As of today, Bob Byrd is the longest serving member of Congress in the history of the United States (he just beat Carl Hayden whose tenure combined 15 years in the House and over 40 years in the Senate).  Anyway, Byrd, who will turn 92 on Friday, made a floor speech today celebrating the milestone.  According to Politico, only one Republican (Orrin Hatch) was in the chamber to hear Byrd’s speech.

Doris Kearns Goodwin on Morning Joe:

What happened to [political] parties in this country? I mean, I think it’s a deadly thing – parties used to be part of peoples’ identity. There used to be parades, they used to go running around feeling like ‘I’m a Catholic, I’m a Democrat, I’m a Protestant, I’m a Republican. People don’t feel that way anymore. No wonder we can’t govern, there’s no loyalty left. Those independents have every control, they can float any way they want to.

Later in the show…

Joe Scarborough: “Doris, are we entering the age of the independent?”

Doris Kearns Goodwin: “I think it’s a worrisome age, if so. You know it really was true in the old days that parties would choose the nominee, maybe it wasn’t as open as you would hope it would be today – primaries are a good thing. But in the old days, once you got in, you owed your loyalty to a group, a collective group and you tried to get things done together. And that’s gone right now. And I think with the internet, with money, which is what Morty was saying…”

Mort Zuckerman: “… education too, by the way. There’s a much higher level of education, college education, and those people tend to be more independent, and less tied to an individual party. That’s an inevitable flow in American society.”

Two things are undeniable:

1) Electoral politics are changing in ways that hurt the two-party system. Online fundraising and alternative media outlets have robbed both the Democratic and Republican parties of their most basic functions. An independent candidate could easily mount a competitive campaign – even for President – in the very near future.

2) Pretty much everyone I know celebrates Undeniable Fact #1 as a victory. Set that aside as anecdotal. Support for a “third party alternative” registered 46% according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released today. [Dig a little deeper and you also find evidence in the same poll for the obvious: most ideological momentum is with libertarians, whether on gun rights or gay marriage.]

Part of that is nothing more than basic institutional skepticism – no different than the distrust of mainstream media, organized religion, or government itself* (our culture has over-internalized the “Question Everything” mantra). Part of it is that an increasing number of people refuse to compromise their special perspective to become part of some “big tent.”

But while it’s easy to attack the two-party system, it’s also important to remember why strong parties are good for the country.

In the past, the endorsement of a major political party was essential to getting elected. As a result, elected officials felt pressure to be “good soldiers” in their party’s caucus. While that has led to the caricature of back-room deals and smoke-filled rooms, it has also led to most of the positive legislation we’ve had in the nation’s history. It’s how LBJ was able to peel off support of some Southern Democrats for Civil Rights legislation, for example.

Fast forward to today. Candidates know that the best way to raise funds is to buck the party establishment (becoming Netroots stars like Michelle Bachman on the Right or Alan Grayson on the Left). They get elected owing nothing to political party, and owing everything to even narrower interests.

Just as in the past it had been in the interest of elected officials to support the party leadership, it’s equally in the interests of today’s elected officials to defy party leadership in order to distinguish themselves. Legislators who would have at one time been considered ineffective back-benchers are now heralded as principled “lone wolves” with glowing alt media headlines. And where the glowing headlines go, the online donations soon follow. It’s how previously unknown congressman Joe Wilson could turn his “You Lie!” moment into more than a million dollars of campaign funding. Ditto that for the Russ Feingolds and Ron Pauls of American politics – standing alone is the best way to get support in today’s climate.

As parties decline in relevance, something is always there to fill the vacuum. Look at today’s headline: “Lieberman Says He’ll Join GOP Filibuster of Health Care Reform.”. OK, Lieberman won re-election in ‘06 as an independent (after losing the Dem nomination to Ned Lamont). As a result, Lieberman owes nothing to a political party, cannot be swayed by leadership, and is now free to revel in his exaggerated sense of self-importance. But while he doesn’t need his Party, he does need the support of Connecticut’s insurance companies to fund his elections, so a vote they want is more valuable to him than a vote the Senate leadership wants.

