The '60s to the 1990s

IN EUROPE, ESPECIALLY EASTERN, THE NEXT decade, and perhaps the next century, is busting out all over. Everything that's not being opened is being restructured, and the status quo of half a century is dissolving into a thrilling, if uncertain, dawn. Meanwhile, in America, the once-New World, we grind on in smug stagnation and nostalgic decay, playing burger-vendor to the world and diving back into '60s anniversaries at every opportunity.

Our politics are without imagination. Our economy, still a bonanza for the rich and famous, promises only insecurity for workers and desperation for the growing legion of the locked-out. Our culture is increasingly defined by cynicism and calculated indifference. That's the dominant picture in the land of crack'n'Uzis and hillside Jacuzzis. And there's no point pretending otherwise.

But all of the news isn't always in the headlines. In these last days of the late, gray '80s there is also, even in America, the possibility of a democratic renewal. At the turn of the decade, it has become an op-ed page truism that, after a decade of "greed is good" individualism, the cultural pendulum is bound to swing back toward compassion and community. And the truism is true. Even our kinder, gentler president knows that there are, out there in America, the first longings and stirrings toward a new idealism. And he doesn't want to be the one punctured by those thousand points of light.

It's also true that this is a time of catastrophic crisis among the American poor. And, not coincidentally, it is also a time of changed, that is, constricted, economic circumstances for the American middle class. Conventional politics of the Right and Left, of the electoral or protest variety, have mostly failed to address these new realities. But there is in this mix of economic frustrations and moral confusions a new decade, and a new American political culture, waiting to be born.

AS I'VE KNOCKED AROUND the last couple of years thinking about these things, as I often do, there have been moments when I heard and saw a new political-cultural stance and style which seemed to speak to the contemporary American condition and suggest new options and openings for the future.

At a time when the operative political vocabularies, including the one I've used most of my life, seem increasingly stale, irrelevant, and detached, I heard in these moments a new voice and felt that I was beginning to see with new eyes. And despite my own ideological commitment to look for social change at the fringes of society, I found these new voices surprisingly near to the mainstream of American life. What follows is a story about some of those times when I thought I saw the '90s.

Over the Rainbow

ON AN EARLY SPRING AFTERNOON in 1988, I was on the campus of Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi. Mississippi State is not the first place you might think to look for a wave of the future. It's what is unkindly called a "cow college." Its distinctly non-elite student body is mostly drawn from the farms and small towns of the Magnolia State. But I was there that afternoon because Rev. Jesse Jackson was coming. And, as you might recall, that spring Jackson was regularly leaving some rather amazing mini-transformations in the wake of his campaign meanderings.

That day at Mississippi State was only one of several times I caught Jackson on the stump that season. But it was by far the most memorable of those occasions, both for where it happened and for what happened. The campus auditorium was filled far beyond capacity with a crowd that was roughly equal parts black and white. Most of the white students were there out of curiosity, but not all of them.

Directly in front of me sat a young white woman with her black friend. The white woman was country as country could be. She liked Jackson because, she said, he was the only one talking about what's happening to the farmers.

I knew this would be an unusual political rally when a local elected official, a black man in his 30s, took the podium and began his remarks by quoting from rhythm-and-blues great Sam Cooke's posthumous classic "A Change Is Gonna Come." And, sure enough, Jackson's remarks were in no way typical of 1988's superficial, know-nothing, say-nothing political rhetoric. He surveyed the sea of black and white faces before him and cut right to the warm human core that undergirds all politics.

"We're gathered here today in search of something ... We're like lost brothers and sisters who were orphaned off at childbirth because something happened to our parents. And we never really knew who we were ...

But then someplace along the way we bumped into each other. What a strange sensation! We resembled each other. Our interests are the same. The rhythm of our talking is much the same. The more we talked the more our curiosity is aroused. We begin to find that both have been adopted. Then we start searching for our parents, and we find them. Then we search for our brothers and our sisters. And we find that we're each other's brother. We're each other's sister.

