In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, like fellow presidents George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump a “68er” (all three men graduated from college in 1968), reportedly told the celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. biographer Taylor Branch that how a person answered a single question—“Do you think on balance the 1960s were good or bad for America?”—could predict with 80 percent accuracy how he or she would vote. Those who said “good”—who saw the decade as a time when civil rights were expanded, authority was questioned, the young marched against an unjust war, and new forms of cultural expression erupted—tended to be progressives and vote Democratic. Those, in contrast, who saw the decade as one of internal chaos, riots in the streets, a rising drug culture, and a lost war, were more likely to be conservatives and vote Republican.¹

Over the course of 2018, Americans of all stripes have commemorated 1968, that great annus horribilis of modern American history, and the tumultuous events it spawned: King’s assassination, the bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the seizure by North Korea of the USS Pueblo, the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Black Power salute by American athletes at the Mexico City Olympics, and what many saw as the redemptive circling of the moon by Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve.²

As Clinton’s archetypical Democratic voters would argue, there can be no question that the United States of 2018 is in many ways a “better” society than that of 1968—fairer, more just, less provincial, more inclusive, less judgmental. The assassination of King and the urban riots that followed reflected the unresolved problem of race in America, as had been documented in the report issued in February 1968 by the Kerner Commission (formed to probe the causes of the urban rioting during the previous year).³ The feminist movement was still in its infancy in 1968, with inequality and lack of opportunity a universal fact of life for that half of the population that happened to be born female. Homosexuals (the word gay was not yet in general use) were almost universally subject to social ostracism and legal persecution. Other groups—Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and the poor of Appalachia—were similarly disadvantaged, as Robert Kennedy had emphasized in his brief electoral insurgency. Nothing as yet had been done to rectify the injustices done to the Japanese-American community in World War II. While race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation remain preoccupations of contemporary America, few today would argue, following the election of an African-American president, after Obergefell v. Hodges, and with the electoral gains made by women in the 2018 midterm elections, that the United States has not become a fairer and more inclusive society.

On the other hand, Clinton’s archetypical Republicans might argue, the United States of 1968 was in many respects a “greater” country than the America of 2018: more capable of doing big things, more willing to sacrifice for what was seen as the common good, less of a whiner, more of a risk-taker—a “weary titan,” in Lord Salisbury’s phrase, but a titan nonetheless. And in these two sides of 1968—“greater” but not as “good”—lies a question worth pondering as 2018 draws to its close. How is it that the United States of 1968, as unfair and provincial as in retrospect it appears to have been, was able to accomplish things that the more just, more equal, more inclusionary, more cosmopolitan—not to mention bigger, richer, and more educated—America of 2018 finds impossible to achieve or even attempt?

Paying One’s Way in the World

To begin with the obvious, the United States of 1968 paid its way in the world; that of 2018 does not. In 1968 the United States ran a surplus on trade in goods and services of some $2.4 billion, a small percentage of its then GNP of $860.7 billion.⁴ Registering a trade surplus in 1968 was a bit like winning the Olympic pole vault—something that Americans had done uninterruptedly since the late 19^th century, part of the natural order of things. Today, of course, the situation is very different. The United States last ran a trade surplus in 1975. Most Americans alive today have never lived in a country that for a single year or month of their lives sold more to the world than it bought—that did not every day run down its international assets and increase its external debts by consuming more than it produced. President Trump has broken with decorum by ranting about the deficit and imposing punitive tariffs on friend and foe, but the deficit has persisted and indeed grown somewhat on his watch.⁵ It is on track to reach more than $600 billion, or about 3.3 percent of national product (down from nearly 7 percent of GDP in 2006) by year’s end.

To run a balance-of-payments surplus in 1968, moreover, was not merely a mark of economic strength; it was a political and strategic necessity growing out of the Bretton Woods system and the special burdens it placed on the United States. Today’s foreign policy establishment has made a fetish of Bretton Woods, a key part of the so-called liberal international order established after World War II and now said to be under attack by Trump. The reality, of course, is that Bretton Woods in 1968 meant something entirely different than it does in 2018. Today the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are home to well-paid international bureaucrats who mostly dispense advice and administer loans to poor or mismanaged countries. These institutions are overseen by government officials who meet on a regular basis, mostly with likeminded officials from other countries, generally in very pleasant spots with the best of accommodations. Except for those countries who suffer the misfortune of having to turn to the fund and the bank, there is no sacrifice, hardship, or even discipline involved with being part of Bretton Woods.

