When Nostalgia Undermines Hope
Tea Party Economist
In the year I went off to college, the President was Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower had been elected in 1952 by means of a slogan: "I like Ike." it was completely devoid of any sense of good versus evil, better versus worse, truth versus falsehood, tomorrow versus today.
One week before the election, the first full-scale detonation of a hydrogen bomb took place. It was code-named Ivy Mike.
"Ivy Mike" and "I like Ike" rhymed. I don't think people noticed that at the time.
The news about Ivy Mike seemed to give us a leg up on the Soviet Union, but it was obvious that the Soviet Union would be able to match the technology soon enough, which it did.
For one congressional term, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. That would not happen again until 2001, and only for a few months. But FDR's New Deal remained intact. It steadily expanded.
It is possible to look back at those days and become nostalgic if you are an aging middle-class white man. The civil rights movement did not begin until 1955. There was a recession in 1953, there was another one in 1958, and a third in 1960, but they were mild. In 1952, there was no Playboy. The American economy was the strongest economy in the world. (On a per adult basis, it still is. Overwhelmingly.)
I am not nostalgic about that era. The Cold War was a nuclear threat in 1953, and it escalated for almost four decades. The potential for nuclear war is still here technologically, but the Russian Federation is not ideologically driven by a philosophy of world conquest.
There was no conservative movement in 1952. There was no libertarian movement. There were three tiny publishing houses that would occasionally release a conservative or libertarian book. Hardly anybody had heard about them. There was no conservative newsletter movement, other than the tiny Human Events, which began in 1944, and even more tiny Facts Forum, which began in 1952. The Freeman started in 1951. National Review started in 1955. The Foundation for Economic Education began publishing The Freeman as a free magazine in 1956.
For the middle-class white American, it was a glorious time in retrospect. But middle-class living is never glorious. It is merely comfortable.
Television in 1952 was finally beginning to reach into every American household. Prior to that, it had been limited to the largest cities. The culture on television was basically warmed-over vaudeville. The biggest star was Milton Berle, a vaudeville performer. With only three major television networks, the range of cultural choice was minimal. The only show that anybody remembers from that era is I Love Lucy. Take a look. Four years later, the top show was still I Love Lucy. Most of the other shows still survived. Take a look. Cultural tastes were not improving.
At the beginning of Eisenhower's presidency, there was no great political issue confronting America, other than the Cold War. The differences between Eisenhower and Stevenson were minimal, and when they ran against each other again four years later, they were still minimal.
Most people forget that the top personal income tax bracket was 91%. The voters accepted this. Then, as now, there were loopholes in the tax code, but the tax code was radically socialistic compared to what it is today. I don't think Bernie Sanders would dare to run on such a tax reform platform. But Eisenhower never criticized it. It was not lowered until 1964, when Lyndon Johnson was president. Again, most people forget this.
Eisenhower's first appointment to the Supreme Court was California governor Earl Warren. That was a promise he had made to get Warren's support at the Republican National Convention for his candidacy. That began the most significant era of liberal "legislation by judicial decree" in American history. I have no nostalgia about the Warren Court.
The number of libertarian spokesmen was limited to maybe half a dozen nationally known people, of whom F. A. Hayek was the most prominent. Hayek been blackballed by the economics department at the University of Chicago. He was not accepted in academia. Ludwig von Mises was known by almost nobody. The only publicly known libertarian organization was the Foundation for Economic Education. It was tiny. It had no influence. There was the William Volker Fund which put up money for Hayek and Mises and FEE. It published no books. It published no magazine or newsletter.
The only college with an Austrian School undergraduate economics department was Grove City College, where Hans Sennholz was the chairman. That began in 1955. He was an Austrian School economist, but not everybody in the department was. As for free-market graduate schools, there was the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, but these were mathematically oriented schools. The kind of free market education that they taught was not remotely Austrian.
THE EXTENSION OF THE NEW DEAL
I mention all this for a reason. We are seeing a loss of hope today within the middle class. The political parties are divided. There is a loss of civility in public. The federal deficit is out of control. The universities seem paralyzed by politically correct speech.
I contend that what we're seeing is simply an extension of the liberalism and the welfare state that was fully entrenched in 1952. Liberalism was dominant on college campuses then, just as it is today. It was a complacent liberalism. It was a self-satisfied liberalism. It seemed to be a unified liberalism. Today, liberalism is fragmented, just as conservatism is fragmented, but at least there is a conservatism today. There was not in 1952. There barely was in 1956.
The three networks are declining in ratings. There is no unified culture any longer. In the 1950's, the culture was hardly inspirational. It was just more polite. But there is no social salvation associated with politeness.
I want to go back to the quotation from C. S. Lewis's 1945 novel, That Hideous Strength.