And now here we are in this family reunion. This is the New South. This is the New Mississippi. This is the heartbeat of the New America.

Jackson's implicit message for the black students that day was straightforward and clear. "You are somebody. You, the daughters and sons of slaves, are joint heirs to the future. You can rebuild your state and even lead the nation." And there's no underestimating the importance of that message, from a black man, for black young people, at this time.

In the white members of his audience, whom others might call "rednecks," Jackson's "parable of the orphans" reached for, and judging from the crowd reaction, touched, something even more complex and potentially transforming. He touched something in those people that is even more powerful than racism: the belief that they are in fact better, nobler, and more complex and intelligent than they are usually taken to be. He touched the most basic human need to feel unique and important.

Racism touches that same chord, only by setting the self against a hated "other." It feeds on and perpetuates a stunted sense of self that requires an even lower inferior to affirm its shaky self-worth. What Jackson reached for, and what the best politics, religion, and psychology will always reach for, was that larger sense of self which, secure in its own value, is deepened and enriched by joining with others.

Maybe lives were changed. Maybe not. But I can tell you with certainty that as the evening went on an unlikely collection of young white people heard a black man talk some straight talk about race and class and war and peace -- the kind of stuff that's usually considered "out of the mainstream." And they didn't leave feeling angry or guilty.

Good Times and the Common Good

ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT toward the end of 1988, I was in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was there for the only East Coast performance of the Amnesty International Human Rights Now tour featuring Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Bruce Springsteen.

The message of the Amnesty tour was centered on the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As the tour made its way from Eastern to Western Europe and from North to South America and on to southern Africa, it left in its wake hundreds of thousands of copies of the declaration printed in the local languages with the admonition to "know your rights and use them." The Universal Declaration, by the way, includes those pesky social and economic rights -- the ones that don't always accrue to free persons when they're born in the U.S.A.

It was a long trip from Boston to Philly. And if the truth be told, I didn't make it solely for Amnesty International. I also made it for the idea that rock and roll, which has made my life a better place, can do the same for the world.

Well, it was for that idea and for The Boss, with whom the idea is synonymous. Springsteen's participation in the Amnesty tour was of a piece with the direction of his work since 1984-85. On his tour of that year, Springsteen began linking the populist sympathies long present in his music with the concrete needs and aspirations of his audience and their communities. At each tour stop, The Boss visited with representatives of a local community organization -- a union food bank here, an environmental group there, a Saul Alinsky-style organizing project down the road. He gave the organizers a five-figure check and invited them to set up tables at his show. He also incorporated a rap on the group and its issues into his performance that night.

But what was most important about that tour, at least for our purposes here, was the style and language Springsteen developed for explaining his activities. He couched his politics in a cliche-free idiom beyond conventional ideologies and orthodoxies. He didn't shy away from controversy. The union groups and others Springsteen associated with were usually grassroots renegades, often radicals. And he never missed a chance to place the blame for homelessness and unemployment at the door of the Oval Office.

But Springsteen didn't speak the language of protest, or even of politics in the debased sense that term now carries. He offered instead a street-level translation of that grand old construct, The Common Good. In Springsteen's declaration of interdependence it came out, "Nobody wins unless everybody wins." He spoke of rights, saying, "When I was a kid, rock and roll was saying one thing, 'Let Freedom Ring!'" and of responsibilities, taking a breath and adding, "But remember, you gotta fight for it."

All of that and more was present in Springsteen's performance on the Amnesty tour. Aside from being moved (physically and emotionally) by the music, I was struck again with the power of Springsteen's message-stories. The raps are like the music. Both face up to the meanest of life's realities and, as another rocker once said, "dance all over them." Both music and message were relentlessly affirmative and straight from the heart, with a minimum of decorative trappings or self-involvement.

