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Until recently, the U.S. had a boundless faith in steady progress, a growing sense of social justice, a belief that federal cash would solve the nation's re maining problems. Yet a decade that began with a quest for moral grandeur has bogged down in the effort to keep society from exploding. Gone is the idea that a big power can safely fight a limited war against a small power. Instead, North Viet Nam forced the U.S. to spend $85 billion and lose moral prestige in much of the world. At home, vast New Dealish programs have failed to cure poverty; civil rights legislation has left Negroes more frustrated than ever. For all the U.S.'s faith in uni versal higher education, many of the nation's brightest youths have rebelled against mass schooling that seems to ignore their burning questions: What is the good life, the nature of justice, the remedy for society's evils?
Big News and Little Solutions
As 1968 began, some of the most idealistic students set an example for their elders by avidly seeking reform through the political process. What they found instead was a seeming national swerve toward conservatism. The young, the poor, blacks and antiwar dissenters had profoundly affected government—something they once felt powerless to do. But then came a counterreaction of other Americans who feel threatened by change and civil disorders, to say nothing of youth's drug culture and new sexual freedom. As if to further dis illusion youth, the No. 1 domestic political issue may well be "law and order" rather than social justice.
Unfortunately, all this promises more crises and convulsions in 1968. The con fusion tends to confirm extremist notions that U.S. institutions are moribund, that the only solution is to uproot society and start afresh. Only the fatuous deny that too many courts, legislatures, federal agencies and universities have grown unmindful of their duty to liberate rather than constrict. Yet in advanced countries, institutions cannot be eliminated; the infinitely complex problems of crime or poverty require organized experts. There is no Gordian knot waiting to be slashed. To yearn for apocalypse and reject the real task—to reform failing institutions—is simply to sabotage one of the world's few self-governing societies.
The trouble is that most of what needs to get done in the U.S. is pretty boring stuff—things like modernizing taxes, zoning, building codes and local governments. Yet neglect of such matters is what promotes the wrong kind of change. Most of the historians' turning-point years involve wars and revolutions, not peaceful change. Clearly, 1968 is already a year for the history books; if it becomes a really major entry, the reason will be that Americans failed to solve too many of the minor problems that eventually cause major explosions. In that sense, today's blaring headlines convey a warning: the big news is what isn't being done in a thousand little ways.
Americans have really always known this. There are various ways of looking at history: as fate, as chance, as an opponent to be outwitted or a force from which to hide. Americans treat it, at least in part, as a problem to be mastered. Call it pride or pragmatism, on this fundamental belief the U.S. was founded and still stands—that men need not be victims.