For Children of ‘60s and Their Ilk, a Government to Despise--Again

“I think I should have voted for Bush,” said a disappointed friend. “Since everyone I vote for always loses, maybe it would have thrown the election to Dukakis.”

It’s true that, in my neighborhood, we’ve backed a lot of losers. Here on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which has one of the most liberal electorates in the nation and a congressman, Ted Weiss, with a record to match, the lines at the polling booths bristled with never-say-die Dukakis-Bentsen buttons and pessimistic frowns. The returns from around the nation came as no surprise, but election night was nonetheless a gloomy one.

There was no surprise, too, in the reactions of my friends. Most of us are in our late 30s or early 40s, professionals and academics of one kind or another with rent-stabilized apartments, postgraduate degrees and some experience, back in the ‘60s, with the anti-war movement. Predictably, the feelings that I’ve heard expressed by almost everyone I know are deeply at variance with the rest of America: it’s a given, around here, that George Bush is a goofily grinning mediocrity whose election bodes ill for the environment, for women’s rights and for the poor; that his running mate, Dan Quayle, is a national embarrassment (and potentially a national catastrophe), and that, in handing the two of them so lopsided a victory, American voters have once again demonstrated their blindness, their anti-intellectualism and their susceptibility to the crudest sort of flag-waving demagoguery. “Those morons out there have done it again”--that’s what people in these parts have been saying ever since the election. I hear it all the time.

But I’ve also begun to hear something else--something I first became aware of eight years ago with the coming to power of Ronald Reagan. I heard it again after his reelection, but it seems even more apparent today. Beneath the genuine anguish and disappointment, beneath the grumbling and the sighs, as my friends and I contemplate another four or even eight years of Reaganism and enumerate the disasters that await us, I hear a secret satisfaction.

In part, of course, it’s just the melancholy satisfaction of the doom-cryer; there’s something undeniably enjoyable about playing Cassandra. There’s also a hint, in my friends’ worried tones, of the excitement one tends to feel in a crisis. Adversity is not without its appeal.

This time, though, the appeal is of a very special kind: that of the outcast, the rebel, who defines himself by his opposition to those in power. Disturbing as it may sound, it is by no means entirely unpleasant to live under a regime one truly loathes--at least here in America. One is free to criticize the government’s hypocrisy and stupidity; one can dissociate oneself from its blunders. Most of all, one can feel superior to it. It’s small satisfaction, of course, but very real.

It’s also an exercise in nostalgia, for not since the Vietnam War era has this outcast’s role come quite so easily. It came, in those days of undergraduate proclamations and draft-card burnings, with a peculiar certainty. The war was criminal, and we knew it. The government was wrong, and we knew it. Millions of Americans--a vast majority, at one stage--may have supported the war, but they, too, were wrong. We knew we were morally and intellectually superior to them.

Several years ago a social observer at the New York Times noted the rise of a new class of Americans: those who defined themselves not so much as representatives of a particular region, ethnic group or social background but, foremost, as members of the intelligentsia--smarter, in short, than the average Joe. That’s the way we saw ourselves in our college days. We were ashamed, appalled, outraged at the things our country was doing--and the feeling was curiously agreeable.

Jimmy Carter changed all that. For me and for most of my acquaintances, his election remains the only time we actually voted for a winner. Suddenly we felt obliged to take the government’s side--a rather uncomfortable position for self-styled dissidents. We found ourselves defending the Administration, or trying to, when it waffled on some issue. We winced when the President was criticized because it was no longer quite so easy to dissociate ourselves from his failures; after all, we’d elected the guy. It was alternately enraging and humiliating to watch the nation blunder, as nations will, into crises at home and abroad. Despising the government turned out to be a lot more pleasant than having to apologize for it.

Now, once again, we’ve got a government we can despise. Once again we can feel superior to the rest of the citizenry; they’ve turned their future over to a couple of slickly packaged know-nothings and they deserve everything they’re going to get. As for us, we’ve been given another four years to feel young and defiant. It’s just like old times.