The two-party system also leads to some semblance of national consensus. The traditional arguments between Democrats and Republicans are about policy, the proper role of government, various issues. I can’t quite figure out where the independents want to begin the debate… seems like our whole form of government has to be re-argued.

The Glen Beck tea baggers have no concept of American history post 1789. Beck himself is in love with the idea of “refounding” or some kind of bloodless revolution. It’s only marginally better on the Left, where the concept of revolution has always been romanticized. How is it possible to move forward on policy when the national debate keeps expanding to questions of political theory: are international borders obsolete in a global society? What would Thomas Paine think of the Federal Reserve? Who cares?!

Are we really THAT convinced of our individual uniqueness that we feel qualified to re-think everything and come up with a better conclusion than everyone who came before? At the very least, political parties keep things grounded, and set a few boundaries for mainstream debate.

Lastly, the rise of independents reinforces the idea of political opinion as narcissism. Political parties used to be functional: you choose the one you agree with the most – Democrat or Republican – and accept the fact that you may have disagreements on some issues. Somewhere in the 70s and 80s, political parties became something more like a brand, or more specifically, a vanity tag. Rather than forcing oneself to fit inside a narrow dichotomy, it was better to declare independence and throw stones at the “system.” Functionally useless, but satisfying to the ego.

And that’s where we stand today: barely able to govern as is, and joyfully skipping toward an end that will make that even more difficult. Political parties, in the minds of many Americans, are just another special interest group, and every blow to the two-party structure is another advance for democracy itself. With today’s technology, the people who share that view will likely get a chance to test their theory. I’m not optimistic.
*I may write a full entry at some point on this fact alone, but it fits in well here anyway: According to Gallup polls, in 1964 over 70% of Americans trusted the federal government; in 1996, fewer than 20% of Americans gave the same response. That certainly doesn’t make governing all that easy.

Yup… just as there’s a boat for the wicked, there’s also a boat for the good.

Coming up with the list for the “good boat” just isn’t as much fun in general, but if I ever do set up such a boat, I will have to remember to save a seat for Ken Burns.

Just watched him on Rachel Maddow and was really impressed. He took a passing shot at Ayn Rand, praised FDR, skewered libertarianism, AND pointed out the good of Bedford Falls triumphing over Pottersville.

That I would like Ken Burns isn’t exactly a revelation… I own “The War,” have always wanted (but somehow never managed) to see “Baseball,” and I’ve always appreciated that his films blend a sort of Rockwell (Capra?) sense of Americanism with New Deal liberalism. That shouldn’t be nearly as rare as it is.

Ideology and sentiment aside, what history buff wouldn’t like Ken Burns? But seats on these hypothetical boats are hard to come by. Takes a lot to earn one – like, maybe a 5-minute interview that condemns both Ayn Rand and Mr. Potter.

Tens of thousands of conservative activists, assembled loonies, birthers, deathers, tenthers, conspiracy theorists, Confederates, libertarians, militia members, haters, and opportunistic Right-wing politicians gathered on the National Mall and around the country for Saturday’s “tea party” protests, and – aside from the freak-show quality of the whole thing – one fact stood out: they were so OLD.

Fox News interviewed a 73-year old and her husband, who traveled from Oklahoma I wanna say, and they seemed to be a pretty representative demographic sample of the crowd. Sure, not everyone in the crowd was Medicare-eligible, but I’d peg the median age at 66, 67 years old.

At first, that made sense to me in the current context: polls have consistently showed that the 65+ age group is the most likely to oppose the President, health care reform, or any other piece of the Obama agenda. Whether the opposition is racial, cultural, or simply political is open to interpretation, but clearly, that age group would be the most likely to turn out in protest.

But…

I went to a bunch of anti-war protests in the early part of the decade, and thinking back, that crowd leaned toward the 50+ age demo as well. The young people who did turn out for those were generally either campus neo-hippies or black-clad anarchists.

Do retirees just have more time and cash to travel to Washington for these? Or, is there just a protest generation that will continue to age? In twenty years, will marches be skewed to the elderly?