In 1968, in contrast, the real Bretton Woods entailed substantial obligations on the part of the United States, ones that the American political class and presidents in particular took with deadly seriousness. The key to the system were the U.S. commitments in the original IMF Articles of Agreement (since abandoned) to exchange on-demand dollars or foreign currencies into gold at the rate of $35 per ounce. The United States had to run surpluses over the long run, lest foreigners cash in their excess dollars, depleting the U.S. gold stock and bringing the system crashing down. The system was in some ways primitive (Keynes had called the gold standard a “barbarous relic,” and the par value system established in 1944 still relied heavily on gold), but it imposed disciplines on countries and limited, for better or worse, the movement of capital by private firms and speculators.

President Lyndon B. Johnson began 1968 by announcing a new set of policy measures—one of many such packages put in place before the Bretton Woods system finally collapsed in the early 1970s—aimed at strengthening what Johnson called the liquidity position of the United States. The government cut its overseas expenditures and undertook efforts to promote exports and attract investment. Even ordinary citizens and the private sector were asked to sacrifice in ways that from today’s perspective seem almost quaint. Johnson urged business and labor (unions had far more power then) to avoid strikes in key industries that could threaten American exports and the trade surplus, while the American people were asked to continue adhering to an earlier request to “defer for the next two years all nonessential travel outside the Western Hemisphere.”⁶

The real Bretton Woods was unsustainable, and no one suggests that it could or should be restored. But its significance is widely misunderstood. Trump rails against foreigners who have cheated the United States in trade deals or by systematically undervaluing their currencies, forgetting that when America was, by his own definition, “great,” it did not publicly whine and complain about the behavior of others, but in fact made great sacrifices to maintain a system seen as vital to our credibility, the stability of the postwar order, and the struggle against world communism.

As for Trump’s liberal internationalist critics, Bretton Woods is mostly an empty slogan. The billionaires who gather in Davos to talk of world order could not have amassed their fortunes in a world of capital controls and fixed currencies. Countries invoke global order, but go their own way when it comes to trade and payments, ignoring the IMF’s fundamental purpose (theoretically still in force) of “limiting disequilibria” in the international balances of payments of its members. Germany and China wrap themselves in the mantle of multilateralism while pursuing ruthlessly mercantilist policies to amass enormous surpluses. As for the United States, it merrily goes on, year after year, importing hundreds of billions of dollars more than it exports, happy to take in those cheap consumer goods and unable or unwilling to build industries that would permit even an occasional balance. In a word, the system works for everyone, but whether it is “great” (or even “good”) is another question.

Immigration: Who Did the Work?

If the America of 1968 was self-sufficient with regard to goods and money, that was also mostly true with regard to people. Immigration was by historic standards quite low in 1968. Annual net immigration was about 450,000, less than a third the current rate, in a country with about two-thirds the current U.S. population.⁷ The increased flows and accumulating stocks of immigrants triggered by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the later rise in illegal immigration had not yet kicked in. The number of foreign-born in the population was about 9.6 million, compared with nearly five times that level—45.3 million—in 2018. Immigrants made up only 4.7 percent of the U.S. population, nearly a historic low point in the 20^th century, while today the share approaches 14 percent and is projected to rise to historically unprecedented levels.⁸

As with Bretton Woods and fixed exchange rates, the immigration regime of 1960s was untenable and few argue that it can or should be restored. But the question arises as to how the United States of 1968 was able to bear the burdens that it did and register the achievements of that time chiefly relying on its native-born population. To be sure, immigrants made a vital contribution to U.S. society. Two of the Nobel Prize winners in science that year were naturalized citizens who had been immigrants: Lars Onsager from Norway, winner of the prize in chemistry, and H. Gobind Khorana from India, who shared the prize for medicine.

There was nothing, however, comparable to today’s situation, when Silicon Valley whines that unless it secures enough H1-B visas to bring scientists and engineers in from India and elsewhere it cannot possibly maintain its competitive position in the world. Much the same applies at the low end of the skill and income scale, where vast numbers of immigrants are needed to staff hospitals and restaurants, work as carpenters and laborers to turn houses into McMansions, and pick our fruits and vegetables.

