These executives were themselves middle class, and probably understood that not every son in Scarsdale, Scottsdale, or Grosse Pointe should be able to do better and live better than his father. When taking off from a fairly high starting point, some will fall instead of rise. But the executives meant more than incomes or titles; they were also talking about the kind of world, the kind of America, their sons and daughters would inhabit. They were not speaking in the put-down vocabulary of our times in which a phrase like “the American dream” can be used only in irony, but from the despair about these times felt by those who are not themselves cynical.

Promises fulfilled

Yet the despair seems, at the least, to be premature. A persuasive case can be made that if the American dream is dead, or dormant, it is because the dream of the fathers has been mostly realized, while the dream of the sons has not yet been successfully formulated. Like all dreams, the American dream has never been easy to describe in the cold light of day. In its traditional form, it included both our purpose as a nation, embodied in such propositions as “liberty and justice for all,” as well as the personal goals that echo in the familiar phrase, the land of promise. To all but the most cynical, it will be seen that liberty does extend from sea to shining sea (the cynical are often the best exemplars of it); that justice is now more evenly shared, even by minorities, than at any time in our history; and that the land of promise has proved to be so, not universally, but for successive generations in the millions.

But dreams achieved become mundane. The achievements bring new problems. As the preceding article points out, justice more evenly shared has been accompanied by higher crime rates. The great improvements in material well-being often do not satisfy. To have all the dreams that money can buy seems not enough; in the words of Peggy Lee’s song: “Is That All There Is?”

Not many Americans are so naive as to think that money automatically brings happiness. They are not experiencing the hedonist’s hangover. What seems to be bothering them are some of the practical trade-offs that mass affluence has required. People feel that the vast and impersonal technology that brings them their comforts and satisfies their needs has somehow diminished them as individuals. Most Americans are “better off” than they once were, but are less singular for being so, and feel less individually attended to. They take the wonders of their possessions for granted, and the failures (so different from the TV commercial’s glamorous promise) resignedly.

They can be well fed, well clothed, and well sheltered, but live in a pattern indistinguishable from their neighbors: they crowd the same highways, watch the same television shows, queue up at the same supermarket checkout counters. They can afford to travel more and farther because of economies of scale; they fly in jumbo jets to places where hospitality is calibrated, rooms are standardized, and service is chain-management functional. “Getting away from everybody” gets harder and harder as more and more people can afford to try.

The newest dent in the American dream of affluence comes from the discovery that our resources (and the world’s) are more finite than we thought. This challenges that delicious American freedom, the right to be prodigal and uncaring—that open, generous, spontaneous attitude sometimes so envied, sometimes so deplored, by more parsimonious and tradition-confined foreigners. Americans have always believed that “there’s plenty more where that came from”; you don’t divide the wealth, you multiply it. And thus every man’s ambitions—to make, to sell, to buy—somehow can be felt to serve the common good.

If rapid growth is no longer the easy answer to our problems, the alternatives to it are difficult for a nation with an economy so attuned to growth. Adding this to so many other matters they worry about, many Americans have lost confidence in what they once regarded as their natural ally, the future.

Year 10 of the transition

The contemporary fear of the future might be lessened if it were realized that we are now well into a period of drastic change, rather than just at the beginning edge of it.

The frame of mind that sighs nostalgically for a more assured past seems to regard each current new year as a darkening, and finds confirmation of this belief in some event that is new and horrendous—hijackings, Watergate, Arab oil—which colors the times, but does not really define them. The transitional period we are now in has been going on for at least a decade. It has been five years since the worst campus eruptions; seven since the worst ghetto disorders. The postwar 1945-65 years are now a recognizable historical era, and a radical change in attitudes has taken place since then. In the tenth year of the transition we can be said to be coming to better terms with the way we actually live. We are gaining on disorder, yet without having found an agreed direction.

The patient young

But if the future shape of society is far from clear, one prediction is already possible: those parents who fear for the future may find that their children are better prepared to live in it than the parents are.

The young generally seem able to take or leave alone the goodies that society turns out for them; they don’t use dress, for example, to mark their place in the pecking order. When a computer fouls up the father’s charge accounts, the result may be splenetic rage, and a rush to straighten things out; his son is more apt to toss the bill in the wastebasket and wait for the computer to unsnarl itself. In their casual, slouching patience, the young have adapted creatively to crowded situations.

Their loyalties are internalized, and not given to institutions. Their rejection of hierarchy in society is deep-seated; their scorn of institutions is often cited as proof of honesty and freedom from cant, which it often is, but it also sanctions in some of them the right to “rip off” institutions. To judge by the books they favor and the films they see, they feel empathy only toward the rootless, whom they do not so much admire as sympathize with. Open to new ideas and experiences, they remain opaquely un-open to established values.