Back to those tea-party guys – I’m guessing very few of them turned out at the ‘63 March on Washington, Selma ‘65 or Grant Park ‘68 – but those images still had to impact their political awareness. The 65-year olds in that crowd would’ve been between 19 and 29 during the prime American protest years and it wouldn’t be surprising if they still define the Left in that context.

I was a generational exception to those early-decade anti-Iraq war protests. I was a college student at the time – not a neo-hippie, certainly not an anarchist – and I can see why most people like me were more disillusioned than inspired. Most of those protests were sponsored by International ANSWER, which is – I believe officially – a front-group for the Workers World Party. Many of the speakers were blatantly anti-American and a lot of the signs (the Bush = Hitler theme was common) were over-the-top and just wrong.

Cindy Sheehan, whom I had admired during her original Bush-ranch stand-off jumped the shark with a hunger strike the following year, and I have vague recollections of some D.C. march I attended in her honor. By then, most of the early-war mainstream demonstrators had moved on, leaving only the hardcore (which consisted of a few true-believers, an assortment of crazies, and people who just really like to protest). Again, average age of 50 or so. I was probably in part a true-believer, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also drawn to the festive atmosphere and the feeling of being part of my times (or, pretending I was part of another time, apparently).

The concept of protesting the war in Iraq was certainly justifiable, and if that’s what we had done, it would’ve been a very noble thing. But, while I went there to protest the war, I’m pretty sure the result was getting worked up about some previously unheard of political prisoners or institutionalized racism in this country. I probably got stuck marching behind some 9/11 Truthers or stood next to people as they called for an end to fascism in the United States (sigh).

Even looking at it objectively, the tea-party guys were FAR more vitriolic (and downright scary). Some of them seemed ready to storm the Capitol, and I caught a glimpse of one sign that read “We didn’t bring our guns… this time.” Huffington Post linked a video of a woman distraught that the Muslims were taking over her country, and one guy interviewed on Fox said he had fought for his country in Vietnam and was now prepared to fight a war to “take back” our country at home. Signs calling Obama or Pelosi un-American, fascist or communist were too common to even be noticeable as were the pre-printed “Bury ObamaCare with Kennedy” signs.

This clearly wasn’t a “the Left did Thing A and the Right did Thing B and both are equally nutty” occasion. No. The Left did some crazy stuff and the Right just did some far crazier stuff. But, even allowing for the difference in degree I can still see how these fringe-y groups on either side might turn off a new generation of demonstrators. If protests remain the collection of crazies that they’ve been the last ten years, then I’m content with letting them die out with the generation that flocks to them. In the larger context though, I certainly hope they don’t take to the grave with them concepts like civil disobedience, political participation, and grassroots activism.

Short-term, I’m skeptical. I think it’s unlikely that I would attend another protest until I’m certain I won’t be embarrassed to be counted alongside the other protesters. Guess that makes one fewer “under-30″ participant.

I watched most of the coverage surrounding the death of Ted Kennedy over the past couple of weeks, and was really taken with one particular point that was repeated several times by many commentators and reporters – Are there any “giants” left in the Senate?

Politico even ran a top story contemplating which sitting Senators could qualify as having both the Kennedy-level of allegiance from the Party base, coupled with the necessary respect among colleagues to pass legislation (John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold, Tom Harkin, and Dick Durbin were their finalists). Willie Brown, on MSNBC, declared Michael Bennett of Colorado, who has yet to win a Senate term*, as the “next Ted Kennedy.” Someone – I can’t remember who – listed Sherrod Brown as the one to watch (actually, he’d make my short list as well), and a couple of people, including Lawrence O’Donnell, weirdly picked Olympia Snowe, a moderate Republican, but still… a Republican.

Anyway, I may only be 29 years old, but I still got a bit nostalgic for the concept of these “Senate giants” who left the scene years before my political consciousness. My normal desire to time travel took on a very “Saunders and Diz” quality – wanting to check out the old Senate cloak room, maybe eavesdrop on a smoke-filled room, or do the Washington cocktail circuit with Mary McGrory.

