The Alarmists Need to Relax: Even 1968 Wasn't 1968
It's a rather pricey part of Manhattan to live in today, but in the 1960s New York City's Harlem neighborhood was very poor and very unsafe. Full of restaurants and bars today, fifty years ago it was known as a place to avoid; particularly at night.
Interesting about Harlem, a locale marked by race riots in the ‘60s, was how very prosperous it was back then in a global sense. Though poor by lofty U.S. standards, historian Steven Hayward points out in the first volume of his impossibly good two part book, The Age of Reagan, that per capita income in 1964 Harlem "would have ranked it among the five richest nations in the world."
Hayward's broader point, one too often forgotten by commentators eager to find major meaning in everything, is what perhaps helped drive unrest in the upper part of Manhattan in the ‘60s. While it's not uncommon to suggest poverty is the root of frustration within the citizenry, Hayward suggested that "revolutionary turmoil is often fueled more by rising expectations [my emphasis] than repressive conditions."
This is worth remembering in consideration of all the supposed present-day tumult, not to mention all the commentary from left and right about how bad things are in the United States. Relative to what? Bad times for us are boom times elsewhere. The living conditions of the poor in the U.S. would rate as middle to upper middle class in other parts of the world. Is the U.S. really in turmoil right now, or are spoiled Americans angry that what is great isn't spectacular? It's something to think about.
At present we're hit by daily commentary about a "war on cops" inside a "nation divided" by all manner of things, including economic inequality. To believe the headlines these are bad times, but maybe not.
About policing in the U.S. today, it should first be said how awful the recent murders were in Baton Rouge and Dallas. All lives matter, including those of the police whose job it is to serve and protect us. Still, the underreported good news is that the supposed "war on cops" is vastly overstated.
As libertarian scholar Radley Balko pointed out last year, not only is violence against the police near all-time lows, so is the rate of violence against police in the U.S. well down. The number of firearm-related deaths for police has plummeted over the last 100 years. The number of deaths perhaps unsurprisingly hit a high during the Prohibition era, and that's worth bringing up as way of suggesting that an end to the worthless drug war would make policing exponentially safer than it presently is.
As for a "divided America," let's hope. Never explained is why it's a good thing when America is united on issues. Unity plainly makes it a lot easier for Washington to impose a lot of economy and freedom-sapping one-size-fits-all solutions on us that will make us worse off. What makes the U.S. great isn't that we're a unified blob; rather the genius of the United States is a fierce individuality protected by the Constitution. Mobs can vote for a lot of dumb things, at which point we should cheer on our continued division.
Certainly the rise of politicians like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders signals something amiss, this column has written about currency devaluation as the historical driver of societal tumult, but let's not forget the Harlem stat. While the U.S. has very rich and very poor, it can't be forgotten that the lifestyles of the U.S.'s very poor are pretty grand by global standards. So while some of the general U.S. frustration is surely economic, it's more realistically rooted in the U.S. economy not growing fast enough as opposed to not growing. While economic growth is easy, and is as simple as reducing or removing the tax, regulatory, trade tariff and floating money barriers to production, it's always worth stressing that the U.S. has more of an expectations problem than a growth problem. Sorry, but we're spoiled.
All of which brings us back to 1968. It's been suggested more than once that the murders in Dallas and Baton Rouge alongside broad political unrest signal something bigger societally; perhaps a return to the divisions of 1968. The problem there is that the alleged 1968 upheaval is just that. To see why, it's time to return to Hayward's The Age of Reagan once again.
Though the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago give off the impression now of a Democratic party torn apart by Vietnam, Hayward reminds readers that the Republican party was even more divided, and the Republican nomination for president "much more in doubt than the Democratic nomination." Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a defender of the Vietnam War who wasn't on any Democratic primary ballot, had the nomination well in the bag owing to broad support among party leaders. As for Robert F. Kennedy's campaign, he wasn't terribly popular on the hard left such that Humphrey welcomed his candidacy as a way of Kennedy publicly exposing his weakness with the Democratic voters.
Kennedy was assassinated after the California primary that he won, and that Humphrey hoped he would win given his view of him as a non-threat. As for what this signaled societally, Hayward writes that,
"The assassination of Robert Kennedy two months after the killing of Martin Luther King has forever blurred and romanticized the memory of 1968. Like King's killing, Kennedy's killing set off a fresh round of America-bashing among liberals. ‘The world today,' Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said the day after, ‘is asking a terrible question which every citizen of this republic should be putting to himself: What sort of people are we, we Americans?'"
But as Hayward pointed out, the Kennedy tragedy had very little to do with "we Americans." As he noted, Sirhan Sirhan "was a foreign born radical whose diary said, among other things, ‘I advocate the overthrow of the current president of the f-----United States of America...I firmly support the Communist cause and its people.'" Did either tragic death have an impact on an allegedly insurgent left in the U.S.? Hayward thinks not; writing that by '68 "the left had little use for King, and no use for Kennedy." King was shot in Memphis while helping bus strikers, while Kennedy was seen as too far to right of the hard left on Vietnam. On the domestic policy front Kennedy was way too far to the right. No less than Ronald Reagan observed about him that "I get the feeling I've been writing some of his speeches."
The 1968 "revolution" or unrest was anything but. As opposed to a divided nation, the U.S. was much more unified than is commonly thought. Seemingly more than it is today. On the subject of the Chicago riots that generated a big police response, Hayward cited a poll showing that "71 percent of Americans thought Chicago's security measures were justified; 57 percent thought the police had not used excessive force, while 25 percent thought the police had not used enough force." Just as the statistics show there's no "war on cops" today, there certainly wasn't one in 1968. There wasn't even a sentiment problem as the polling data unearthed by Hayward reveal.
What was the problem then, much like now? Probably one of context. Americans are once again spoiled. So used to good times are we that even a slight slowdown in the continuous increase in our living standards causes us to make a lot of noise. Importantly, the noise magnifies everything, including tragedies that it well should. But let's not confuse what's happening now with something bigger than it is. Expectations can be cruel, and all this talk of some kind of bigger meaning to the present gives us something to talk about, but little of substance.
Indeed, the context is weak. Things keep getting better, though not as rapidly as they have been. Reduce the governmental barriers to production, and we'll be back on the fast track; all the talk of 1968 put to bed. As it should. There's no story about 1968. 1968 wasn't even 1968.
