By Ramesh Ponnuru Contributing columnistWashington Post July 25th 2023
American politics is awash in nostalgia. It’s bipartisan, and it starts at the top. All of our recent presidents have trafficked in it. Donald Trump’s inaugural address in 2017 portrayed a nation that had fallen from its peak because “a small group in our nation’s capital” had plundered the country for years while “struggling families” were left with “little to celebrate.” President Biden says our economy has been lagging behind other countries, at least until he took office, and that misguided policies have been impoverishing the middle class for 40 years.
Americans agree that the present doesn’t measure up to the way things used to be. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 58 percent of respondents to its survey said life for people like them is worse than it was 50 years ago.
There’s some debate over what accounts for this sentiment. One school of thought holds that economic trends amply justify the public’s sense of decline. According to this view, wages have stagnated for decades, making it harder for young people to marry and to start families. But the best evidence contradicts this story. The Congressional Budget Office reports that households in the middle of the pack had income growth of 26 percent from 1990 to 2019 — and of 55 percent if you count taxes and government benefits.
Those impressed by such statistics wonder why we are so ungrateful. Maybe it’s the negative bias of the news media, they speculate, or the natural wistfulness of an aging society. Or maybe our unhappiness is not mostly a matter of economics. Social conservatives point to declining rates of church attendance and marriage as causes of lamentation, although they cannot pine for the higher divorce and abortion rates we had 50 years ago.P
I have a tentative theory about the hold the “good old days” seem to have on us. Yes, we have more material possessions, more wealth, more access to medicine and more educational opportunities for our children than we did 50 years ago. But living standards were rising more rapidly back then. And that steady upward movement is a large part of what we miss — even those of us with no personal memory of it.
This idea of progress was not merely material. The civil rights revolution was making our society more just. Most Americans trusted the government to solve problems and work in the public interest. During the 1960s and 1970s, that confidence cratered. (It partly recovered in the 1980s and early 1990s and then resumed its downward trajectory.) Even if that confidence was misplaced, as it certainly was in the 1960s, it’s understandable that we would regret losing it.
Social changes have continued, often using the civil rights struggle as a model. But even as most Americans see same-sex marriage as a social advance, the conviction that the arc of history bends toward justice, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, has faltered.
The sheer size — and current age — of the baby boom generation is surely responsible for some of today’s nostalgia. But not all of it. When its members were kids, the country really did look forward to what lay ahead more than we do now. The problem isn’t that we’re idealizing the past. It’s that the future’s not what it used to be.
If I’m right, then convincing Americans that we were poorer than we remember in the old days will not suffice to change our mood. We will have to find a way to recapture yesterday’s way of looking at tomorrow.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/24/nostalgia-is-about-losing-confidence-in-future/