As if that wasn’t enough, C-Span has spent the week running tapes from 1964 and 1965 of LBJ’s phone conversations with Senators about the Medicare vote: conversations with people like Al Gore Sr., Russell Long, and Wilbur Mills (confession: I’d never heard of Wilbur Mills before listening to these tapes on C-Span, and anyway, he was a Congressman, not a Senator.) I hadn’t actually intended to listen to the LBJ tapes on C-Span – that seemed a bit too wonky even for someone like me – but I really did get hooked.

Bottom line: the multiple paths to nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to take on a new history project… reading up on all those mid-century Senate giants I’d been hearing about. Two things had to be determined; 1) exactly which Congress best represented the era; and 2) within that term, how would I distinguish the “giants” from the more ordinary Senators? On the first, I picked the 86th Congress: 1959 – 1961. It was LBJ’s last go-round as majority leader, and many of the members stayed on to cast votes on civil rights legislation and Vietnam. The Democrats were still defined by their adherence to New Deal principles, and the New Left wouldn’t come on the scene for another 8 or 9 years. On the second determination… I basically just wikipedia’d the 86th Congress, looked through the names of Senators, and decided the “giants” were the people I’d heard of. Real scientific.

I had half expected to debunk the myth that the Senate was somehow larger then than it is now. I would’ve been a bit disappointed with that conclusion – it would kind of take the thrill out of my Saunders and Diz time-traveling fantasy (and yeah, Saunders and Diz were part of fictional 1939 Washington, so the connection requires a bit of imagination). I wasn’t disappointed though – these guys were bigger. Aside from LBJ, Long, and the senior Gore were names like Fulbright, Dirksen, Humphrey, McCarthy (Gene, not Joe), Muskie, Goldwater, Thurmond, and Mansfield. Second tier, in terms of name recognition, were Senators Kefauver, Yarborough, Javits, “Scoop” Jackson, Sam Ervin, Smathers, Church, and Russell. JFK served in Massachusetts until resigning in December ‘60, for fairly obvious reasons. Other famous family names included Thomas Dodd and Prescott Bush – both of Connecticut.

I read up a bit on many of them and made a few observations – one of which takes me down a whole other path, a whole other train of thought:

Hubert Humphrey was pretty awesome. I always liked what I knew about him – I’m partial to anyone who earns the “happy warrior” label – but the more I read about him, the more reasons I find to justify my admiration. Not to go too far out on a New-Left-bashing tangent, but I can’t believe how completely liberals turned on him in ‘68. They had quite the uncanny ability to eat their own. First, they march around asking LBJ how many kids he killed today. Everything else is forgotten: the most comprehensive civil rights legislation in the history of the nation, the Great Society and the most far-reaching domestic program since FDR. Not enough apparently to earn any good will from the Left. But Humphrey too? He’d been fighting the good liberal fight for decades, and suddenly he gets heckled by the Left and abandoned by the people he spent his career championing? Songs like “Whatever Became of Hubert?” shouts of “sell-out” at campaign events… Were we stupid?

And here’s the sidenote: my Humphrey kick led me to watch 2 documentaries, Primary and Chisholm. Primary is about the 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Primary between Humphrey and JFK. It basically highlights the difference between wholesale politics (JFK) and retail politics (Humphrey, in scenes walking down a street, handing out business cards).

The second film, Chisholm, was about Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Politicians kind of sucked that year, it seems. Everyone was so super-serious about everything. The documentary itself seemed like a Saturday Night Live parody – every interviewee, without fail, said that no one took Chisholm seriously because “she was black,” “she was a woman.” The full documentary was about an hour long, and they could’ve cut that in half if they’d made those points only once or twice. Was everyone in 1972 so… I don’t know… ridiculously self-righteous and politically zealous? Oh, and this one asshole who was interviewed admitted that he became politically involved because he was of draft age. This is exactly who they talk about when they talk about college students who dropped out of the movement after the draft ended. As for the politicians in the documentary, Chisholm wasn’t the only one guilty of taking herself too seriously (although she was a definite offender). For the most, they all did.

