Harbingers of regrowth

From No, This Isn’t as Bad as 1968 (So Far) by Zachary Karabell.

NEW YORK—Biking from the Upper West Side down near Washington Square Park on Saturday I was struck by how it felt like a journey back in time. Earlier that day, we’d seen a pioneering space launch; on the sidewalks, people were hanging out, having impromptu block parties, drinking openly; and every 20 blocks or so there were spontaneous riots and baton-wielding police. Police cars were screaming down the streets at random intervals. The blue CitiBike I was riding, unlocked with an iPhone, was very much a 21st-century phenomenon, but the landscape around it felt like 1968.

In the past days, 1968 has emerged as a meme, a way to understand what we’re living through right now. On CNN.com, historian Julian Zelizer wrote that “it's hard for Baby Boomers not to feel like this is 1968 all over again.” And not just “like,” but considerably worse. At The Atlantic, James Fallows, who has been covering American politics and policy for decades, eulogized our world today by reflecting on how until 2020, “The most traumatic year in modern American history was 1968.” He glumly suggested that with this weekend’s violence coming on top of a deadly pandemic and Depression-level unemployment, all overseen by disorganized leadership, 2020 may have caught up—and there are still seven months left in the year for things to go wrong.

The echo of the late 1960s is undeniable. With life strangely slowed by the pandemic, and lock-ins now bizarrely alleviated not by a cautious reopening but by mass protests of police brutality and racial inequities, it is all too understandable that the mood is bleak and backward-looking. The country is split by Trump and race the way it was split back then by the Vietnam War and race. The temptation to see today as a darker recapitulation of the darkest years of the late 1960s is hard to resist.

But resist we should. Now isn’t then. It’s far better, even though it may not feel that way.

Indeed. MSM are dialing up the panic trying to make Covid-19 something it is not, trying to make race an issue it is not, and trying to make policing an issue it is not. At least not empirically. Emotions are a different thing.

Last month I blogged The Summer of 1968, the plague year pointing out that in 1968 we had a flu epidemic which killed 100,000 Americans out of 200 million. The 1968 flu had attention at the time but only marginal attention. Nothing in particular was done about it and most people have forgotten about it.

Covid-19 is probably milder than the flu epidemic in 1968. And as Karabell points out, our political divisions and tensions were dramatically greater in 1968 than now. Youth riots at both conventions in 1968 but especially violent at the Democratic convention in Chicago. A Cold War opponent just about at the peak of their threat. The quagmire of Vietnam. The prospect of forced bussing. Real per capita GDP in 1968 less than half of what it is today. Decolonization in Africa. Unrest in Latin America. Warsaw Pact tanks just on the border of West Germany. Airline hijackings by PLO and others. One year out from the Six-Day war. A murder rate in 1968 nearly a third higher than today. The first wave of drugs. The assassinations of both Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. On and on.

The poorest 20% of Americans today have a consumption pattern equivalent to that of the middle class in 1968.

2020 so far doesn't hold a candle to 1968, domestically or globally.

So why are we being stampeded into hysteria and panic? Lots of possible hypotheses. Things are not nearly as bad as they are being represented. I suspect we are seeing the death knell of some old establishment and institutional privileges which are long past their sell-by date. Unearned privileges in journalism and academia in particular but in other areas as well. Hopefully these current troubles are harbingers of regrowth.