization is more likely true of the bicoastal upper-middle class types in their enclaves of smug, where residents enjoy the privileges of sneering at and sticking rhetorical fingers in the eyes of people who don't qualify as the gentry's mascots.

SELLING THE SUBURBAN EXPERIMENT?

That term refers to the combination of highway construction, zoning, planned-use developments, and mass-produced housing that shaped residential patterns in the United States after the War.  In aesthetic circles, there's a lot of sentiment that it's all a mistake.  "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal."  From that perspective, "Paradise Drive" might be ironic.  "Perhaps that way [of living and interacting] was made possible by cheap oil, and it's unsustainable, or perhaps its current existence will influence the innovations to be induced by no-longer-cheap oil."  And cultural-studies types had ample material to spin their theories of oppression.  "Silly me, to think that those images were simply the reality that came after the morale-building propaganda during the world war.  And that the efforts during the war produced The America That Worked^(TM)."

Much of that criticism uses the Futurama urban form as a foil.  In reality, the expressways are never as uncongested as the working models, and the high rise housing is more like a khrushchoba or the projects, although there was a recent spate of commercials for exercise equipment featuring people showing their stuff in front of floor-to-ceiling windows in urban condos to the amusement or seduction of people with similar windows.

It might be, though, that it wasn't the Futurama that sold people on suburban living, it was General Electric's Carousel of Progress.

The closed captioning on that recording of the Disney version is amusing, isn't it?

I was at one time skeptical of General Electric's vision, and that without seeing the socialist-realist signage Disney added to the attraction.

That vibrant future, however, was planned, rationalized, top-down (much as the arrangement of exhibits on the midway is). As far as the Carousel of Progress, there was something sad about the 1960s vintage home, in which Mom and Dad and the kids had all sorts of General Electric appliances, but they'd packed the grandparents, who, as residents of the earlier vintage homes, delivered a line about things being as good as they ever could get, setting up the appliance commercial in the final act.

Some of the 1965 content has been tweaked in the nearly sixty years since I saw it, and no doubt there are women of the fevered brow who would lose their temper the moment the 1900 era male head of household started the audioanimatronic spiel.  But, upon reflection, there might have been something in the idea of your own house being tricked out with ever better conveniences.  "The aspirations of the yeoman farmers, mechanics, and merchants were to achieve a level of comfort, not necessarily to die with the most toys."  That should have occurred to me years ago.  "[Henry] Ford [stocked his Greenfield Village with] all sorts of mass-produced and mass-marketed goods to highlight improvements in the lives of ordinary people. His 'history is bunk' quip is a comment on the emphasis of ordinary historians of his time on Important People and Important Events."

Or, thinking about my frontier ancestors as the Age of Steam came to America's Dairyland,

The Francis Hopkins family certainly might think of a world in which people complain about sixty hours as the nearest thing on Earth to Heaven. Their aspirations, however, might have been to no more than ownership of 160 acres free and clear, with a frame house and a windmill pump replacing a log cabin and a windlass well. What intrigues, though, is that the popular term for that aspiration was "competence", which connoted "sustainable."

There's also mention, in the Disney version of the Carousel of Progress, of the "horseless streetcar," referring to early incarnations of the electric streetcar.  The streetcar suburb, we have noted, is an emergent phenomenon that still has a lot of potential for urban development.

Perhaps it is on the people who would undo the Suburban Experiment to present a value proposition that involves more than fit people showing off in front of their windows, the way the modest aspirations of General Electric's animatronic homeowners did.