What Springsteen did, at his best, was use the most fundamental human and humane values (interdependence and the common good) to frame his "issues" in positive terms that invite a positive response. This is in place of doom-mongering and nay-saying, which invite only despair, or a cult of political correctitude, which invites only self-marginalization. Springsteen's political message, and medium, didn't invite alienation. It offered the rewards of community, the intrinsic good, good feelings, and good times that are found in giving oneself to something larger than oneself.

Even without the politics, Springsteen's concerts, as events, have always exemplified the communitarian ideal. Now he was simply suggesting that the principles of Saturday night could also be put to work on Monday morning.

Please Turn in Your Bibles to Galatians 3:28

ONE SATURDAY MORNING IN FEBRUARY 1981, I got up a lot earlier than I'd prefer and walked to the subway in a miserable, blustery freezing rain. I was going to the Hynes Convention Center in Boston to witness the installation of Rev. Barbara Harris as adjutant bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts and the first female bishop of the catholic tradition.

The entrance of a woman into the chain of apostolic succession is history-making enough for one day. But the sociotheological resonance of Barbara Harris's consecration was even deeper and broader than that. Harris is also an African-American woman, from a background of poverty, without conventional academic credentials. And she was being elevated to the bishopric in a church that is, with some justification, often thought to comprise the American ruling class at prayer.

Even the skeptical, which I am occasionally, would have to suspect the possibility of a divine hand in this turn of events. And I suspect that it might have taken a direct act of God to so focus the attention of the cultural elites in this most secularized of American cities upon the arcane details of a 1,900-year-old religious ritual. But there was, whatever its source, a power to this event that proved undeniable and irresistible.

The place of this event in an article about the American future should be self-evident, and on several levels. First and foremost it was evidence of how much, and how quickly, conceptions of a woman's place in our society have shifted in only 20 years.

In 1969, the rebirth of American feminism was a fringe phenomenon discussed only within the small world of the radical protest movements. Today the core feminist principle that women are entitled to full and equal participation in all spheres of public and private life is well on the way to becoming an assumption in American culture. Certainly there is still opposition to it, and in very powerful places. But that idea does now shape the way that tens of millions of people perceive themselves and their lives.

There is no going back on such a fundamental shift in consciousness. But, except for the most minimal adjustments, the institutions of American life have not changed to meet a new consciousness and a new set of popular expectations. That incongruity is social dynamite of the most volatile sort and is likely to provide the most potent fuel for social change in the next decade and beyond.

But there was more to the power of the Barbara Harris event than just another feminist milestone. There was also the very real, media-verifiable contemporary power of ancient religious symbols and traditions. When those symbols and traditions are taken seriously and put to real use they still speak, even to the unbelieving, as few other things can. In this case this particular set of symbols and traditions served to infuse a sense of liberation and holiness and exaltation into the act of opening ourselves to each other in new ways, as the Episcopal Church was opening Christian, and human, history in new ways. There was in the event an open invitation to the broader community to acknowledge the need for each other in new ways.

A lot of fine words were said when Barbara Harris was made a bishop. But the meaning of the event was beyond words. It was explicated by this black woman's assumption of the mitre and staff and her celebration of the Eucharist. It was in these events that the centuries-long hold of male European power on the symbols and language of our civilization was broken. A myth was fractured, and in the process an opening was created for a wider, richer, and deeper truth. The truth that will, we are told, set us free.

This power was present because in church traditions, even when they are corrupted, there is the recognition that human acts of openness and interdependence are freeing, holy, and exalted acts having to do with ultimate realities and an ultimate good. That foundation gives to those traditions the power to demonstrate to America that male and female, white and black (and other colors), affluent and poor belong to each other and are bound together in the deepest possible ways.

In the novelty of a black, female Episcopal bishop, there was a reaffirmation of the oldest gospel truth. At this table set by Jesus, there is room enough for all. What I saw on that day in Boston was a future in which that word again becomes a transforming social reality.

