VOTER ANXIETY: A CHRONIC CONDITION

By JEFF GREENFIELD

"What is wrong with us?

"It is in the air we breathe. The things we do. The things we say. Our books. Our papers. Our theater. Our movies. Our radio and television. The way we behave. The interests we have. The values we fix.

"We are, on the average, rich beyond the dreams of kings of old. Yet something is not there that should be--something we once had."

These anxious words instantly struck a chord. Forty-one American newspapers and magazines reprinted them. Letters and phone calls flooded the office of Cleveland Press editor Louis Seltzer to tell him he had put his finger on our gravest crisis with his editorial--in the summer of 1952.

Really? Dismay over movies and TV at a time when "virgin" couldn't be uttered in a film and Lucy and Ricky couldn't say "pregnant" to describe her condition? Concern over values and behavior when the out-of-wedlock birthrate was 2%, when the first faint chords of rock 'n' roll were yet to be heard in mainstream America?

In fact, what was ailing us was a good deal more concrete than Seltzer suggested. The U.S. was in the midst of a postwar upheaval tearing tens of millions of us loose from the moorings of generations. From the agrarian South to the industrial North, from Frostbelt to Sunbelt, from the city street to the suburban cul-de-sac, a boundless prosperity was luring us to new places far from family and the old neighborhood.

And yet the heady promise of peace had already been submerged by the cold war: the specter of Soviet subversion, real and imagined, at home; the threat of nuclear holocaust ominous enough to send schoolchildren diving under their desks at a teacher's practice command. (I remember studying an aerial photo of New York City, on which concentric circles described the effects of an H-bomb blast over the Empire State Building, and feeling a sense of doom that I lived four blocks inside the zone of vaporization.)

Those anxieties may seem quaint to us now, but they were real enough then to trigger a deep sense of discontent and unease. That kind of transcendental disquiet has surfaced over and over again in our political campaigns. Its persistence is less about introspection than about a uniquely American strain of denial.

From where we are now, 1960 looks just as Edenic as 1952 had: a time when a candidate could have run on pure optimism. We were smack in the middle of a full-tilt boom, with steady growth, full employment, no inflation, balanced federal budgets as a matter of course, a constantly rising standard of living, low crime rates, stable families. Yet over our heads, Sputnik was circling the earth, an implacable Soviet Union seemed to be on the offensive, and the worry was powerful enough to encourage John Kennedy to run for President warning of America's shrinking prestige in the world. Later, presidential chronicler Theodore White would write that "1960 was a year of national concern--but vague, shapeless, unsettling, undefinable national concern."

Even when our discontents are specific, we are tempted to define them in sweeping, almost poetic terms. When gas lines appeared in 1979 and rising energy prices shot a malignant dose of inflation into our economy, Jimmy Carter chose to widen the focus, summoning a symposium of great minds to Camp David and descending from the mountain on July 15 to tell us of "a crisis of confidence that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will." (No, he never said "malaise," but that's what everyone heard.) And the speech was more muted than the April 23 memo by Carter pollster Pat Caddell that inspired it, warning of "a crisis of confidence marked by a declining faith in the future [that] threatens the political and social fabric of the nation."

Could any of Seltzer's or White's or Carter's words be cribbed for a mood-of-the-nation homily today? Sure; but on second glance, they would have a Novocain-like quality, numbing us to the fact that what troubles us now is rooted in a much more definable concern.

It is finally dawning on us that we may have made a Faustian bargain a half-century ago, swapping community and neighborhood and roots for the expectation of material abundance for ourselves and our kids, only to find stagnant living standards and overworked two- and three-career families making that promise more and more dubious for more and more of us.

If we are going to have an honest political debate about the most dicey and un-American of ideas--that the American dream is foundering--then we are going to have to have concrete, specific ideas on the table: Retrain workers? Limit corporate power to downsize or to move abroad? Lower taxes across the board? Stop promising an ever brighter tomorrow for everyone?

Diagnosing the discontents of the spirit is far less risky for politicians--but this year, it would also qualify as sheer quackery.