Since the young, in their numbers, will be the survivors, their continuing attitudes will inevitably set the tone of the American future. So far, having rejected, ignored, or satirized most of the old values, they have been largely content to rely on the purity of their own intentions as a substitute. They have managed to discredit, in some measure, the country’s leadership elites in many fields, but are not yet in position to become leaders themselves, and besides have an in-built resistance to the exercise of authority by anyone, including one another. Their most charitable assumption about anyone in power is that he has been compromised, where he has not been corrupted; and his role is seen to be, in one of their favorite words, manipulative.

The victims of this attack have included anyone—business executives, union leaders, editors, politicians—who had a powerful voice or sat in a powerful chair. And when “the Establishment” came under attack in the violent Sixties, it proved more vulnerable than anyone expected—perhaps because (contrary to the image conjured up by the young) it never really had all that much authority, or never existed as a common body of views.

We are gaining on disorder, and coming to terms with the way we actually live.

In any event, successful men in the prime of life found both their authority and their motives challenged. The challenging still goes on. “I can stand the arguments,” says the president of a large midwestern university, “if only they didn’t question my integrity.”

The elastic institutions

The leadership elite is back in control of day-to-day affairs, even in the universities, but what they have lost, in terms of both self-confidence and a mandate, will not be easy to replace. It can be said of a number of American institutions—as the British political scientist Harold Laski said of the American presidency—that they are surprisingly elastic. These institutions can expand quickly to meet new challenges, but they can also shrink, particularly when there is no broad agreement about what they should be leading us toward. The shrinkage of leadership is both the best evidence and worst symptom of disagreement about a national purpose.

When in trouble the familiar response of most perplexed citizens is to look to the White House for leadership. But the control that presidential leadership often exerts over competing ambitions in our society has been damaged by an unprecedented dozen years that began with John F. Kennedy’s assassination and ended with an interim President operating from a fragile political base as the first Chief Executive not elected to national office. Restoration of vigor and trust to the White House is indeed essential if the American dream is to be restored as a working model, but as Laski has said, truly strong presidencies grow not so much from magnetic leadership as from a strong sense in the citizenry of urgent and shared goals.

A case can be made that business leaders have been the real energizers of this materialistic society. Turning its back on Europe’s luxuries and privileges, America from the beginning set out to be a working place. With so much to be done, culture was scorned as effete. And thus developed a nation of great egalitarian vigor, crudeness, impulsiveness, hard work, and ambition. Even today, and even among the young, criticisms directed against materialism come up against a stronger demand for goods and services, a stronger need for jobs.

As for the business leadership itself, in these uneasy ten years of transition, it has done much to shore up its defenses. It has met, deflected, blunted, or accepted some of the charges that critics have brought against it; it has to a degree changed its way of thinking on many subjects, including pollution, consumerism, and minority rights. But in general, it has moved in a manner—giving ground bit by bit—and in a direction it doesn’t want to go. Even more unsettling, it is not even clear about the direction, and is thus in no position to lead the way.

Polemics is a growth industry

All of which suggests that the country is in for constant hassles between contending claimants for public support, for coalition politics instead of strong leadership. And it suggests a new growth industry of lawyers, lobbyists, and polemicists, all engaged not so much in public relations as in relations between publics. This situation might be celebrated more, as the happy disorder of freedom, if it did not so often lead to an anarchy of powerlessness, in the absence of that most essential ingredient of democracy, common consent.

An absence of common consent in present-day society is in fact what the transition is about. If the Establishment had all the power it was assumed to have, and even if it were prepared to turn over power or leadership to someone else, it could find no one to give the baton to. We have lived with multiple and contending interests before, but never have those interests been so articulate and skilled at getting attention. Those who assault the citadels of the Establishment flaunt the banner of “accountability,” demanding a kind of democratic plebiscite on all institutions. They rarely assume responsibility for restoring what they tear down; like the slothful waiter, they shrug: “That’s not my table.”

“Hell No, I Won’t Go”

Yet out of this near-anarchic wrangling of the transition years, a new set of attitudes seems likely to emerge. The process can be seen at work in the case of one value—patriotism—that has traditionally been regarded as the very symbol of America’s faith in itself.

There has been a decided decline in Americans’ sense of their own uniqueness and superiority as a nation. Those who see this as a decline in patriotism (though it is really not that) find abundant evidence in the “Hell No, I Won’t Go” attitudes about Vietnam, and the ways in skits, songs, and clothes that the once untouchable American flag has come to be derided. (A genius for the offensive gesture is one of the skills of the television generation.)

But now there is fairly broad agreement that Vietnam was a regrettable overextension of American power, and attitudes about Vietnam seem less an index of patriotism than they did. “Hell No” brings memories of the Oxford Union resolution in 1933 not to fight for King and Country. Seven years later, when Britain’s survival was really at issue, those young “I Won’t Go’s” fought the Battle of Britain.

The kind of patriotism many still sigh for, and want overtly demonstrated by others, was really at its most intense a century ago, in another unsettling time. Patriotism then was proud but suspicious, excluding and parochial. The immigrants of many tongues and cultures had to be quickly immersed in a melting pot if America was to survive in its own identity. New York City’s school superintendent in 1896 considered it his duty to “fuse and weld” immigrant children into “one homogeneous mass, obliterating from the earliest moment” any trace of the “obstructive, warring, and irritating elements” they brought with them.

