We all do it, but Frank Rich has developed a drooling passion for it: recalling a prototypical modern America that never was, one virtuously united in a far-sighted, "can-do," spirited belief in economic democracy and national progress.
"America can’t move forward until we once again believe, as [we did in the late 1950s and JFK era]," Rich thematically concludes this morning, "that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because [of oppressive wealth inequality]."
Rich does acknowledge that "Many of America’s more sweeping changes since 1956 are for the better," such as organic progress -- then unimaginable -- in the areas of civil and women's rights. "But," proceeds Rich with a quickly dismissive pen, "for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class."
This school of idealistic thought has come to crowd the modern progressive mind; we should dream big dreams, think big thoughts, idealize an idealized past, and thereby amplify some rapturous future that awaits us -- if we believe. Belief, coursing through the national soul like a reinvigorating elixir, comes foremost.
Here's my problem with that: It's humbug.
OK, that's the short version, a bit less explanatory than perhaps desirable. The longer (but not long) version is that the historic rise of America's middle class throughout the 1950s and 1960s came as a direct product of the profoundly pragmatic minds of New Dealing men and women who had stopped dreaming and started doing. Because of the absolute necessities of the 1930s' and 1940s', they put aside their grand utopian urges and pushed and hustled and grabbed whatever progress could realistically be had at the moment.
As R. Hofstadter noted to lasting effect in The Age of Reform, the ideological personalities of left and right essentially traded places in the '30s. The activist left cashiered its transcendent progressive dreams and instead sought practical, experimental, whatever-works incrementalism, while the right retired its hard, dollars-and-cents, no-nonsense approach to governing and began screaming in protest and slopping about in a reveried, non-existent utopia of an Ideal America Lost.
The reactionary right is, by definition, still there -- adrift in evocative thought of either "True Grit" or "Ozzie and Harriet" -- but the left is slipping, losing its grip on the hard, pragmatic, Rooseveltian step-by-step struggle for progress.
All of which is reflected in Rich's rather cheaply opportunistic observation: "President Obama [has] called for more spending on research and infrastructure, more educational reform and more clean energy technology. (All while reducing the deficit, mind you.) Worthy goals, but ... you realize something more fundamental is missing from America now: the bedrock faith in the American way that J.F.K. could tap into during his era’s Sputnik moment."
Let us not forget that JFK, however, had not sufficiently pulled us out of the horrific McCarthy era to avoid sucking us straight into the even more horrific Vietnam era. All that "bedrock faith in the American way" -- here, over there, everywhere -- soon ran aground, first in Southeast Asia, then at home. America's immeasurable hubris in its "can-do" spirit doubled back on itself -- a lesson in spiritual moderation.
The thrust of Rich's exhortation, I get. We all get it; we all tend to look back and see some version of a nobler America that never was. I also take and appreciate Rich's point that Obama has got himself lost in the policy weeds, and now needs to present himself not as a fastidious gardener but as an artist before a very large canvass, painting a broad and beautiful landscape, into which there lies a discernable path.
Yet, Mr. Rich, a little humility, please. I believe Obama already profoundly knows this and that an uplifting Grand Presidential Narrative -- of the old progressive style -- is on its way, since, after all, a campaign is underway. But he also knows, as FDR knew, that real progress comes only step by step, that it's cumulative -- and that idealism, though spiritually transporting it may be, is but a minor partner to his rather unsexy workhorse of progressive pragmatism.
Wish I had found this blog sooner and am grateful for someone on BWD's new blog for linking to it.
I'll be a regular reader, for sure.
Happy New Year!
Posted by: Bob | December 27, 2010 at 12:49 PM