Picking Up the Pieces

THIS IS NOT, APPEARANCES TO THE CONTRARY, a story about Jesse Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and Barbara Harris. Those famous names are not the answer to anything. Jesse Jackson sometimes acts like any other politician, Springsteen often acts like any other rock star, and given enough time Barbara Harris will probably act like any other bishop.

Instead it is a story about discovering sources of renewal in American life. And my set of examples is highly personal, perhaps even eccentric, and certainly not an exhaustive one. These are just moments that I saw because they happened where I was looking. I know for a fact that similarly revelatory moments have taken place in the Farm Belt, in community struggles against toxic wastes, and in drives to unionize clerical workers.

And I'm willing to bet that all of these fleeting moments could, with the right combination of patience and audacity, add up to a new American future. It would be a future in which people are more interested in the values and aspirations that they hold in common than in the things that keep them apart. It would be a place where the rebellious impulses and wild ideals of democracy are reborn in concrete struggles to humanize our economy. And it would be an America that finds its true place in the world community not as a center of empire, but in its other heritage as a beacon of tolerance, diversity, and social experimentation.

What is it about this scattering of events that sparks such a claim? In all of the above, I see the first vague outlines of a new style of political activism. It's a style that's aimed at the time-honored goals of freedom, equality, and community. But it speaks a language that is appropriate to the context and circumstances of America in the last days of the century. It's a language that takes seriously the felt needs and aspirations of ordinary, "undissident" Americans.

Lost in the '60s

THAT IS TO SAY, WHAT I SEE, AND HOPE FOR, is a striving for social justice and humane values that is not even vaguely reminiscent of the '60s. As anyone who watches television or listens to the radio knows all too well, the '60s still loom large in our perceptions of the present. This is as true of our politics as it is of our nostalgia-dazed popular culture. The unresolved conflicts, historical grudges, and cultural reverberations from that big, loud decade still shape the thinking and discourse of our time in fundamental ways. And I would suggest that this is one of the things wrong with our time.

Certainly the startling success of the Far Right in the 1980s was built on a carefully cultivated reaction against certain elements of the '60s ethos (cultural permissiveness and black assertiveness). Rightists run against the '60s as shamelessly and successfully as liberal Democrats, for 40 years, ran against Herbert Hoover.

And the picture on the Left is much the same. What we've inherited from the '60s is a political and cultural approach that defines itself through a stance of "resistance," over against the values and interests of the majority of Americans. That self-definition by alienation is still too often the dominant style of self-conscious white dissent in America today. And even where it isn't reality, it is the operative media perception, which is just as bad.

There was, of course, value in some of those attitudes formed by the '60s. Certainly an awareness of America's privileged and predatory role in the world is one of them. The exposure of the pervasiveness of racism in America's past and present is another. So also is the feminism that was reborn in the last days of the '60s and has lived on to become one of the most important political, economic, and cultural facts shaping the '90s. But today many of the lingering attitudes and ideological trappings of the '60s are more often counterproductive and out-of-touch.

It's past time for all of us to wake up and smell the coffee. The '60s are dead, and whether the period was good or bad is just irrelevant. In the past 20 years, the world has drastically and irrevocably changed. All of our grasping backward for relics, icons, or villains only underlines the abject failure of our political, cultural, and religious thinking to account for the changes that have happened and make meaning of our new and different context.

WHAT'S CHANGED? The most fundamental economic facts of life, for starters. Social visionaries of the '60s saw a future of abundance that would mean less work for more wages. In the developed world, social problems were expected to revolve around the management of unprecedented leisure time in a post-scarcity society. Those expectations obviously affected the way people thought about their lives and the world.

In 1990 the economic facts of American life are going to mean, to put it bluntly, more work for less wages. Those lowered expectations should also affect how we think about the future and conceive our possibilities. And they haven't yet.