Except Hubert, who came across as an outdated, but endearing practitioner of the Old Politics: “I was there for you, and now I need you to stand with me…” Retail Hubert, with his labor audiences and his black audiences and his unfailing smile. Of course, he lost the nomination to McGovern that year, and retail politics (no matter how it’s spun every 4th year in Iowa) pretty much died off after that. It might be a stretch to say that that marked the end of the Senate giants, but it definitely was an indicator. Being good-natured and likable, trading in on favors, the meat-and-potatoes rhetoric – apparently outdated in both the Senate and on the Presidential campaign trail.

And now we are where we are. An awful August of crazy town-hall meetings, death panels, and “pulling the plug on grandma” capped off with the loss of the last Senate giant. An ideologically pure Left that seems directly descended from the Hubert-hecklers of ‘68, spineless Blue Dogs who will almost certainly never be elevated to Giant status (“weasel” apparently being their highest aim) and the batshit crazy Right, notable especially for the fact that there are actual elected members of the Senate who validate them (also notable for bringing guns to Obama events and drawing cute little Hitler mustaches on their signs).

It’s easy to trace the difference in today’s Congress in comparison to Congress in 1960 in many ways: C-Span cameras, talk radio, internet, constant fundraising keeping members out of DC on weekends, or – as one columnist put it – the end of the drinking culture. Maybe with all of those systemic changes, we’ll just have to redefine what qualifies someone as a Senate giant. A more transparent, less-clubby Senate definitely has its pluses as well, even if it does come at the expense of the more fabled, sausage-making aspect of legislating. That’s a tough concession to make after watching the coverage from this summer though. It sure would be comforting to have some happy warriors in there now: willing to both fight the good fight, and cut the needed deals.

I’m not so cynical as to believe that the era of Senate giants is gone for good. I actually really like some of the people currently serving, and I think the class of ‘06 in particular is strong enough to take on the mantle in a decade or two. Maybe it will be Sherrod Brown. Or Claire McCaskill, or Jim Webb. Maybe Tom Harkin or Dick Durbin will become the mentors and Senate elders.

Plus, there’s always Michael Bennett, legislative legend.

*Bennett was selected to complete the term of Ken Salazar after Obama picked Salazar for Secretary of the Interior.

The Civil Rights movement, as it is generally defined, began with Rosa Parks in 1955 and ended a decade later with the signing of the Voting Rights Act. (This is not to say that advancements and/or setbacks to the cause of civil rights were contained entirely in that decade, any more than it would be fair to claim that the Era of Good Feelings – 1817 – 1825 – marked the beginning and end of all “good feelings.” That would be untrue, and very sad.) But the sit-ins, the marches, the Freedom Riders, the stuff of countless songs and movie plots pretty much climaxes with the Selma to Montgomery march, and concludes with LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech and subsequent signing of the VRA.

Things really changed after that. Some leaders of the movement, including John Lewis, Marion Barry, Andrew Young, and Julian Bond, left their roles as activists for the world of mainstream politics. Martin Luther King expanded his activist efforts – anti-Vietnam, pro-worker rights – in the years and months leading up to his 1968 assassination. Those who remained in the movement were radicalized at best, marginally insane in some cases, or downright criminal in others.

Nonviolence gave way to Black Power and the work for justice splintered into various separatist movements. Bob Moses, one of the architects of Freedom Summer, became disillusioned, changed his name to Robert Parris and moved to Canada to dodge the draft. H. Rap Brown declared violence to be as “American as cherry pie,” and is currently serving a life sentence for murder. James Bevel, close associate of King’s and a driving force behind the Birmingham “children’s crusade,” fell pretty far as well. At one point after King’s assassination, he locked himself and his “followers” in a hotel room and encouraged them to drink his urine (he later became a Lyndon LaRouche supporter and, even later, was charged with carrying on an incestuous relationship with his teen-aged daughter. He died months after being found guilty in 2008.)

I guess disillusionment is just the back end of empowerment. People become frustrated when the change they advocate doesn’t occur, and somewhat lost when it does. I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately with the parallels between some of the people in the “Birther” movement and the Left’s own version with the 9/11 conspiracy nuts. I’ve also been reconsidering some of the things I once believed and advocated.

