Radio and TV d.j.’s like to talk about musical decades so as to evoke the nostalgia of there being a particular sound or style that dominated music for about a decade. I think that we can broaden it out so that each decade includes its politics and social structure so as to characterize decades as being cultural entities, distinct from the previous and the succeeding one, just as if we do when historians and literary critics speak of the periods of Classical and Romantic and Victorian, the Romantics, for example, not just meaning Jane Austen and John Keats and Charles Lamb, but also John Bright and the Luddites and Peterloo and the other early struggles of industrialism. Periodization is a different prospect from doing what a friend of mine does, which is separate before and after a critical event, which for him is 1968, That year separates two different experiences, people profoundly altered by that event so that I, for one, still expect to turn on the television and find out that there has been an assassination. Pearl Harbor was one of those events that made America different and not in just leading to the waging of the worst war in human history. It made the United States the economic, cultural and military center of the world, while the Vietnam War was just an interlude even if young people at the time, including me, found it all consuming, it instead just coming and going, which would also be the case in the War on Terror that commenced with the World Trade Center, but lasted only a decade or so, and us still not knowing whether Trumpism can outlast his separation from office.
Each of the decades would seem to have the whole package. To begin arbitrarily, in that one could look at earlier decades, the Twenties had its culture what with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and John Dewey, to my mind, at his best, and also its fashions, with short skirts and bobs and Rudolph Valentino and also its ever higher stock markets and sane, sensible Republicanism, and also that characteristic music: “Showboat”, Al Johnson. hot jazz. The same collection across the board marks the Thirties: very talky black and white pictures and Big Band Music (which has to be rejiggered in that it lasts from 1935 or thereabouts to 1950, when it was replaced in the Fifties by male and female singers who were the stars rather than the fronts for bands.). The Thirties also provided the background for the Great Depression and the great political change whereby government was thought to have become a solution rather than irrelevant to social problems. The Forties were the War, as I will always regard it, and “Don’t Sit Down at the Apple Tree” and the United Nations and atomic energy, and the Fifties were, along with Rosemary Clooney and Nat King Cole, the era of the suburbs and massive entrance into post secondary education and the Interstate Highway System, and Camus and Tennesee Williams.
And so on for each decade, except for a complication. It seems to me that I can go just so far associating decades with their distinctive complex intertwinings of music and culture and politics and social structure. I got the mental cue of the Beatles to tie me to the Sixties, as if I could not need to have a visual cue to remember the Sixty-Eight Democratic Convention in Chicago or the Vietnam War. (I never had much use for Bob Dylan, the divide between the two separated the politically Conservative Beatles, whatever their druggie affiliations, with what we would now consider the Progressive followers of Dylan). I can go into the Seventies in that Disco Music and Donna Summer were associated somehow with leisure suits and high heeled shoes for men and also John Updike and Philip Roth, that dynamic duo, if you think about it, dominated literature for the second half of the twentieth century. But then, for me, the formulation of each decade as a distinctive culture seems to me to have died after that. I mark the end as “Fame”, the popular movie musical of 1979, that seemed to me to be screeching and yelling than making music, and so has, for me, been the case ever since, neither its words or music comprehensible, barely recognizable as music. And so I don’t think of the clothes as being distinctive nor the writers, though I am partial to Michael Chabon and not much else in the way of novels or even movies after the Godfather Trilogy, with the exception of Kenneth Branaugh and Emma Thompson movies, together and apart.
I know that the decades do succeed one another because I can cue them up by referring to politics. I know it was part of the Eighties because Ronald Reagan was President and I know we are in the Nineties because Bill Clinton was President, not because I have a sense of the cultures of those times. That does well enough because Reagan’s cabinet brought an end to the Cold War as well as the idea that the Republican Establishment was an alternative to administrations by Democrats in that both parties were credible. Clinton, for his part, gave us the age of Monica, and his Vice President, Al Gore, had funded the Internet. It is as if we are looking into Roman dating, or dating in other ages, when a coin would have itself as in the age of an emperor or king. Maybe this is all because I am getting older and so recent decades get lost while farther removed ones cling to memory or I have read about and so facts stick to my mind for that reason.
