THE END OF POLITICS?
21
of alteration in our politics between periods when private action, private
interests, private enterprise seem the best way of meeting our problems,
and periods when public action, public purpose seem the best way. The
Reagan 1980s was of course a classical phase of faith in private action,
and rejection of public action. It was a more drastic reenactment of the
Eisenhower 1950s, a period which was itself a reenactment of the
Harding-Coolidge-Hoover 1920s. Similarly, at thirty-year intervals, we
turn to public action, public purpose, public interest. Theodore
Roosevelt ushering in the Progressive era in 1901; thirty years after that,
Franklin Roosevelt ushering in the New Deal in 1933; thirty years after
that, John Kennedy and the New Frontier in 1961. So if the rhythm
holds, the 1990s should be more like the Roosevelt and Kennedy eras
than like the Reagan era.
There is no mystery about the thirty-year interval. It is roughly the
span of a generation. People tend to be influenced by the ideas that pre–
dominate when they come of age politically. People who grew up dur–
ing the Progressive era, like Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and
Harry Truman, carried forward thirty years later, when their generation's
turn came, the ideas of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson into
the New Deal. Similarly, people who grew up in the 1930s, like John
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Robert Kennedy,
carried forward the New Deal thirty years later into the New Society
and the New Frontier. Kennedy touched and formed a political genera–
tion; and in the sense that the Kennedys and Johnson were the children
of FDR, so Clinton and Gore are the children of Kennedy. And, as I
say, if that rhythm holds, then that political generation's time should
come in the 1990s. The kind of problems we confront as the result of
more than a decade of public neglect can be met only by affirmative
government.
It
may be that if a government begins to address itself to
the serious problems concerning the American people, this question of
alienation will not seem so formidable.
I will conclude by recalling what Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1889
in
The Political Science Quarterly
at Columbia University, reviewing
Bryce's
American Commonwealth,
Wilson wrote, "America is now saun–
tering through her resources and through the mazes of her politics with
easy nonchalance; but presently there will come a time when she will be
surprised to find herself grown old . . . a country crowded, strained,
perplexed ... when she will be obliged ... to pull herself together,
adopt a new regimen of life, husband her resources, concentrate her
strength, steady her methods, sober her views, restrict her vagaries, trust
her best, not her average members. That will be the time of change."
When we look at America's position in the world today, I think
