{This is the second of my reflections on Kirkpatrick Sale’s Human Scale, published in 1980.}
"O beautiful for spacious skies, / but now those skies are threatening /they’re beating ploughshares into swords / for this tired old man that we elected king / armchair warriors often fail / and we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales / this is the end / this is the end of the innocence." (Don Henley, “The End of the Innocence”)
"Here I sit so patiently / waiting to find out what price / you have to pay to get out of / going through all these things twice." (Bob Dylan, “Memphis Blues Again”)
The Seventies was America’s Buzzkill Decade; by its end, in the summer of 1979, when Jimmy Carter limned the national malaise, three-quarters of Americans agreed that the future was not what it used to be.
But then came Ronald “Morning in America” Reagan, and happy days were here again, except for midwestern farmers and Rust Belt blue-collar workers. 1 By the time Reagan left office in 1989, in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal and with several members of his administration in jail or under indictment, there had been a measurable uptick in national optimism—despite which, 54% of Americans still believed the nation was on the “wrong track”. They could not all have been bitter holdouts from the Sixties.
According to Kirkpatrick Sale, in his 1980 book Human Scale, at least since the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 “the American public has become disillusioned with the national government and apathetic or cynical about its efficacy.” On the one hand, the government in those years had consistently underperformed and disappointed, promising more than it could deliver, misleading the nation into a pointless and protracted war, and supporting the struggle for civil rights just as long as it remained south of the Mason-Dixon line. Just as the smoke began to clear from the riotous Sixties, the Nixon/Watergate scandal (1972-74) did to government and politics what Upton Sinclair had done to the meatpacking industry: it revealed the tawdriness, the corruption, and the venality beneath the surface. The Seventies saw devastating inflation, the OPEC oil shock, long lines at the gas pumps, and American citizens taken hostage in Iran. In short, from 1963 to 1980, Americans had no shortage of reasons to be “apathetic or cynical” about Washington.
On the other hand, we had (and have) no one but ourselves to blame for the sorry state of government: Americans, to put it bluntly, did not and do not vote, at least not in the numbers necessary for a functioning democracy. In 1960, 62.8% of eligible voters weighed in at the polls on Kennedy vs. Nixon; in the sixty years since, despite voting rights legislation and voter registration reforms, we have not approached that highwater mark. The closest we have come in the past fifty years to the 1960 benchmark was in 2008, when just over 58% of eligible voters made it to the polls to deliver a verdict that many of them would inexplicably repudiate just eight years later.
Four decades after Human Scale, most telling is the ongoing discrepancy between voting numbers and expressed levels of dissatisfaction with the state of the nation. In 1979, 75% of Americans agreed that something was seriously wrong with American life; a year later, only 53% of voters showed up for the presidential contest. In 2008, 76% of Americans believed that the country was on the “wrong track,” but only 58% of voters, as mentioned above, cast ballots. We seem to be substantially better at griping than we are at voting.
It doesn’t help, of course, that one of our two national political parties openly admits that, for its own electoral purposes, less is more when it comes to voting; the GOP would rather not have voters meddling in the business of politics. For decades, Republicans have opposed every effort to make voting easier, denouncing such efforts as nothing more than “power grabs” by Democrats. And why bother voting, anyway, when a major party candidate—indeed, when the incumbent President himself—says that our electoral system is rigged, that ballots will be stolen and/or fabricated, that non-citizens are swarming the polls at the behest of crooked politicians, and that dark forces are at work undermining the integrity of our elections?
Rather than blame the electorate, Kirkpatrick Sale quoted Arthur Hadley: “Voters voluntarily avoid the booth because they see no connection between politics and their lives.” Even worse, as Sale himself added, “I suspect that a lot of the people who do go into the voting booths have no great faith that what they are doing touches their lives in any important way.” America, as of 1980, was experiencing “a decline in the credibility of legislative bodies,” according to one source; “a loss of confidence in the nation’s leaders and institutions,” according to a second, and “mutual distrust between government and citizens,” according to a third. If anything, the levels of public faith, credibility, confidence, and trust have all declined since 1980 and have plummeted since 2016.