There is an alternative explanation than my own observations about my aging so as to explain what has happened. It is to put aside the idea of decades as the organizing principle for successive cultures. Instead, think of trends, which mean the unfolding of one or another process in social life and not just cultural life, and that these do exist for a particular length of time, which is about thirty years, which is the time from the Missouri Compromise of 1830 to when the Civil War began. That time now seems to have been inevitable, various statesmen trying to brake what was unravelling for those thirty years. If time is much longer than that of a trend, we think of it like the Industrial Revolution or the Democratic Revolution, the first covering the Nineteenth Century and the second also lasting from 1776 to about the end of the Nineteenth Century, in that the last of the new democratic innovations, such as state laws to elect propositions to override boss rule as well as the popular election of Senators. Another longer period than a trend would be the image of the Wild West, lasting from the beginning of the westward expansion in the 1830’s, through Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, through the western movie and through the Fifties, with their highly stylized “Shane” and “High Noon”. Peckinpaugh’s “The Wild Bunch”, shown in 1969, was about the Western genre that had ended.
Here are four trends that attend us for the past thirty years or so that explain the way things are in our society and also in the world, each from a different institutional realm, and the first one of which does seem rather recondite, though it is not so. For the past thirty years, there has been a move in secondary and post secondary education to deemphasize the traditional humanities and social sciences for STEM courses, the name given for science, technology, engineering and medicine, and including computer science and also extending to such technical fields as finance (which are computer and mathematically based) and such skilled trades as air conditioner repairmen and solar power installers (which are engineering based). That is because education is defined as job preparation rather than cultivating a person so as to know their civilization well enough so that they can become adequate citizens or, if one cares to say so, as fully realized human beings. This impact is difficult to measure. It means, at the least, that there are fewer Milton scholars and that fewer graduate students go into the humanities. It may also mean, however, that citizens are not prepared to take part of the political debates aware of what our Founding Fathers have said about the American Experiment or how the ups and downs of American history serve as ways to be compared to the goings on of contemporary political events, our humanistic education making us wary of the mistakes and rightly jubilant of the successes, however much every one of us making up his or her own mind on a matter, some consensus forming about why Hamilton did some good things and so did Jefferson as well. What seems to me, at least, the current political polarization is partly the division between the educated and the uneducated, and that has made Presidential politics a bit akilter, and not to become rebalanced so quickly as when Trump leaves his office. The uneducated working class had supported FDR while the educated and the newspapers supported whomever was his opponent, but they had their ballast because of their class consciousness as workers.
A second trend is that of the computer, which began with the first desk-top computers soon tied into the Internet, in the not so long ago 80’s, and the technology came to dominate the transmission of information from the receptionist to the most remote medical doctor, and all the lay people who look into social media and find how to get to a Japanese restaurant that is not too far away. This trend might be seen as a stage in the development of the Communications Revolution that goes back to the bonfires that might have been lighted in a chain from the English Channel to London to “telegraph” that Napoleon was invading England, but the computer age is qualitatively distinct in the way it makes information so voluminous that people find it necessary to silo into a computer age resource so that what they are offered remains comprehensible. Perhaps the trend has proliferated to the extent that it will end soon enough with the need to treat some sources rather than others as unreliable, so sanctioned by either government or media “publishers” like Mark Zetterberg, so as to make information reliable, however revolutionary it may be to dispense with the idea of John Stuart Mill, that liberty was the result of the marketplace of ideas, Mill assuming that many a newspaperman could buy a printing press, but that only able or at least committed people would bother to create a newspaper to compete with other newspapers and rise to convincing the public that their views were well founded. Furtive and evil forces far worse than Willaim Randolph Hearst lurk within the innards of the Internet.