International Competition: Science and Sport

Speaking of the Nobel Prizes, in 1968, the United States won all of the science awards, continuing its post-World War II dominance. Luis Alvarez of UC Berkeley won in physics, Onsager of Yale in chemistry, and the trio of Khorana (Wisconsin), Robert W. Holley (Cornell), and Marshall W. Nirenberg (National Institutes of Health) in medicine. By the 2000s, the rest of the world had caught up and the U.S. share of the prizes had dropped significantly. Concerns emerged that Americans were losing faith in science and not investing enough in fundamental research; the smartest people, some said, were going to Wall Street rather than into the laboratory.

Still, 2018 was not a bad year for prizes, reflecting the more inclusive society created since 1968. Americans won a respectable 43.75 percent of the three science prizes. That was down from 100 percent in 1968, but one of the winners in chemistry, Frances Arnold of Caltech, was a woman. Arnold had gotten her start in science in the 1970s, studying engineering at Princeton, an institution that in 1968 was still debating whether to admit women.

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce,” Karl Marx famously wrote, and so it was in that other great arena of human competition, athletics. In 2018, Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback who started in 58 games over a five-year period in the National Football League, compiling a 28-30 win-loss record, made headlines by signing a multimillion dollar advertising contract with Nike. Kaepernick had won fame (or notoriety, depending on one’s point of view) in 2016 by his refusal to stand during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As Kaepernick explained his action, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

Nike reportedly was attracted by the interest of identity-conscious American youth, and the company’s stock soared after the announcement of the deal with Kaepernick. One of the ads with the former quarterback featured the lines: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”—except perhaps the $5 million per year that Nike was reported to be paying Kaepernick. Two of the great radical intellectuals of 1968, the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his star student Angela Davis, would have recognized in this corporate co-opting of a social cause confirmation of Marcuse’s theory of “repressive tolerance.”

The Kaepernick episode inevitably recalled a more famous incident from the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, when Tommie Smith and John Carlos, sprinters from San Jose State University, turned toward the American flag and raised their black-gloved fists while the national anthem played as Smith was awarded the gold medal for the 200 meters. (Carlos had taken third in the event, behind Peter Norman, who won the silver). Smith later wrote that the gesture, which produced one of the most iconic images of the 1960s, was not a “black power salute” but a “human rights salute.” Clearly it was both. Norman, a white Australian, joined the American runners in wearing a human rights badge on his jacket.⁹

Wikimedia Commons

All three runners suffered repercussions from the protest, and none got rich. Carlos had a brilliant track season in 1969, played briefly in the Canadian Football League, and then worked in California as a high school counselor and track and field coach. Smith, one of the most gifted track athletes of all time, played three seasons in the American Football League and later became the track coach at Division III Oberlin College. In 2010 he reportedly put his gold medal and spikes up for auction, with bids starting at $250,000 (a twentieth of what Nike reportedly pays Kaepernick each year).

Apart from the drama of the black power/human rights salute, 1968 was a year of remarkable athletic achievement for the United States, especially in track and field, the premier event of the games and a proxy for overall competitiveness.¹⁰ Americans won 12 of the 24 gold medals awarded in men’s events, including, in addition to Smith’s victory in the 200, the 100 meters, the 400 meters, the 110-meter hurdles, the two relays, and the long jump. The latter event produced the most stunning performance of the games: Bob Beamon’s leap of 8.90 meters, which smashed the world record by nearly two feet and later was named by Sports Illustrated one of the five greatest sports feats of the 20^th century.¹¹ The winners of these events were all African-Americans, most involved in or sympathetic to the protest movement.

The achievements of white athletes were almost as impressive. They won the pole vault, keeping intact an American lock on the event that had begun in 1896, shot put (Americans had won the event every time it was held since 1896, with the exception of Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics), high jump, and the decathlon. Most remarkable was the achievement of Al Oerter, who again won the discus throw, as he had done in 1956, 1960, and 1964 (becoming the only track and field athlete to win the same event in four successive Olympics), each time improving his throws and outdistancing younger competitors. “I don’t compete with other discus throwers. I compete with my own history,” he once put it.