Let me actually start there, with the personal. I’ve recounted the story dozens – maybe hundreds – of times, as a major rationale for grassroots political activism: my first political contribution was $25 to the Dean campaign in 2003. I felt great after making that contribution. I was part of the process, I was empowered. THAT’S the way to build a movement, THAT’S the way to change America. I was absolutely convinced that as other people made small (or large, depending on their ability) contributions or volunteered their time that they would gain that same sense of empowerment. I told people that the act of getting someone involved somehow superseded the actual contribution, whether time or money. It was all about movement building, “creating activists.”

I see the narcissism that exists in activist culture, and I did my part to help create it. My giving $25 to Dean? That was about ME. I didn’t make the contribution because I believed the campaign needed the money to win, and that winning meant a lot of people who needed help would get it. Naa… my motives were so much “bigger” than that. I was part of the process.

With that backdrop, it’s no wonder activists radicalize after a victory. They aren’t devoted to a cause, they’re deriving their identity from it. Liberals battle it out to take back Congress in ‘06, and a few months later declare that “we voted for change, but ended up with business as usual.” The same people who spent 2007 and early ‘08 adamant in their belief that The Powers That Be would deny Obama the Democratic nomination, now believe that after six whole months in office Obama has failed to deliver any Real Change. Whether he has or hasn’t, whether he will or won’t is all irrelevant. For 90% of the people making the claim, it isn’t about concrete policy changes, it’s about their identity as progressive activists. The Alamo to defend.

A few years ago, they had their moment. They got to dress-up and play ’60s with worldwide anti-war protests and rising public opposition to Bush’s policies. Eh, it was fun for me too, me of “I’m-part-of-the-process-with-my-$25-contribution” lore. I loved going to those protests and if I had to stand through speeches about political prisoners in every country on the globe, well… the kooks and fringe-y people are just that – kooks and fringe-y people: a tiny minority in an otherwise well-intentioned movement. Easily dismissed.

Not like those Birther freaks on the Right these days. What a collection of nutjobs! A recent poll showed that a majority of Republicans either believe that Obama was not born in this country, or have some doubts about it. How crazy and stupid do they look? They are blind to all facts that contradict their loony theories. They’re staging town hall meeting disruptions that make that McCain campaign “He’s a… Arab” woman look reasonable.

But here’s the scary part: a 2007 poll showed that 61% of liberals believed that – or were unsure if – the Bush Administration had been complicit in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So, our kooks aren’t necessarily a tiny minority either.

And it is a bit disillusioning. Governing, with all it’s back-room deals and compromises, is starting to seem a lot more noble to me than the self-righteous activists who often use idealism as a cover for narcissism. I’m not sure if it’s just a completion of the empowerment – disillusionment cycle, or if it’s just a natural move toward pragmatism (I am turning 30 in a couple months…) but either way I am a bit more inspiration-skeptical than I had been in the past. It’s a weird kind of skepticism though… it actually increases optimism in the prospect of positive change. The system isn’t broken, the players aren’t malevolent, progress is possible without ideological purity.

To the countless lessons about grassroots organizing that can be learned from the history of the Civil Rights Movement, add “accepting success” and “knowing when the movement’s over” to the list. It lacks a bit of the romance of activism, but at least it won’t descend into the weird conspiracy madness of the last couple years.

For a bunch of reasons I won’t go into here, I’ve been thinking lately about a book review I read several years ago (technically a book review… barely mentions the book). The review was by Christopher Caldwell, of all people, and it responded to the book The Paradox of Choice. The book itself argued that an abundance of choices in the marketplace lead to consumer anxiety and depression.* Anyway, Caldwell spends about 2/3 of his review offering anecdotes to support the book’s thesis, and the last third dismissing the thesis as a relic:

All the abstract arguments against choice become harder to make when they are translated into concrete terms. When Schwartz notes that young Americans are unduly troubled by their choice of career, because they are ‘remarkably unconstrained by what their parents did before them,’ he sounds kindhearted and sincerely concerned. But he also sounds a bit like an English nob defending the class system while he sits in a leather armchair in Boodle’s in about 1926. And if Schwartz’s book is really about the anguish of choice in general—and not merely about choice as a facet of shopping—there is no reason for any such argument to stop before it reaches, say, ‘a woman’s right to choose.’ Once you stop taking people’s expressed preferences at face value, pretty much every single contentious political, economic, sexual, familial, social, and labor issue can be opened up to unpredictable renegotiation.

