Judging from the election returns, the nostalgia vote isn’t making much headway in 1996–neither the Morning-in-America sort from Steve Forbes, nor the Turn-Back-the-Clock variety espoused by Pat Buchanan. But the Buchanan campaign in particular has underscored and amplified a note of heartache that is widely felt.
The pain of layoffs and dislocations has evoked a wave of nostalgia for the 1950s: for the Fortune 500, good schools, an enemy abroad, the Latin Mass, tidy suburbs, paternalistic companies, a respected civil service, a binding social contract between companies and their workers.
The casualties of the last 15 years of global change are at center stage. “Economic Anxiety,” proclaimed a recent Business Week cover. “On The Battlefield of Business, Millions of Casualties” began a striking series in the New York Times on what it called “The Downsizing of America.”
Certainly we are living in a time of astonishing change. More than 43 million jobs have been lost since 1979, as the Times pointed out. But another 70 million jobs were created in the same interval. And with 126 million jobs and a low unemployment rate, the U.S. economy seems to be the quickest in the world to embrace change–a precondition, presumably, for further growth. There is strong historic evidence that such periodic “gales of creative destruction,” as the economist Joseph Schumpeter once described them, play a crucial role in reconfiguring economies for periods of further prosperity and development.
At least five distinct trends, all interrelated, are behind the current wave of economic anxiety.
– The golden age of American oligopoly–and with it the great days of the unions–ended 15 years ago, as a result of growth abroad and consequent global competition. It had lasted roughly from 1945 until 1980. Those palmy days were in large part the result of the ravages of World War II, from which only America emerged unscathed. But American foreign policy in those years was to put the economies of Europe and Asia back on their feet and trade freely with them. By the late 1970s, American companies’ hold on their markets was being challenged by new foreign competitors–as, for example, when superior Japanese cars entered the U.S. market. Today, American firms have climbed back to highly competitive global positions, thanks in large part to the discipline enforced by a free-wheeling market for corporate control. Other nations, notably Japan and Germany, are now feeling pain.
– The Cold War has ended. Virtually all campaigns since the Napoleonic Wars have concluded with economic letdown–usually an outright depression. As the half-century of high-tech competition between the U.S. and Russia winds down, this peace seems to be exceptional only with respect to the mildness of the slowdown of general business–even though tens of thousand of workers in the military-industrial complex have lost their jobs. Only a new arms race among various smaller nations, especially those that feel threatened by China, has served to moderate the decline.
– A wave of invention and technological change has ocurred and been turned into commerce, amounting to an industrial revolution comparable in magnitude to revolutions in the early 19th and early 20th centuries. Automobiles and television both entailed major changes in the way Americans lived and worked, just as had steam power and electricity before them. The computer seems destined to have even more profound and unforseeable effects on the way work and culture are organized–since it makes it possible to move beyond the familiar regularities of “mass production.” As a new “information” sector has emerged, the manufacturing sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole–much as the agricultural sector declined to less than 3 percent of the economy from more than 50 percent–while food production soared.
– A long-time trend toward centralization and direct government control has been reversed. Since it was first enunciated 125 years ago, “Wagner’s Law” held that an ever-larger fraction of a nation’s resources would be spent through the public sector. Since the mid-1970s, in virtually every nation in the world, that trend has shifted–in favor of more decentralized decision-making generally and privatization in particular.
– A sea of change in women’s role in society has occurred. Suffrage was a big step barely 75 years ago, but women’s entry into the labor force in dramatically larger numbers since the 1960s has represented a more far-reaching change. The sweep of American women into the work force seems to have leveled off. Between 1960 and 1995, the number of working women rose from 22 million to 58 million. This “labor force participation” issue, as the economists quaintly call it, is now altering time-honored conceptions of career and work-place patterns, forcing changes in the social security system, changing our conception of the family, and in general creating a more free and equal world.
Against trends of this magnitude, Buchananism is impotent. Build a wall, repeal a treaty, pass a law to raise wages: Outright rebellion, whether with pitchforks or protectionism, simply won’t work on a scale great enough to make a difference in the broad scheme of things.
Moreover, all evidence is that it happened before, and with generally good results–albeit at intervals of a century or so.
A great wave of social reform accompanied the tumult of the industrial revolution in England, starting in the 1820s and accelerating thereafter. Police departments were organized, public schools were founded, child labor was forbidden, factory hours were shortened and slavery was abolished. All are monuments to the ability of law to shape and soften the operation of market forces.
Do comparable remedies exist for today’s dislocations? The answer surely must be yes. The first step requires a fuller understanding of the forces at work–and the nature of the losses that they have caused.
Nobody has been a more diligent searcher after solutions than Labor Secretary Robert Reich–and the retraining and education programs he has favored are likely to become a staple of the information age.
So the current debate really boils down to a disagreement about how to treat a set of real injuries–and an amorphous fear. Buchanan’s lashing-out is a form of tantrum. Forbes’ sunny exhortations about optimism and growth amount to denial. No wonder that the dignity with which Bob Dole has born for 50 years an arm withered in a righteous cause looms as such a potent symbol in the present campaign.
Such forward-looking stoicism has been the hallmark of the generation of World War II since the day the war ended. That is why, for all the talk of “one last mission,” there is nothing whatsoever nostalgic about the Dole campaign–only an illuminating argument with Bill Clinton about the best way to proceed.