The United States has remained a great Olympic power, in track and field as well as in other sports, but the results of recent Olympiads show how much the rest of the world has caught up. In the most recent summer games, at Rio de Janeiro in 2016, American men won gold in six of 24 events in track and field, half the level of 50 years earlier. Americans on occasion still win the shot put and the pole vault, but these events are no longer a lock. American sprinters have long been surpassed, improbably, by their Jamaican rivals. Here as well, however, the more inclusive nature of American society (as well as the collapse of the drug-fueled sports machines of communist Eastern Europe) is reflected, as American women actually improved their medal-winning performance in 2016 over what it had been in 1968.

War and Defense

Looming over all the achievements of 1968—the trade surplus, the Nobel prizes, the Olympic medals, and the voyage to the moon—was of course the war. Vietnam ripped apart American society and forever changed the country. In all, more than 58,000 Americans died in the conflict, along with untold numbers of Vietnamese. 1968 was the peak year for casualties, with combat deaths reaching more than 500 a week during Tet. Having been shot down on October 26, 1967, John McCain was in his first full year of what would turn out to be more than five years of captivity, and was just beginning to undergo, in August 1968, the torture that was to damage his body and shape his thinking for the remainder of his life (including his strong opposition to the U.S. use of torture in the “global war on terror”).

By way of contrast, the United States in 2018 was in its seventeenth year of the endless war that had begun with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Americans were weary of war, but casualties were down and there were no widespread protests. Total U.S. casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the lesser theaters of the war on terror were approaching 7,000 by the end of 2018—by no means trivial, but still only about 12 percent of those killed in Vietnam over a shorter period and from a smaller population.

The identities of those killed reflected the different ways in which America fought its wars. Of the 58,193 individuals killed in Vietnam, nearly half were aged 20 or under, with the highest number being aged 20 (14,095), followed by 21 (9,705), and 19 (3,103). Twelve were just 17.¹² Those killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria on balance have been older, especially in recent years as the United States has moved from a direct combat into an advisory capacity. Of 24 Americans who died in the global war on terror in 2018, 14 were in their thirties, one was 42. Only one was aged 20, none was 19 or under.¹³ Whereas in the earlier war it was mostly young, inexperienced draftees who were killed, often just days after being thrown into combat, in the war against Islamic terror it was mostly men in their late twenties or thirties, all volunteers in the professional, post-Vietnam military, whose luck finally ran out after tour after tour of combat duty. The ethnic and geographic composition of the casualty lists also reflected the ways in which American society had changed since 1968. In Vietnam there was a perception that blacks died in disproportionately high numbers (which partially fueled the Mexico City protests). Many of those killed, both white and black, were from the big industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. In Afghanistan and Iraq, in contrast, those killed were more often from small towns and rural areas in the South and West.

Quite apart from the war, the U.S. military in 1968 was an enormous globe-straddling colossus. The active duty force comprised 3,547,000 men and women (mostly men), with another 2.8 million in the reserves. National defense accounted for 9.8 percent of GDP, or 45.0 percent of the Federal budget. The U.S. Navy had 933 ships on active duty, the Army 23 divisions.¹⁴ These forces were mostly deployed in Europe and Asia, positioned to effect an ambitious national strategy that called for simultaneously fighting and winning two and a half wars, a major conflict in Europe, another in Asia, and a “brushfire” war somewhere else in the world.

The U.S. military of 2018 is still large and operates in dozens of countries, but the force is smaller and more compact: 1,314,000 men and women in the active force, with another 815,900 in the reserves; 42 army brigades (roughly equivalent to ten divisions), and 299 Navy ships. Defense spending in 2018 accounted for 3.1 percent of GDP, or about 16 percent of the Federal budget.¹⁵

Like the force of 1968, today’s military is strained by years of constant combat and charged with a strategy that it lacks the forces to effect.¹⁶ While no one argues that the United States now needs forces as large as those of 1968, there is general agreement among outside experts and in the Pentagon that after the drawdowns of recent years and with the continued military modernization programs underway in Russia and China, the U.S. ground, air, and sea forces are too small. The Trump Administration has begun a program to expand as well as modernize the force. Whether the money, personnel, and political support for such a build-up can be found on a sustained basis, however, remains very much an open question.