Always a neat little slippery slope argument with the libertarians: take away one choice, take away all choices. But setting that aside, I don’t see concern over young Americans being “unconstrained by what their parents did before them” as a defense of the class system.

It used to be that the emphasis on duty/sacrifice and the emphasis on freedom/choice would flip generation to generation (this is described in a lot more detail than I want to go into in Generations, by William Strauss). The generation that came of age during the early years of the 20th century and again in the 1930s were harder, tougher, more attuned to duty than individual choice. In between those generations were the freedom generations: those who came of age in the ’20s or the ’60s. These generations valued breaking away from convention, questioning authority, challenging social norms, self-expression…

Each generation reacted against the flaws in emphasis of the generation that came before. It was cyclical, and that was probably healthy. But we’re two generations beyond those now – those who came of age in the ’80s (Gen X) and those who are coming of age in this decade, and the concept of sacrifice – while very much alive in some ways – has never really recovered to any pre-1950 level.

Defining four types of sacrifice:

1. Sacrificing for future self. Postponing pleasure, saving money, getting a good education, etc… Unlike the generations of the ’20s and the ’60s, there’s no real anti-establishment backlash against this kind of sacrifice now.

2. Sacrificing for future generations. Ranges from the micro (parents setting up college funds for their kids) to the macro (the entire green energy movement). This kind of sacrifice is definitely encouraged by society.

3. Sacrificing for others. Community service, national service, military service, selfless acts… This is mixed. On one hand, voluntary community service rates have risen among young people over the last decade. On the other, it doesn’t feel like duty. It’s self congratulatory – with the kids who participate believing they’re doing what is good rather than what is expected. Even more cynically, it’s often viewed as a boost for college, with a side benefit of service. In that way, the line is blurred between this and Sacrificing for Future Self.

4. Sacrificing for previous generation. Teenagers expected to work to help support the family, the expectation of taking over the family business, moving in with a sick parent… as a concept, this kind of sacrifice is pretty much dead. I mean, how many movies have as a conflict a character who wants to follow a different career path than the one expected by their parents? The positive resolution is always that the character ultimately confronts the parent/society and forges his or her own path. We’re a long way from George Bailey taking over his father’s Savings and Loan.

So, you end up with generations that are paradoxically comfortable with the concept of sacrifice, but have little use for the concept of duty – whether duty to country or duty to family. Without duty, choices are unlimited. Children are told they can go as far as their dreams take them. They won’t have to fight our country’s wars – that’s for the kids without options: more options, less duty. They can choose any career they want, live wherever they want, marry, not marry, or divorce at will.

And, as described in the Caldwell article (well, the book reviewed by the Caldwell article), unlimited options often lead to anxiety and depression, not to mention insecurity. Every decision will be subject to endless second-guessing and inevitable disappointment, because every option was available at the time the decision was made, and every decision can be easily changed. Grass is always greener type of thing.

There’s also the practical aspect: every civilization will periodically need a majority of its citizens to act according to duty without filtering that duty through their personal ethics.

For the slippery-slopers, this obviously shouldn’t be taken to its logical extreme – nobody’s talking about marching in lockstep toward an evil end (pick your state-imposed villain… fascists? communists?) Just maybe a return to something before institutional skepticism went mainstream – pre-Watergate, pre-Vietnam. It’s hardly limited to government institutions either. Duty has lost ground to personal happiness in marriage, family and career as well.

For a lot of people, this isn’t a problem at all. More choices and freedoms are seen as a sign of absolute progress, beyond question. Even for those who do see it as a problem, it’s hard to figure out an answer. There are some things that can be done at a policy level – national service requirements, for example, or making divorces more difficult to obtain – but most changes would have to come from parents, teachers, religious leaders, coaches, media, etc. I don’t see any evidence of that happening.