When the economic well-being of the vast majority of the people seemed well taken care of, there was the leisure for reflection on the fairness of the society, the possibilities of personal growth and interpersonal fulfillment. In the '60s an unprecedentedly large number of young people entered the thought-provoking leisure world of higher education. And unlike today's smaller generation of students, they entered it relatively free from pressing worries about their own economic futures.

From that fluky hothouse was born a welter of political impulses and cultural innovations that continue both to enrich and curse American life. These included a sense of alienation from American mainstream values, especially in matters of personal behavior, and the articulation of a counterethic based on personal autonomy and fulfillment. On the political flipside of personal alienation was an intense identification with the interests of those left out or victimized by the rise of American economic and global power.

At the time, the left-out most certainly did not include the American middle class. They, due to their affluence, were either unwitting oppressors in need of consciousness-raising and repentance, or simply "the enemy." In either case they were considered largely irrelevant to the politics of social change.

The Shrunken Pie

THE CHANGED ECONOMY WE TAKE INTO THE '90s has turned many of those '60s perceptions upside down. Things have certainly gotten no better for American minorities or Third World majorities. But the economic boom that was once seen as the defining fact of the postwar world is now a thing of the past. The pie is no longer expanding in real terms for most Americans. Family income has stopped growing and is only barely maintained at '60s levels by second and third jobs that bring exhaustion, domestic chaos, and a generally lowered quality of life.

The prosperity of the '60s seemed at the time to be fairly evenly spread among most white Americans. Almost everyone could consider themselves middle class. But that distribution of wealth was mostly founded on the cornerstone of good-paying, unionized jobs in the manufacturing sector, jobs that didn't require a college education.

Today basic American industry has been shipped off to distant, low-paying, non-unionized Third World climes. In the service economy, there are high-paying and high-powered professional slots a'plenty and no shortage of minimum-wage drone work. But we can't all be corporate lawyers, and families can't live on McDonald's pay.

As can already be witnessed in growing public discontent over child care and health care, and in the current mini-resurgence of union activism, the real, immediate economic interests of a majority of Americans are very much up for grabs again. And all of the grievances middle-class Americans are feeling lead directly back to fundamental questions about corporate power, inequality, and even America's role in the world. But a large sector of our dissident culture has little to say to those Americans because we have for too long discounted the notion that white, employed Americans might have legitimate grievances against the corporate system.

The most striking example I've seen of how out of touch '60s-bred attitudes are with '90s realities involves the catchphrase "downward mobility." A parody of the American Dream of upward mobility, the phrase connoted an "alternative lifestyle" centered on neo-ascetic simplicity. More recently the phrase has entered mainstream parlance, and you see it in daily newspaper articles about the American economy. But now downward mobility is used not to describe the selfless choice of an enlightened few, but to sum up the central, involuntary, economic fact of life for the "middle-class" majority.

Lives of Quiet Fragmentation

BUT LIFE IS NOT JUST MADE UP of economic facts. Equally important are our shared values and assumptions, our sense of identity, and our ways of thinking and feeling about our lives. And in this realm of cultural values we find that in the '90s the world of the '60s has turned upside down.

It is in the realm of cultural values that the legacy of the '60s is especially strong and destructive. A counterculture of alienation and personal growth has become a mainstream culture of cynicism and fragmentation. In retrospect, the great cultural revolution of the '60s can be seen as little more than the means through which capitalism was allowed to extend the marketplace ethic of "consumer choice" into personal, interpersonal, and family life. And the free-enterprise system of morality is not working out so well, if the rates of drug and drink casualties, broken families, and professional corruption are any indication.

Be they political or personal, the ties that bind are blowing apart. Neo-conservatives to the contrary, there's no going back to an old world of unquestioning conformity to unquestioned absolutes. And I, for one, am glad of that. A world in which everyone had their place, and stayed in it, had its drawbacks. But now there is before us the challenge to reconstitute notions of communal responsibility on new, more humane and egalitarian terms.