"If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family--anything you like--at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren't quite so sharp; and that there's going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous. Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder."
This was more perceivable in Great Britain in 1945 than in the United States in 1955. The Labour Party had taken over. There really was not an ideological debate between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. It was more like the Republican Party of 1945. It was non-ideological. There was no body of free-market opinion. Really, there was only Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. But not many people had ever heard of it. Margaret Roberts had. She was majoring in chemistry at the time. Her married name became Thatcher. But she was not representative of the conservative party in 1945.
We are seeing the working out of what Lewis described. The issues are becoming clearer. This has undermined the old boy networks of both Great Britain and the United States.
LOSS OF HOPE
I have an old friend who is in his early 80's. He was part of the libertarian movement in the Eisenhower years.
He sees no hope for America. He sees everything that has happened since 1960, or almost everything, as erosion. He was aware of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in 1955. He was one of a tiny remnant of people who were. He looks back to the mid-1950's as the golden age of libertarianism. Back then, ideology was pure. And it was. Well, not quite. The limited government people excommunicated the anarcho-capitalists. The anarcho-capitalists had almost no way of getting their message out.
Back then, nobody in the libertarian movement had any influence. So, nobody suffered any guilt for not having any influence. I think that was what made the age so golden for him. He is long into retirement. He keeps reading, but what he reads is never optimistic. For him, the dark clouds have no silver linings.
I came into the conservative movement in 1956. It barely existed. What little there was, was anti-communist. There was virtually nothing on the development of conservative principles, let alone building a conservative political movement. It was a lot easier to read the conservative literature of the period because there was so little of it. Today, nobody can keep up. This is good. This is not a cause for despair.
There was no Christian Right. The only Christian college that had anything resembling a free market curriculum was Harding College in the little town of Searcy, Arkansas. That was because of one man: the president, George S. Benson. It was a Church of Christ school. It was not known in the fundamentalist Protestant movement. Bob Jones University was conservative, but its economics curriculum was not uniquely free market. In any case, BJU was not committed to transforming Protestantism or American life. It was inward-looking, with only one exception: the most extraordinary collection of medieval paintings in the Western Hemisphere. Culturally, it was unique. But nobody knew this back then, and almost nobody knows it today. It was incredible then, and it is incredible today.
Today, the ideas of the Austrian School are far more widespread than ever before. Let me give an example. If you go to the Alexa site to see the rankings of websites, you find that the Mises Institute is around 28,000. This is out of over a billion sites. The Foundation for Economic Education is around 29,000. In contrast, the website for the American Economic Association, which is the website of academic economists, is about 29,000. So, the libertarian sites combined have twice the traffic that the AEA's site does. This was inconceivable three decades ago.
The number of libertarian and conservative books is huge today. We cannot keep up with the titles. It was not difficult to keep up with the titles in 1956.
The homeschool movement has made inroads on the public school movement. This was certainly not the case in the 1950's, the 1960's, or even the 1970's.
The decentralization of communications and the rise of YouTube have combined to give alternative viewpoints an opportunity to reach huge audiences. Jordan Peterson sometimes gets several million hits on a video. In the 1950's, there were no conservative psychologists, and the number of conservative sociologists on campus was three or four men. Only one of them wrote books, and he was not known at the time: Albert Hobbs. Robert Nisbet did not begin to publish widely until the second half of the 1960's.
Today, if you have a strong viewpoint, and you are able to articulate it, you are expected to do so. There is no good excuse for not doing it. If you can read a book, you can write a book review. If you can write a book review, you can publish it online. Somebody will read it.
CONCLUSION
The fact that things seem to be getting worse all around us is an illusion. Some things are getting worse. We see it in culture. We see it in the federal budget deficit. But to imagine that gridlock politically is a disadvantage is a mistake. The welfare state is running out of money to steal. Margaret Roberts Thatcher was correct: "The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." That is how her statement has been summarized. She actually said this in 1976, the year that she took over as leader of the Conservative Party, which was out of office. She said this of the Labour Party:
I would much prefer to bring them down as soon as possible. I think they've made the biggest financial mess that any government's ever made in this country for a very long time, and Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they're now trying to control everything by other means. They're progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.
This is as true today as it was back then. The fact that the welfare state is going bankrupt should not be a cause of despair. It should be a cause of rejoicing.
The fact that some things are deteriorating is consistent with the critique brought against the welfare state by conservatism, libertarianism, and the remnants of the new Christian Right. It would be a sad state of affairs if bad economics produced good results, meaning morally good results and economically good results. That would be a cause of despair.
I like to look at the bright side. For me, the following represents hope: https://www.garynorth.com/public/19611.cfm.