Space and the Race to the Moon

Not least there is space, the “final frontier.” Perhaps the less said about the U.S. manned space program in 2018 the better. Following the retirement of the space shuttle, the United States no longer has a capability to launch astronauts into space. Since 2011 NASA has been entirely dependent on the Russian space agency to send crews to the International Space Station, its only manned space activity. Roscosmos had its own difficulties in 2018, but it managed to dispatch four U.S. astronauts, two on Soyuz MS-08 in March, one on Soyuz MS-09 in June, and another on Soyuz MS-11 in December, to the station. Members of Congress (including the late Senator McCain) bristled at this dependence on a hostile foreign power, and in the course of the year the Trump Administration ramped up plans for an American space renaissance. Others placed their hopes on the private efforts of several of the country’s leading billionaires, notably Elon Musk and his SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin.

How different was the story in 1968. The Apollo program was a huge government effort, led by NASA, an elite agency then in its prime, which oversaw a vast supply chain of corporate and university contractors and subcontractors. Relying upon computers less powerful than the smartphones that the average American now checks some 200 times a day, Apollo 8 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on December 21. Traveling at an initial speed of 24,200 miles per hour, faster than any previous spacecraft had flown, the three men on board became the first humans to view Earth from space.¹⁷

Earthrise (via Wikimedia Commons)

Apollo 11, when it landed on the moon the following July, was the greater engineering feat, but Apollo 8 was arguably the more significant event in long-term perspective. It marked a fundamental change in how humans viewed their planet, the “tiny blue marble” about which Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings later would sing and which astronaut William Anders captured in the famous photograph Earthrise, taken as the spacecraft made its fourth orbit of the moon on Christmas Eve. The vague religious sentiment that many felt at the time and that was captured in the lyrics of the song was shared by the astronauts themselves, who expressed it by reading to a vast worldwide television audience the first part of the Hebrew creation story in Genesis 1.

Atheist Madalyn Murry O’Hair filed a lawsuit complaining that this reading by government employees represented an unconstitutional government promotion of religion. The Supreme Court sidestepped the question by dismissing the case, saying that O’Hair lacked jurisdiction. NASA subsequently curtailed any overt connection with religion on its missions, but few seemed to mind the reading at the time, which in retrospect appeared more as an expression of mid-American corniness than a serious threat to the separation of church and state.

Apollo 8 began its trip back to Earth on Christmas Day. The command module, all that remained of the massive apparatus launched some six days earlier, splashed down in the Pacific south of Hawaii on December 27 and was quickly recovered by the fabled USS Yorktown, one of the 23 aircraft carriers in the U.S. fleet at that time (today there are 11).

There was no break, of course, in the fighting in Vietnam. During the seven days of the mission, 147 Americans were killed in Southeast Asia, and another 99 in the remaining four days of the year. This brought the total for 1968 to 16,899, an average of 46 per day. 

Another Time, Another Country

So that was America in 1968, a country not always good but often great—in what it achieved and attempted, in what it asked of its people, and in what they delivered.

Many of the quantitative differences between 2018 and 1968 are striking. The decreased expenditures in 2018 on defense, as well as lower spending on foreign aid and space, along with the shift from an international payments surplus to a deficit represent a swing of more than 9 percent in GDP, money that presumably now goes to increased consumption, higher expenditures on health care, and servicing of the external debt that began accumulating in the 1980s. President Trump wants to make America “great again,” but it is unlikely that he (or any other president) could engineer a 9 percent shift in GDP that would pay for investments to make this happen—to replace the military’s worn-out equipment, to fix crumbling national infrastructure, to return to space in a big way, or to tackle the crises in education, opioid addiction, and declining life expectancy.

Apart from the changes that leap out from the quantitative indicators, there are many qualitative differences between American society in 1968 and that of 2018 about which sociologists, historians, cultural commentators, and poets and novelists have written. The United States of 2018 is clearly more diverse, more urban, and less religious than that of 1968. Monetization (a word with a different connotation in 1968) and professionalization are striking features of America in 2018. With jobs in manufacturing and other industries increasingly scarce or ill-paying, and with Silicon Valley providing the facilitating technology, individuals now monetize their every asset—their cars with Uber and Lyft, their spare rooms with Airbnb, and their time through various micro-monetization schemes.