Quick anecdote: I was talking to a friend of mine of couple weeks ago, and she told me about a psychologist she heard speak on NPR (she does my NPR listening for me.) The psychologist described a situation in which a teenage soccer player wanted to quit her high school team. She went to her father first, and he discouraged it: playing a sport looked good on college applications, she should stick with it. She went to her mother, and she supported the daughter: she should find what makes her happy, high school should be a time of self-discovery. The psychologist noted that neither parent mentioned an obligation the daughter had to the rest of the team.

I’ve repeated that anecdote to a few people I know, and not one of them considered duty to the team any more important than had the girl’s parents. There’s just a cultural blind-spot when it comes to those kinds of priorities. Unless and until that mindset changes, it’s hard to foresee another generation motivated by duty.

*Consumers offered a choice between chocolate and vanilla ice cream report higher satisfaction than customers offered a choice between 20 flavors including chocolate and vanilla; one product radically marked down sells better than the combined total of two competing products marked down equally. That kind of thing.

I live in rowhouse land. A city block in an old part of an old city – mostly gentrified and made hip in the early part of the decade, but with enough longtime residents, shops, and local customs to have kept some measure of authenticity. I’m part of the gentrification boom. I’m under 30, from the suburbs, and I bought a freshly rehabbed one-bedroom alley-house three years ago.

There’s an elderly woman who lives about half a block up from me, and in the warm months, she sits on her stoop almost every day and makes polite conversation with passersby. Always a smile, always a nice comment, and I always return the nicety and go on my way.

When I walk a couple blocks south, I usually find a heavy-set middle-aged man wearing a veterans cap sitting on his front steps. He’s a bit grumpier than the elderly woman – the smile doesn’t come as easily – but he always says hello, and he’s usually surrounded by neighbors who’ve come out onto their front steps, cheap domestic beer in hand. There are a few young children (maybe grandkids?) who play in an inflatable pool they set up on the sidewalk. Nobody seems to be talking about anything of much importance, just enjoying the company on a pleasant summer night – probably as they did last year, the year before, etc…

Decades ago (maybe pre-boomer?) I imagine this was the default. If you weren’t part of this kind of scene, you were just “weird” or antisocial. Nobody cared about introversion, nobody cared about a person’s capacity for small talk (probably nobody even used the phrase “small talk,” instead likely referring to it as “conversation.”) You became friends with people because they lived nearby, not because of shared interests. Now we’re more sensitive – people are wired differently, and not everyone will communicate in the same ways. Let people find their niche. And I guess that’s supposed to be progress. But I don’t know. I’m shy around strangers.  I like my privacy.  I sometimes have a hard time with small talk. And I find myself wishing pretty often now that I hadn’t grown up in an era where that was accepted and coddled – the “self-esteem generation” (to steal a phrase).

It’s not that I think everyone should conform to a set standard – that we should all be extroverted small-talkers who sit on the stoop and bemoan the yupsters, hipsters, intellectuals and artists who have taken over a big chunk of the neighborhood. I just think it would’ve been nice to have been raised in an environment where, instead of having it reinforced that it’s okay not to fit in, I had been tossed into the lion’s den and taught that I wasn’t so special. Maybe if my entire generation had been taught that lesson, there’d be a bit more social diversity at these impromptu summer neighborhood gatherings. We’d probably have a lot to learn from each other.

Anyway, it’s a bit Utopian, I guess, and the truth is we’re not going back. People like me move in, and maybe we admire the “old ways” from a distance (or maybe we patronize them like a city couple vacationing in the country commenting on how “cute” everything is). But admire or patronize, we don’t join in. I walk past, I say something to the elderly woman about the weather, nod to the guy with the veterans cap and hope for a smile. Then I go on my way. I wouldn’t have the first clue how to become a part of that world… nobody ever told me I had to.

… the people walking around the harbor today with the “Green Monstah” T-shirts leaving the stadium quickly and quietly.

… people watching the game at the Tam in Boston paying their tab, walking to the T and whining about Masterson, Saito, Papelbon…

… being at the game tonight surrounded by obnoxious Red Sox fans at “Fenway South” at the moment Jason Bay swung through strike 3.

Wish I’d been there.