The End of an Era

 My book American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War(2000) had two endings, a narrative ending and a much more reflective epilogue.  The narrative concluded with LBJ's press conference of July 28, 1965, in which he announced the beginning of increasing ground troop deployments to South Vietnam.  I then wrote these last paragraphs.

"In the same press conference, Johnson announced his choice of Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court.  Two days later, on July 30, he signed the Medicare Bill in Independence, Missouri, and presented former President Truman with Medicare Card no. 1. The Congress would soon pass the Voting Rights Act and a huge Education Bill.  Johnson had a 65 percent approval rating.  The Gemini program, the next step on the way to the moon, had just completed a spectacular mission, including a spacewalk.  The economy had been steadily expanding for four years and five months. Unemployment was 5 percent; annual inflation was less than one percent.  The deficit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1965 was $3.8 billion (less than $20 billion even in 1997 dollars).  One dollar bought four Deutschmarks and 360 Japanese yen.  The Interstate Highway System was well on its way to completion.  The Sound of Music was the most popular movie of the year. American colleges, with the sole exception of the University of California at Berkeley, were full of well-dressed, industrious, and obedient undergraduates, and in January, in a cover story on the Palisades, California high school class of 1965, Time had announced that American youth seemed to be on the verge of a new golden age.

"No one knew that a whole era of American history was over."

The era that came to an end had combined a series of extraordinary national achievements--such as the space program and the Interstate Highway System--with a remarkable expansion of the role of the federal government (Medicare) and decisive, unprecedented progress in civil rights (the  Voting Rights Act).  It was also an era of fiscal discipline, US industrial dominance, and careful macroeconomic planning, creating perhaps the most rapid broad-based economic progress in US history.  And it was a socially conservative era in which men, women, children and  young adults all knew their roles.  Within ten years, things had turned decisively in a different direction, and they have kept going in a different direction ever since.

 Two events last week, combined with other only slightly less recent ones, leave no doubt that we have left other aspects of earlier eras completely behind.

The first such event was the end of the START  treaty, the last of a series of agreements between the US and the USSR--later replaced by Russia--to contain their nuclear arsenals within recognized limits.  The two nations had always struggled to keep that effort alive, and it suffered a major blow when the George W. Bush Administration denounced the treaty banning anti-ballistic missiles so as to pursue Star Wars.  It had allowed both the US and Russia to make huge reductions in their nuclear arsenals, but both sides have continued to upgrade some of their capabilities, and now they can do so without limit.  President Trump claims to want a new agreement including China, but such a pact surely would have been easier to bring about if Russia and the United States had stuck to the old one.  Meanwhile, Trump's obvious aversion to the NATO alliance is forcing other NATO nations to think about developing new nuclear capabilities of their own.  The generations that lived through the invention and detonation of nuclear weapons recognized an obligation to try to get that genie back into the bottle. Today's leaders, who grew up in the relatively secure world that our parents left us, do not.

The second equally striking example was the president's announcement that the EPA is withdrawing the finding that greenhouse gasses threaten public health, thus invalidating the basis on which the agency has tried to regulate the use of fossil fuels.  Even fuel economy standards for cars are going to lapse, and Trump is waging a war on alternative energy sources, which now threaten the fossil fuel industry because they have become cheaper.  That looks to me like the end of attempts to combine science and the power of the federal government to regulate the economy for the common good.  Once again, a clear-eyed look finds evidence that no administration had ever established a clear legal basis for regulating the burning of petroleum and coal.  The original Clean  Air Act did not mention them, and Congress apparently has never passed a law defining climate change as a threat.  Now it looks as if climate change is simply something that we shall have to live with, because industry has won a decisive victory over attempts to regulate it for the common good.  We have already lost the same battle with respect to the financial sector, going back to the 1980s.  

And last but not least, our political climate has changed beyond recognition.  The founders of our nation believed that only a virtuous citizenry could make a republic work.  They believed that our heads must rule our hearts--a problem movingly addressed in private by one of their most distinguished members, Thomas Jefferson, in a love letter to a married woman.  These beliefs later led Jefferson, who took office at a moment of partisan conflict every bit as intense as our own, one that had nearly brought the young republic down, to announce in his first inaugural, "We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans."  Now instead we have a president without any emotional restraint of any kind, who explicitly denies any restraints upon his own behavior, and who--along with the rest of his administration--treats the entire opposition party as treacherous, dangerous, worthless scum, whose power must be eliminated by any means necessary.  One would search the archives in vain for another cabinet member's appearance before a congressional committee that would rival Attorney General Bondi's display before the House last week.  It made a mockery of the oversight process that is one of the foundations of our government.  In the meantime, she has joyfully embraced her assigned mission of making criminal cases, however weak, against anyone who has offended her boss.  So far federal judges and a grand jury have managed to stand in the way. There will be more tests. 

And unfortunately, the same spirit of partisanship and a similar disregard for facts has infected the opposition as well as the government.  Again and again I have read that the administration's attempts to place new restrictions on voting are illegal because the Constitution gives all power over the administration of elections to the states.  That is not true.  The relevant clause of the Constitution, which everyone seems too lazy to search for on google, states, "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chasing Senators."  The ultimate authority rests with Congress. That of course, isn't enough to satisfy President Trump, who won't wait for Congress.  He has just announced that he will issue an executive order changing the rules for voting.  I also believe that the Democratic Party's knee-jerk opposition to any new voter ID laws is a mistake, both politically and on the merits.  Polls show that very large majorities of Americans support them, and there is no reason to oppose them so long as they are coupled with provisions that make the necessary IDs easy enough to get.  Indeed, it is noteworthy that despite  endless hand-wringing among Democrats about "voter suppression," I am not aware of any accusations of Republicans having actually stopped anyone from voting in the election of 2024.   The real problem is to prevent the current administration from getting control of counting the votes.  The Justice Department has seized all the 2020 ballots from Fulton County in Georgia and may use them to make a fraudulent case for voter fraud there.

Perhaps the most striking feature of our new era is the eclipse of the printed word.  The invention of radio does not seem to have hurt the printed word, perhaps because it simply read from scripts.  But the invention of television, which did provoke some alarm when it first appeared, has been a completely different matter. Images began to replace words as means of communication, and now we all have exactly the images we want to see at the touch of a fingertip.  The whole habit of reading, thinking, and concluding, which made the formation of our nation possible, has been lost among most of our citizens.  

I must again remind my valued readers of why I write these posts.  I do not do so because I think I or any of my readers can do anything to stop these trends in the world at large.  The trends are too big, and great historians, as I often say, do not argue with history.  Yet there are those among us who still enjoy using our brains to put things in context, and to use history and commentary for the purpose Dr. Johnson ascribed to literature: better to enjoy life, and better to endure it.  And to paraphrase my other mentor Orwell, the earth is still going around the sun, and neither the ideologues nor the bureaucrats will ever be able to stop it.  Their time shall pass.