In The New Class War, Michael Lind contrasts the current war (between the elite, powerful, secular, uprooted, educated upper class and the populist, marginalized, religious, localized, uneducated under class) with the social peace that prevailed in the years of our upbringing: 1945-65. His description perfectly confirms my own memory. There was broad, pervasive cultural peace. We were coming out of a unifying war and so relieved it was over. We together faced a formidable foe, Communism, that dwarfed our social differences. We were the uncontested global power. Our economy was cooking with gas: surely the most prosperous, productive and affluent society in human history. And his point: there was peace between the upper and lower classes, between capital and labor. It was in everyone's interest to "get along" and the pie was big enough for everyone. The working class exercised power through a network of intermediary associations that countervailed against the rich and powerful in three significant arenas: in economics through their unions; in politics through their ward-based politics; and in culture through their churches. This is the world in which I was raised: our family... modest economically but satisfied, secure, safe, confident, optimistic, and expansive... was cocooned within a network of benevolent, powerful institutions: the union, the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church....all entirely at home in a diverse, magnanimous USA! It was a good world! The enemy: the Communists. And they really were bad; and they still are! We contrasted ourselves with the Republicans (Ike), the Protestants (Billy Graham), and the public schools...but in a benign manner...as we might compete with a neighboring parish basketball team in the CYO league. No bad blood! Ike and Billy Graham and the kids who went to public schools were decent enough chaps; but they weren't us. No real hostility; no defensiveness; no superiority. We were peaceful and confident and happy in our America. This Camelot peaked in the early 1960s with the election of Kennedy and the Vatican Council.
A brave new world emerged in the 1970s and afterwards: the Cultural Revolution, new technology, a globalized economy, a widening economic gulf between the rich and poor, the decline of intermediary institutions, the replacement of local, ward politics with the influence of wealthy donors and ethnic identities.
Lind does not really address the Culture War except as it accompanies the class war. It is not clear where he stands. He concerns himself with the exercise of power in all its manifestations, the economic, political and the cultural
However, reading him provoked me to ask myself: What were the cultural/moral/religious dynamics of 1945-65?
It was a remarkable era of peace, a real Camelot. I will, of course, be accused of nostalgia and an indifference to the suffering of minorities: blacks, women, immigrants, and so forth. Let us consider this.
First the easy part: the marginalization of the Jew and the Catholic by the WASP elite, as well as the hatred and distrust between Catholics and Evangelicals...all of this simply disappeared in this era. Effortlessly. The bias against the Catholic JFK was overcome. By the late 1960s overt prejudice against Jews and Catholics was already retrograde: both groups attended Ivy League school and were succeeding marvelously.
Statistics I have seen indicate that the black community made remarkable progress in this era. They shared in the expanding pie, albeit at the bottom of the hierarchy. Family structure, in spite of the history of slavery and Jim Crow, was strong...especially compared with subsequent developments. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-60s was a demonstration of immense confidence, purpose and moral integrity on the part of the faith-inspired black community. Without denying the violent resistance from entrenched racist interests and habits, the movement was warmly and generously welcomed by all our nation's powerful interests: academia, Churches, sports, entertainment, law, the media. It was an extraordinary, exuberant and magnificently triumphant movement. It peaked before 1970 and was the crowning expression of the post-war Camelot. And again, with it's success, there emerged an entirely distinctive threat: sexual liberation, the decline of honorable virility and the family, the emergence of ethnic victim-complex and resentment.
The women I knew growing up, family and friends, were not oppressed by a patriarchy. They were happy with families, faith and their identity as women, mothers and workers. They were happy that their husbands were making good money so they could care for their children. They were relieved that the war was over. If anything, there was a significant group who could not marry because some men had not returned from the war and would loved to be part of the family renaissance. But the ones I knew (ok...I grew up in a happy world...it is not the whole story...but it is my story and it is part of the whole story!) were happy with their faith, their extended families, and their work. By the early 1970s, women's liberation was emergent and this movement also was welcomed systematically across the power centers of society. Within a few decades women were outperforming men in many areas. I just never saw the hateful, destructive patriarchy that is so infamous. Here again, however, just as women were stepping into a new pubic position of prominence...at the very tail end of Camelot...again...a different enemy emerges. With the cultural revolution, the liberation of sexuality from spousal fidelity and fecundity, women become increasingly instrumentalized: as vehicles of production and consumption for the economy and as objects for men's pleasure.
And so again: we consider the remarkable cultural peace that prevailed in 1945-65. There prevailed a Christian consensus that incorporated Catholics and Evangelicals and others as well as WASPS and was friendly to Jews. The historically oppressed blacks were flexing their muscles and demanding their fair place at the table. Women, for a generation, enjoyed domestic tranquility but were now moving out into the public arena. There was a miniscule, marginal bohemian, beatnik movement that was hardly visible although it was the seeds of an unanticipated explosion after 1965.
Life was good. It was not perfect. But it was a good time to grow up. Am I nostalgic? Yes I am! Who wouldn't be?
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