The third trend is the infamous K curve, which shows that rich people have been getting richer and poor people poorer while the middle class is staying the same. Textbooks in sociology were documenting that fact back in the ‘70s and so people can opine, as Conservatives will, that the rich being rich is inevitable while what we now call Progressives will claim that we are at last in the late stages of capitalism because the economy will self-destruct. Financial inequality is not a trend but part of a revolution or else it is the inevitable way of economic life. I, for one, don’t care if the rich are rich so long as the poor get a cut of the riches. I think, however, there is a trend, now ending as a result of coronavirus in that it seems fair to give gigantic outlays of income to people who, through no fault of their own, have become unemployed, and that the stability of the economy rests on giving money to everyone or to categories of people, like restaurant workers, so that they get by rather than go under, when that was not the case when people got unemployed in the Great Recession, where there were what we know know were minimal payments to the poor, giving money to the old through Social Security, and some work relief wages for people who would otherwise have been unemployed, like writers and artists and hillbillies who did conservation work. Now, one can hope that the safety net will get expanded to cover everyone. It won’t be charity, which is what happened in Eva Peron’s Fascism; rather, it will be a minimum living wage with supplements whether you are working or not. That is the good outcome of the pandemic, should Joe Biden decide to do so on very pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, and if he has the Senate rather than a long term tug of war with the Republicans. This is an opportunity to be bigger than the New Deal because the economic dislocation would be worse than the Depression if the government did not minister to the economy. By correcting what is the fifty year trend of the k-curve.
The fourth trend is what is called the polarization of politics that has lasted with ever greater intensity, since, let us say, the Gingrich Revolution, as it was incorrectly labeled, which went after Bill Clinton hammer and tongs though it has been building since George H. W. Bush first said “no new taxes'' and then betrayed the Republicans by trying to do so. Earlier, remember, Ronald Reagan, however adamant about his conservative economic agenda, made nice across the aisle, while Republicans since then have vilified all the Democrats who got elected as President, thinking them somehow as illegitimate, up to the present day, with the old President not willing to admit that his successor had won fair and square.
“Polarization”, however, seems the wrong term because it connotes opposing sides each armored by their ideologies and so each side not willing to engage with the other.But there is, instead, an asymmetry of the two sides. The Trumpian side does not really offer ideas rather than half truths and a great deal of anger, while the Democratic side is an organized party with policy advocates only some small minority of which are so irate, as is the case with some Blacks and Feminists, to be overcome with anger, the rest of them having to redefine into harmless the chant of “defund the police''. Polarization, as it has been called, is what has happened because of the three other trends mentioned: Mostly the Trumpites are ignorant, have access to suspicious media, and are politically angry because they have been economically downwardly mobile, though it could be as easily said that they are upwardly mobile in that their very limited bits of knowledge make for a dangerous thing. Whatever it may be called, some would say that the political discourse of America is rolling downhill, a trend that like the separation between the North and South, concluded in war, while people like me think this damage temporary and going back to the more or less program oriented Democrats with the stick in the mud rich oriented Republicans, something that had lasted, after all, only between Eisenhower and Reagan, which was also a trend.
The difficulty of thinking about trends rather than thinking about decades is that decades are made familiar and understood through the operations of culture: fashion fads, music, high and not so high literature. What encapsulates our trends? The Forties had movies about the War, while the Fifties had existential angst spelled out in “High Noon”, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “Rear Window''. Nowadays, there are vampire and zombie movies that evoke dread but no content. What are we to make of our political situation or living in the midst of the Internet? There are only conspiracy movies, like “The Matrix” and those do not give much of a purchase on our lives. There are endless essays of Black lives making themselves matter without illuminating life itself, when James Baldwin did just that. That is why I rewatch “Sleepless in Seattle'' and “You’ve Got Mail” because romance is not a decade nor a trend nor even a revolution but a fact of life for as long as we have had literature since Homer and the Bible. I will look at those until something else comes along, and it will probably be during the Twenty Twenties.