I fear for our nation, and I am not alone. The echoes of the past are becoming louder, and I recall the decades between 1961 and 1981 with trepidation, for that era was marked by crisis, tumult, discord, civil violence, war, a near miss of nuclear war, extreme polarization and assassinations.
Many Americans sense the country never really recovered from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, or from the assassinations of presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. five years later in 1968. An attempt on the life of President Gerald Ford was narrowly thwarted in 1975, and an attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan very nearly succeeded in 1981.
A terrible madness swept the land, as dozens of bombings and the bizarre kidnaping of media heiress Patty Hearst by a domestic terror cell pockmarked the 1970s, a decade marked by a failed presidency, revelations of domestic spying by federal security agencies and runaway inflation.
It was a very long night before morning dawned in America again. From the longer view, the twenty years of tumult can be understood as the political and social reaction to what changed in America in the previous twenty years of 1941 to 1960: America had been roused from isolationism to fight a world war, forced to protect allies in Europe and Asia from the threat posed by an expansionist totalitarian Soviet Union, and a century-old reckoning with the racial divide that made a mockery of our nation's principle that "all men are created equal" and should be treated equally before the law. The promises made by the founding documents of the nation had yet to be fulfilled.
The very success of our protection of war-devastated allies created an economic crisis of our own, as the old, less efficient industrial plant of America was outpaced by the new industries that arose in Germany and Japan with modern technologies, industries aided by America's open door to exports and the strong dollar.
The 1970s was a decade of economic adjustment with high costs to both capital and labor as the Energy Crisis and the need to tackle industrial pollution drove a multi-trillion dollar (in today's dollars) rebuilding of American industry, a process punctuated by recessions that caused great misery for those laid off and struggling with high inflation.
These sacrifices and conflicts eventually paid dividends. Inequality eased, high interest rates crushed the inflationary spiral and the investments in higher efficiencies and new technologies started paying off.
My fear is that we've entered another 20 years of tumult, chaotic conflict, infectious madness and discord, but without the resilience we possessed in the 1960s and 1970s, the resilience generated by low debt, strong domestic industries and supply chains, low levels of regulation, low-cost healthcare and education and much higher levels of civic virtue, community, national purpose, moral legitimacy and self-reliance than are visible today.
Whether we admit it or not, we are riven by rising inequality in wealth and opportunity, high debt loads and little consensus on how to get through the night in one piece and emerge better from facing the challenges head on. I fear the siren-song appeal of denial and magical thinking, as if a rocket to Mars or a new phone app or another AI chatbot will fix what's broken in America.
I fear our buffers have been thinned, and our ability to make sacrifices for the future has been lost. Our moral foundations are in such tatters that getting rich by whatever means are within reach is now the "solution" to the coming storm, as if greed bled dry of ethics isn't a proximate cause of the coming storm.
My hope is that we gain the wisdom to see there are no easy solutions, no one-size-fits-all fixes, that solutions will be localized, partial, contingent on continual adaptation to changing conditions, and that this continual experimentation and evolution requires an acceptance of continual failures and a keen sense of humility about our limits.
I hope we gain the wisdom that we need each other, not as enemies but as colleagues, not always in agreement but respectful nonetheless.
Bastille Day July 14--vive la France, God Bless America
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