Professionalization of everything from military service to fundraising is now a ubiquitous feature of American life, a product of the intensifying competition that has come with globalization and the MBA culture introduced in the 1980s. In general, this has been a good thing. Americans enjoy better services (think of how today’s modern dental practices differ from the one-man offices of the past). For the most part we no longer rely on 19- and 20-year olds to fight our wars as we did in 1968.

All this has come at a cost, however. Large organizations spend vast amounts of time on unproductive strategic planning, while governments and corporations have become increasingly risk-averse (without, ironically, really dealing with risk, as witnessed by the 2008 financial crash). No government agency today would have launched Apollo 8, which was changed at nearly the last minute from an Earth orbit to a more ambitious mission to the moon, and which the astronauts themselves recognized as a high-risk venture they might not survive.

The internet is a marvelous invention that has improved many aspects of life from what they were in 1968, but in some ways it has made America both more frenetic and more boring. The poet Jorie Graham complains that her students at Harvard live in a two-dimensional world: if it is not on the screen, it is not real. For assignments, she makes them rise early and listen to birds—the only way for them to understand Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”¹⁸

Despite Hollywood’s best efforts to create heroes and martyrs that will sell tickets or spur downloads, many of our celebrities are neither interesting nor inspiring. In 1968, Mel Pender was part of the 400-meter relay team that won the gold medal and broke the world record in Mexico City. After joining the U.S. Army at age 17 to escape the discrimination and lack of opportunity in his native Georgia, Pender spent 11 years as an enlisted man in the 82^nd Airborne. On Okinawa in 1964, someone in authority recognized from his play on an Army Ranger football team that Pender was fast—very fast. He was asked to take part in a friendly meet with the Japanese track team as it prepared for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and then, as a result of his performance in this competition, began at age 25 an amateur running career and competed in the 1964 Olympics.¹⁹

The games over (he made the finals of the 100 meters and placed sixth), Pender went back to his duties in the Army. In 1968 he was pulled out of combat in Vietnam, with no advance notice, shipped back to the states and put on the Olympic team, where he won his medal and helped break the world record. The games over, he went back to the Army and to Vietnam, where he won a Bronze Star for combat to go with his gold medal.

For better or for worse, stories such as this simply do not happen anymore. Today, when coaches from big-money fueled college sports teams scour even elementary schools looking for talent and when parents plot how their toddlers might someday make the pros and reap the vast financial rewards on offer, it is unlikely that one of the world’s six fastest runners would be an undiscovered enlisted man in the U.S. Army, or, even more improbably, be sent back into combat after having been discovered. 

The Question

And so we are back where we started: How was the smaller, poorer country of 1968, one that did not fully tap into the talents and energies of a large part of its population, able to accomplish what it did? How is it that the United States of 2018, which draws on the contributions of a larger and more diverse population and which every year takes in 1.5 million people and $500 billion in borrowed money from the rest of the world, can no longer accomplish things that it did in 1968?

At least in theory, this question should be answerable. It could be addressed by a team or teams of economists, political scientists, demographers, sociologists, historians, and subject matter experts in a university setting or at a think tank. Mancur Olson’s work on the rise and decline of nations and the role of social rigidities would be relevant, as would Francis Fukuyama’s recent work on political dysfunction and decay.²⁰ Works on imperial overstretch, such as those by Paul Kennedy and Robert Gilpin, could be cited.²¹ Added to these would be more specialized literatures on immigration, trade, social solidarity, and political leadership.

The possible reasons for relative decline in capabilities and ambitions could then be analyzed and quantified. As simple indicators like Nobel prizes and Olympic medals suggest, the catching up and increased competition from the rest of the world are factors, but these would need to be disentangled from purely domestic causes (like decreased investments in science or fewer physical education classes). The effects of immigration and diversity would need to be considered, with the benefits of a larger and more diverse population weighed against such factors as depressed wages and the decline in solidarity that results as societies become less homogeneous.

The achievements of 1968 itself would have to be held up to critical scrutiny: to what extent was the United States in those years living off of past investments—ships, for example, such as the Yorktown that were built during World War II and that could only be replaced at vastly greater cost in a peacetime economy, or the gold stock that slowly was being run down in the battle to sustain Bretton Woods? The environmental movement was in its early days in 1968, and the United States of that time was still building up an environmental debt to the future that it has begun to repay only in recent decades (although not yet in the crucial area of carbon emissions, where U.S. policy in 2018 was still deadlocked and ineffective).