The problem was and is bigger than voting. Sale observed that “Citizenship has simply evaporated in American life, leaving a residue of felt powerlessness.” He detailed the numerous decisions which presidents and legislatures routinely make, regardless of political affiliation, issues ranging from war and taxation to the environment and workplace health and safety, all made without directly consulting citizens and “without any participation from the people who are to be affected other than their having pulled a lever in a polling booth two years before.” He shared this analysis from Robert Paul Wolff of Columbia University:
“Since World War II, governments have increasingly divorced themselves from anything which could be called the will of the people. The complexity of the issues, the necessity of technical knowledge, and most important, the secrecy of everything having to do with national security, have conspired to attenuate the representative function of elected officials until a point has been reached which might be called political stewardship, or, after Plato, ‘elective guardianship’. People cannot meaningfully be called free if their representatives vote independently of their wishes, or when laws are passed concerning issues which they are not able to understand. Nor can people be called free who are subject to secret decisions, based on secret data, having unannounced consequences for their well-being and their very lives.”
For a multitude of reasons, Sale lamented, “We do not have authentic political selves, we do not act politically, we do not know what is happening in and cannot much change the affairs of the nation, so the meager act of voting hardly carries much weight. We do not understand ourselves publicly, as public beings; we do not have public duties and public rights and public responsibilities of any meaning; there is nothing in our extended system that binds us as individuals to the public weal…”
We are not a “nation of sheep,” as some have said; we are a nation of lone wolves, resistant to being herded together and resistant to acting collectively. That, at least, is the American mythos, and our politics—a profession where image is almost everything—reflects the mythos as much as it does reality. “When the facts contradict the legend, print the legend.” 2
In 1980, Kirkpatrick Sale wrote:
We have sacrificed our citizenship slowly over the decades, slowly enough so that we have hardly been aware that it is gone—so it is not surprising that we do not have the interests, the attitudes, of citizens. We do not vote. We do not pay taxes voluntarily—at least five million adults are reckoned to be tax avoiders, and virtually everyone else trims and cheats. We do not support our government in time of war. We do not obey its laws by habit but by force, and a great many of the most highly placed people both in government and business, including even our Presidents and our representatives and the executives at the largest firms, are regularly and increasingly seen to be disobeying these laws.
It’s enough to make you question the viability of the system itself—which is precisely what Kirkpatrick Sale was doing. Politics is how we order our lives together, and Sale recognized that a “human scale” existence requires a “human scale” politics, and vice-versa. However, rather than undertaking the paradigm shift required, America in 1980 installed in the White House a genial, flag-waving corporate shill (before entering politics, Reagan had parlayed his acting career into a job as pitchman for General Electric), slapped a new paint job and some smiley-face stickers on the rusting American chassis, rolled back the national odometer, and hoped to god that no one would kick the tires or read the fine print in the contract. Ronald Reagan was the anti-Nixon of American politics: people would, and did, buy a used car from him, and they refused to hold it against him when the car turned out to be a lemon.
And all of that, mind you, was before Donald Trump's entrance into politics.
_____________________________________________
1 John Mellencamp’s 1985 album Scarecrow, with its stark evocation of “Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough,” expressed the discontent seething beneath Reaganite boosterism. That same year, a band called The Long Ryders released State of Our Union, with songs like “You Just Can’t Ride the Boxcars Anymore” conjuring populist rage from Dust Bowl, Depression-era days: “Now everybody's feeling all confused / They went to get their money and they got refused / Somebody burned 1st National down last night / Smashed and looted daddy's shop downtown / And grandpa said it'd never happen again / The lesson it was learned real good before / Now everybody's leaving town / Sell the house and sell the farm / But you just can't ride the boxcars anymore.”
2 A classic quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Posted by: |