What’s Happened More Than Once Could Happen Again
My mind has been in a rut thinking that the one time we were virtuous was a fluke. We recently had a reminder that’s not true.
That all needs explanation. The current ugliness of our political and social situation had me lose track of the fact that the post-war era was not our only comparatively good era. Part of the reason things were politically sensible, at least relatively, during the ’50s to ’70s was an echo of WWII. All the patriotism and common bond that war built, and all those guys (mostly guys) in politics who had fought side-by-side or under similar horrible circumstances, created a more civil kind of political competition.
The aftermath of the war also had the nation well poised for a booming economy for long after. That echoed too. While the era had its shortcomings for some, women still treated as if they should be obedient, people of color still held to lower wealth and position by subtle, and unsubtle, bias, the national wealth softened that. In a living demonstration of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the fact that all those white guys felt absolutely confident that they and their children could have jobs, good working careers, a home, a not-terrible retirement, it afforded us the luxury of being willing to consider better things. Better things like President Nixon, of all people, responding to the popular push for environmental responsibility by creating the Environmental Protection Agency. And safer conditions for workers by creating the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. Better things like the social progress on the status of women and people of color. Not perfection but improvement.
My mind had gotten in a rut of thinking that it was only that very unusual set of circumstances that allowed us to behave in more civilized ways. That without circumstances like those we tend to behave worse. Just recently I had a reminder, we all had a reminder available to us, that there are other times we’ve behaved well.
The reminder was “The American Revolution” documentary on PBS. One of those Ken Burns remarkably impressive pieces. No, the show was not all happiness and light about what wonderful philosophical ideas were part of the revolution. On the contrary, for anyone who only had a passing notion of the Founding Fathers and the great liberties that came out of it, the show was a good lesson in how conflicted, messy, unimaginably bloody and gory, vicious and devastating the war was. Full of assorted motivations beyond liberty, contradictory and wavering, full of both bravery and inhumanity.
But despite what we went through to get to its end what did indeed come out of it was some great things. Those liberties, best encapsulated, as always, in the Bill of Rights. Note that the leaders at the end of the revolution did not aim for those rights. When the draft of the constitution was sent around to the colonies to ratify, as you may know, the colonies objected. Some colonial leaders objected and some heard the pressure from their citizens. Where were the rights they understood they had just sacrificed for? The citizens would not allow the new era to begin without those rights added in.
There’s an imperfect two-part process in this. The leaders, at the start of the revolution, rallied around their right to be free of British imperial rule, and they were enlightened enough to pick up and chant the new ideas of John Locke and others about human rights. New, in that the rights being declared were a step beyond what had been in the Magna Carta. So the leaders gave the people a taste for these ideas, but then forgot to feed them when they drafted the constitution. The people, now hungry for what they had tasted, and in a position to make demands because of the up-in-the-air state of things at the end of the revolution, demanded the full meal.
A similar thing happened after WWII. President Roosevelt (FDR) and his team, started to focus the economy much more on the benefit of the people rather than just the top. The New Deal. The people got the taste of this. And they were in a position to demand. Partly because the New Deal included much more leverage for workers, mostly white guys, to demand good pay and treatment and they came to expect that’s how things should work. And partly because of that booming national wealth that made many things possible. Leadership had wet their whistle, people were in a position to demand, and good things happened. Same pattern after the revolution and after WWII.
Does this mean this can only happen after a terrible war? No. It’s just that conditions pushed it along. But people could push it along anytime if they realized it.
We are in a dark and disrupted time. If great leadership like FDR and his team, or like Washington and Jefferson and the rest, came forward and held out the possibility of a new people’s era, and if the people demanded, just because they’re pissed, and squeezed, and because they can, then a new era of good things could happen again.
Will it? Unknown. But the possibility is just dangling out there for the right leadership to start the process again.
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