Various theories about turning points—about what exactly went wrong and when—would have to be examined, such as Thomas Frank’s polemical thesis that things went off the rails in the 1970s, when the Democratic Party abandoned its traditional role as the champion of the American working class in favor of affluent professionals, or Paul Volcker’s arguments that the turn came in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan began piling up vast deficits and systematically denigrated the role of government. Studies of growing income inequality, the decline in middle class, and the role of big money in politics and other areas of national life would need to be the considered, as would the conservative counterarguments, that it was precisely when the country strayed from Reagan’s orthodoxy of small government, family values, and strong defense that things took a turn for the worse.²² Simple as well as complex theories would need to be examined, such as Andrew Bacevich’s longstanding contention that what ails America is less any grand combination of structural factors than a set of bad decisions, chiefly in defense and foreign policy, that officials of both political parties have made over the last 25 years and that they stubbornly refuse to admit or correct.²³

Differences in the structure of international politics would need to be considered. The United States in 1968 faced what it thought was a single mighty adversary—international communism—but it also had strong and purposeful allies. The powerful West German army stood alongside the U.S. Army in the defense of Western Europe, while the United Kingdom still had primary responsibility for Western security in the vast region East of Suez. (Another milestone of 1968: it was in January of that year that UK Foreign Secretary George Brown informed a dismayed Secretary of State Dean Rusk that Great Britain would be withdrawing from this region over the course of the next three years, leaving what U.S. officials saw as a security vacuum in the vast area between Egypt and Singapore.)²⁴ The United States went on to capitalize on the split in international communism between China and the Soviet Union and outlast the latter in the Cold War, but today it faces a more diffuse and complicated set of challenges: an aggressive and reviving Russia, an ascendant China, chaos in much of the area “East of Suez,” and an array of restive allies with mostly weak militaries that are also economic competitors.

If done correctly and with the proper scope, such a study might produce a net assessment of where America is and where it has been—one that would take account of changing values, of increases in consumption and health and the many new technologies and inventions that Americans enjoy today, but also examine the decline in national “greatness” that many today lament.

Until then, debate on these questions is likely to remain highly political, informed more by ideology than by facts. Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York staked out one position when he stated, in August 2018, that America “was never that great.”²⁵ This view reflects the sentiment, something of a reigning orthodoxy both in academia and increasingly in today’s identity-conscious Democratic Party, that “greatness” and “goodness” cannot be separated—that a society that did not from the beginning provide equality to women, people of color, and other groups could never have been great. On the other side of this debate is the barely disguised nativism of many Trump supporters, who argue that America was great and can be made so again, but imply or even declare outright that this can only be done by returning to the exclusivity of the past. Both sides, albeit for different reasons and from different directions, reject Samuel P. Huntington’s argument that it was the culture of the “Anglo-Protestants” who settled North America that made the United States great, but that this culture and its values need not be tied to any particular ethnicity and can be upheld and reaffirmed in a more diverse America.²⁶

In the middle, of course, are the moderates, the establishment voices who reject populism, be it from the Left or Right. In opposition to the Left, they argue that America was great and that to argue otherwise is perverse. But they also reject the Trumpian Right’s argument that America is no longer great. In their view, it is and can remain great, but under one proviso: that the right sort of people, the meritocrats who earned their positions in life with the highest test scores and by studying at the best schools, are again put in charge. Judging by the debate over meritocracy that erupted at the end of 2018, it is not clear, however, that this position can sustain itself, either in the United States or in Europe, from assaults by populists on either side.²⁷

On January 20, 2019 the United States will mark the 50^th anniversary of the inauguration of Richard M. Nixon, a president whose election was ensured by the turmoil of 1968. Nixon moved to address many of the strains that the United States was under at that time—ending Bretton Woods, winding down the Vietnam War, ending conscription, and forming a quasi-alliance with China against the Soviet Union—but he of course brought with him his own turmoil. Debates on greatness and goodness, however they are defined, thus are certain to continue into the New Year. But 1968 likely will always have a special significance, and with good reason.