The radio’s been full of stories about the Kennedy inauguration, about that cold, snowy day in 1961 when a young president inspired the nation and the world with a call to civic engagement and sacrifice. Kennedy spoke of the torch being passed to a new generation, and in some ways, he was the first real post-War president. But his most stirring line — “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” — was very much a WWII-era sentiment, a notion that everything wasn’t about getting rich and demanding things, but that America stood for public service.
Not surprisingly, the taxes on rich people back then were much higher, and the income and wealth gap much smaller, and the middle class much larger. There was, of course, terrible poverty, but Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, talked about using government resources to end it. The idea of a “war on poverty” wasn’t even that radical.
It’s stunning to me how quickly that spirit vanished.
The Vietnam War, the Nixon-era crackdown on protesters, COINTELPRO, the war on drugs … by the 20th anniversary of that famous speech, it was all over. And the anthem of the late 1970s, in the leftist circles where I hung out, went like this:
Ask not what you can do for your country
What’s your country been doin’ to you?
And when Ronald Reagan said government is not the solution, it’s the problem, lots of those Avengers fans cheered, too.
Now it’s almost impossible to get anyone to support even modest taxes to pay for basic government services, and the public sector is under constant attack.
Man, if I were into conspiracies, I could go a long way with this one.