Reconstituting the ties that bind means, first and foremost, renewing the notion that we need each other. The name for that notion is community, or interdependence. It is a spiritual, psychological, biological, political, and economic fact of the universe, and it is a basic human need. This need for community will become increasingly evident in American life precisely because our culture, politics, and economy have for so long attempted to deny it as fact.

Vox Populist

THE NEWLY CONSTRICTED ECONOMIC HORIZONS facing most Americans are by now a verifiable statistical fact. And a cultural crisis of fragmentation and withdrawal is widely acknowledged and easily observable. But hope, which is always less self-evident, lies in the social reaction that could happen as these two elements of American life meet in the '90s. The hope is that they may have the answer for each other and point the way toward renewal.

Culture and economy are, of course, not unrelated matters. How the American middle class sees its economic interests in today's changed context will be shaped by the values abroad in the political and popular culture. There are two ways that can go. In a culture of rampant individualism, the natural reaction may be to defend what little you have against those few who have less. That is current reality in no small part.

The great genius of America's corporate powers has always been their uncanny success in splitting off the interests of higher-wage workers (the so-called middle class) from those of lower-wage workers (the poor). Racism has always been one of the keys to this strategy. But it also required constant economic expansion.

The reality of a shrunken American pie could mean that the real interests of the majority of Americans will again come more clearly into alignment with those of the poor minority. It already means that the interest of the wealthy in keeping the white middle class out of alliance with the poor is heightened. Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, the racial mudslingers of the GOP, know that.

But it is also possible that, in our need for new foundations for common life, we may discover cultural values that also match our economic realities. It's possible that, in a time when old economic securities have been pulled away, middle-class Americans could discover "who they really are" and find their long-lost siblings. A revived sense of an interdependent national community that shares a common destiny could also lead to a broader community of shared self-interest.

It's possible that if middle-income Americans keep losing long enough, the proposition that everyone should win will stop sounding so foreign. The concrete political project of reshaping the balance of power in American life toward more humane ends could become a vehicle renewing a sense of interdependence, especially between the white working-middle class and African and Hispanic America.

That is admittedly an enormous leap in thinking. The facts of economic and cultural crisis may be self-evident. The kind of collision and interaction that I'm suggesting, however, is far from certain, and even unlikely. But there is an opening. And, to circle back to our opening parable, there are some early signs to point toward.

All of this suggests to me that the hope of the next decade will lie in the creation of a political-cultural ethos that speaks from identification with the deepest needs and aspirations of ordinary Americans and that points back to the roots of the future in the bedrock values of interdependence, mutual responsibility, and community. The most accurate name for that unborn ethos is "populism," since populism is as much a cultural stance as a political-economic program. And at this juncture it is the cultural stance that is most important.

The populist message, or stance, is today essentially the same as it was in the 1890s. It says simply that the problem with our society is too little democracy. The vast majority of people, whatever their income or educational status, have too little say over political and economic decisions that affect their lives. Society should be run not for the benefit of a privileged minority but for the benefit of, and by the participation of, that vast majority of the people who are neither rich nor powerful.

As it did a century ago, contemporary populism stands against racism, and sexism, because they are wrong and because they stand in the way of attaining common aspirations for justice and dignity that are held by all people regardless of race or gender. It believes, today as in earlier times, that America's destiny lies not in empire and the domination of other peoples but in the cultivation of our own democratic experiment. If America has leadership to offer the world, it will emerge from that example.

The sources for a new populism will not be in the center of the Democratic Party, or any other entrenched political institution. If the tune is a hit, the Dems will certainly start to learn the music. But the sources of '90s populism are to be found where Americans actually live, in the varied landscape of popular culture and local institutions.

As in every other American movement of social change and renewal, this one will draw much of its strength from American religious institutions. This is true because the populist message is rooted in fundamental Judeo-Christian truths and values. But it is also true because the religious institutions are, along with some pockets of the popular arts, among the only remaining social structures that have both access to a broad cross section of the American people and the capacity for independent action and thought.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.