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A better case can be made for the late '50s and early '60s. Communism no longer seemed on the ascendant throughout the world, despite such triumphs as Sputnik. Blacks were winning their civil rights. The American genius for production was turning out technologically dazzling goods and mountainous surpluses of food. The campuses were so complacently quiet that people spoke of the Silent Generation. That age turned sour around the end of 1963, with the assassination of John Kennedy and the deepening involvement in Viet Nam. After that, it became harder to cheer a society divided by riots, split by generations, alarmed by drugs and afraid to walk city streets at night.
But recent years also have their defenders as a good time to be alive in. The man who argues their case most aggressively is Ben J. Wattenberg, who in his book The Real America draws his proofs from Ihe 1970 census. He cites statistics that show more than half the employed working in white-collar jobs, which are more pleasant and less demanding than the production line. Between 1950 and 1973, real income—even discounting for inflation—doubled, and from 1959 to 1969 the numbers of people officially listed as living in poverty were cut almost in half. For the first time, a majority of blacks (judging by income, occupation and education) were in the middle class. Wattenberg concluded that people are really much better off than they think they are, and laid the blame for widespread discontent on an increasing "psychology of entitlement" (college education for the kids, a satisfying job for oneself). So if—despite electric dishwashers to replace poorly paid domestics, and second cars and second homes for millions—people are still dissatisfied, the answer is that history records no instance of a people made happier by the knowledge that they are part of a comforting statistic.
For many, of course, the statistics themselves are small comfort. For blacks and other minorities in particular, the signs of an improving economy seem to bring no improvement in their own high unemployment. Even for Americans secure in their jobs, inflation diminishes their present income and makes the future more worrisome.
But the contemporary sense of times awry goes deeper than economics. Potomac Associates, a research organization, measures something it calls the "ladder of life"; in its most recent test, reported in December, Americans on the average thought themselves better off now than they were five years ago and expected to be personally still better off in the future. Yet these same Americans expressed a sharp decline in confidence in their country's future. Political studies show that in every election since 1958, the "most politically estranged" voters have been those over 50; the world simply became loo much for them. Surprisingly, in the most recent presidential election the next most alienated group was the one from 21 to 24 years old.