The promise of America to the immigrant millions was that their sons could be what they themselves could not. The achievement is that so many have come here, and so few have left. But a more secure and sophisticated America no longer tries so hard to root out what was alien in a person’s past. He is free to take pride in that past, and latter-day patriots feel enriched by their country’s diverse strains.

At home abroad

Any contemporary American holds three memberships. He inhabits a nation, gives obedience to a government, and belongs to a culture. The governmental part—thanks to the constitutional fear of too powerful a state—is often the least consequential part of his activities. His culture is no longer bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific, but gives and takes from everywhere. An American might even concede that in smaller and more homogeneous democratic nations such as the Netherlands and Denmark, the public’s affairs are often tended to with more civility and stability than here. If he works abroad, he often finds such societies more congenial to live in, while remaining resolutely American.

Beneath all the divisions is an epoxy of spirit that is well called patriotism.

Contemporary patriots must also come to terms with the fact that the U.S., while still widely respected abroad, is also the target of a great deal of criticism. One reason for this change is that where once the practical idealism of Jefferson, Thoreau, and Lincoln was our most familiar export, now Americans are a conspicuous economic presence in other countries.

What a pity, too, that at the moment after World War II when the U.S. belatedly accepted its responsibility as a great power, it should have to concentrate its energies on building global alliances in contention with the U.S.S.R. In the process, the American signal to the rest of the world, and to itself, became somewhat less clear.

The beacon becomes a shield

American foreign policy has always combined idealism and self-interest in a semi-stable mixture (see the article on page 152). That mixture worked marvelously in the Marshall plan. But as foreign policy came to be defined by the Cold War, foreign aid was soon allocated not to the most needy but to the most exposed of our client states. Occasional attempts to align ourselves with forces of change were failures.

American policymakers came more and more to value order in other countries and allied themselves with those who provided it. The policymakers shut their ears to those whose cries of freedom we would once have responded to. A lot of Americans felt the good name of this nation had thus been damaged. Even among its allies the U.S. seems now less of a beacon and more of a shield.

Carrying the shield was an unpleasant task reluctantly taken up and on the whole successful; times have now sufficiently changed so that the harder edges of that policy are now less called for. A very basic reason for wishing success to detente with the Soviet Union is not just that it will decrease the cost of armaments, or make nuclear war less likely, but that it will bring about a condition in the world where America may once more be true to itself abroad. This is to be on the side of free people, but favoring trade and travel and exchange with all, acting justly itself and concerned with justice everywhere. That still seems a legitimate part of the American dream.

America today appears at a point of intersecting complexities, but this is not the same as describing an America in decline. In fact, the supply of earnest preoccupation with America’s direction seems as large as it ever was, though conclusions are more various and less optimistically expressed. Voters are too diverse and prickly in their attitudes to be easily assembled into obedient political machines, which is the way democracy once got its work done. To some degree they reflect that other field of expansion in which America has been so prodigal—education—which develops talents and expands horizons in such numbers as to produce a sense of frustrated possibilities—an educated discontent.

The latent order

The result is not a society gone soft, unpatriotic, or indifferent, but thwarted and baffled. Its members may feel powerless to achieve but can be quite forceful in denying, and they now demand, in a thousand little forays, that all institutions—government and business particularly—pay them heed. They do so in an often sour spirit of scorning piecemeal victories over what they cannot on the whole change.

The bold constitutional decision to place all sovereignty in the people can lead to a great deal of aimlessness when the people are of many minds. And the awareness that so many problems are interlocked, and that even the experts, with all their information, are not agreed on the solutions, makes it harder for any leader to put forward a program with confidence and to amass support for it. These conditions reinforce a general feeling of powerlessness. Sometimes it seems as though the best that can be said for our present circumstances is that all the disputing elements in our society are being thoroughly canvassed.

Yet it is not romantic to insist that, though no politician has lately been able to summon it up, there exists beneath all the apparent divisions in this country a latent order, a wish to reach common decisions, an epoxy of spirit that is well called patriotism. The proof of this spirit, in the midst of uneasy transition, lies in the directions that—despite considerable provocations—the U.S. has not taken. It has recoiled from, rather than responded to, those who would incite the nation to violence; it has been angered by official abuses of power.

Americans uneasily sense some permanent change in their condition, and see more change required of them, even if they are sometimes daunted by the lengthy agenda of what needs doing. In the doing of these things, however, there may yet return a pride in accomplishing them together. The merit of freedom, so instinctive to the American character and not lightly to be surrendered, has always depended on the unforeseen uses that can be made of it. The direction that this nation is now taking is certainly not clear, but then ages like that of the Holy Roman Empire and the Renaissance found their identity, and their names, only long afterward. It may be that for a long time we will be unable to define the new kind of society we are making, but will simply discover ourselves living in it.