The Great Anxiety

It must have been a great time to be alive in the mid-1960s, when I was born.  Yes, there were moments of strife, like the civil rights struggle, but in 1965, the same year as the Selma march, enormous progress seemed not only possible but doable.  It was the year of President Lyndon Johnson's first full term in office.  He promoted a new agenda of progress and advancement - the Great Society - which gave us Medicare, Head Start, the Job Corps, a fairer immigration law, the Voting Rights Act, and a "war" on poverty.  It would be a society in which everyone had a fair chance to get ahead in life.  And even as President Johnson was being inaugurated in January 1965, my parents - just married and both 25 at the time -  were living modestly and didn't have much money, like any other young couple, but they had a place of their own and were able to get by while they were just starting out, even after I was born later that year.  It looked like things could only get better for everyone.

Then everything unraveled.  President Johnson (above) deepened U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, undermining his own Great Society programs, and the glacial pace of racial integration and economic advancement led urban blacks (a term soon to become a redundancy) burned down the cities, and leaders who promised even more change - Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F Kennedy - were assassinated.  Then we got the stagflation and energy crises of the 1970s.  By the late 1980s and early 1990s, subsequent Republican administrations had pretty much dismantled most of the Great Society and had also dismantled much of the manufacturing base that made this country work.  When I was 25, I was still living at home.  At 58, I still do.  

Now the young people of today are in even worse shape.  Many of them live in their parents' basements and can't afford much, while those lucky enough to live on their own are nickeled and dimed to the point where their paychecks are in worse shape.  Despite the robust economy, President Biden is faced with the unenviable task of rebuilding four decades' with of a dismantled economic base that is rigged toward higher-income folks.  He's been doing that, but he hasn't gotten far enough.  And the effects of his policies have yet to be felt by young voters - the very voters he needs to defat Donald Trump, who is leading in many polls despite his promises to make America into another Third Reich.

Trump won't just get back in power because young people may stay home.  He'll get back in also because his base - including some young people - will turn out.  Trump supporters feel left out, scorned, and looked down upon, and a lot of young people who voted for Biden in 2020 feel the same way.  And if  Biden just squeaks by in the 2024 election, Trump will claim fraud and more chaos will ensue.  When U.S. Senator Carl Hayden (D-AZ) became the last Senate president pro tempore to announce the winner of a presidential due to a vacancy in the Vice Presidency on Wednesday, January 6, 1965, no one could have expected that on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the Vice Presidency would be threatened with being vacated by a lynching of its occupant for not helping the incumbent President stay in power.

The Great Society President Johnson envisioned is now neither great nor a society.  Welcome to the Great Anxiety.  And buckle up for a bumpy ride.