Our Time

My perception is that we live in a particularly confounding time, and the more history, literary criticism, and culture criticism I read, the more convinced I am that I'm right.

There are, however, two things that I must keep in mind when heading into this. The first is that temperamentally I am prone to pessimism. I have fought against this my whole life, and I like to think that I've hidden it pretty successfully, but I know it's there and I certainly don't want my version of culture analysis to be nothing more than a feelings-driven rant.

The second is that I have lived through a time of remarkable change, in matters small and large, and the tendency --- especially as one gets older --- is to see change as leading to things that are not just different but worse. This, too, I hope to transcend.

For a long time, I have thought that the period between the Civil War and World War I was a time of defining change in American life; that the change took place before the War; and that the period after the War right up until our own time is of a piece. In other words, and in very broad strokes, that there was an American life before the Civil War that was irretrievably lost; that there were a large number of economic, social, and political changes in the period between 1865 and 1914; and that the new American life that came about because of those changes has been remarkably the same since 1919, despite the obvious differences on the surface.

I make this point partly for its own sake but mostly to set up an example. The changes in American life between the Civil War and World War I were huge and most, if not all, of them were driven by the changes in our economic life. The North's victory had committed the United States to the modern way of doing things which positioned us perfectly to take advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's. Put briefly, this led to the creation of monopolies and to the creation of vast new wealth, much of it held by people from places different from the established centers of economic and political power in the East.

These were "the new men," the nouveaux riches, the "men of affairs," the masters of what Twain called The Gilded Age. These were men for whom wealth was all, except to the extent that wealth led to power. There was much talk of an "invisible government," the influence wielded by the wealthy on matters of public policy. And it was not mere talk: Commodore Vanderbilt once said, "Law! What do I care about law? Hain't I got the power?"

These new economic realities provoked a number of reformist (and even revolutionary) responses; it was a time of a great deal of unrest. But the movement that won out was Progressivism and the most visible sign of its real-world triumph was that it held the White House from 1901 to 1917, under Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.

Progressivism is difficult to talk about because it is made up of a complex and even contradictory set of attitudes and goals. In general, the Progressive story is about the conflict between liberal righteousness and evil. But in practice, the movement included a revolutionary mood but resulted in no revolution; it was the political champion of the middle class but also encouraged socialism; it was devoted to the poor and downtrodden but also enthusiastic about imperialism. So it's not that Progressivism was a unified and coherent movement.

But either despite its incoherence or because of it, Progressivism became the popular response to the economic evils of the time. There was an enthusiasm for it unlike anything that we have seen in our lifetime.

One of the many things that I find confounding about our time is that although many of the same economic evils exist today, there is no generally embraced response to them.

Both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were meant to be reformist but it didn't take very long for both of them to be quietly moved to the sidelines.

Bankers and other versions of financiers have committed the most egregious crimes against both the law and the people to whom they had a moral obligation, yet, with the exception of a few highly publicized scapegoats, they are not only not in jail but are continuing to make obscene amounts of money.

It is also hard --- hard for me, at any rate --- to believe that federal and state executives and legislators are as inept as they appear to be. It is far easier to believe that there is still an "invisible government," one that influences through power that comes from wealth and economic influence.

And while our involvement in overseas wars is not popular, there is little enthusiasm, much less a wide-spread popular movement, against them.

So, despite living with essentially the same phenomena that created Progressivism in the 1890's, we mostly just go about our business, tacitly giving our approval to the way things are.

It's important to remember that while it is true that industrial capitalism has produced great wealth for a few people, and created a perhaps-too-large gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, it is also true that industrial capitalism has --- contra Marx's prediction --- created wealth and distributed that wealth much more widely than anyone could possibly have predicted 100 years ago. Most of us have a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of which didn't even exist 60 years ago.

So maybe the reason we are as tolerant of economic and political misbehavior as we are is that most of us are so well off. We have bread and we have circuses, and we have very, very little knowledge of  the past and its meaning for the present. (And the few financiers and politicians who are revealed, shamed, removed from their positions, and jailed are seen as just part of the circus.)

The Progressives of the 1890's rightly saw the miserable conditions of the new industrial cities as a target for reform. Industrial capitalism had created a widespread and intense poverty that was morally unacceptable. The victories of the Progressives, although hardly total, were victories against that poverty.

We have no analog to that progressive enthusiasm, perhaps because most of us are so well off and few of us are aware of and morally outraged by the morally unacceptable conditions of our own time.

But just as it is difficult to talk about Progressivism because of its complexity, it is difficult to talk about our own time in this regard. While it seems obvious to me that there is not a generally felt enthusiasm for reform, it is also true that there are thousands of public and private agencies that work tirelessly on behalf of those who are in need.

Maybe that lack of generalized enthusiasm is because we have been so successful in creating "progressive" social agencies and we now see that as a reform already accomplished.

I don't know. I told you: I find this time confounding.