The Soul-Crushing Malaise of the 1950s Killed the American Dream

By Michael Bader, AlterNet. Posted January 31, 2009.

When I look at family pictures from those years, I see barren suburban yards dotted with recently planted saplings, fathers with a drink in their hands and the beginnings of a paunch, dowdy mothers with cats eye glasses, everyone smoking, boys with crew cuts and girls with pig tails -- but most of all, I see the strained frivolity and veneer of success barely concealing the strangled anxieties of people who are supposed to be happy but aren't, who are supposed to be making it but privately feel they're losing it. These scenes remind me that when the public and private self are so radically in conflict, the result is a special type of suffering all the more corrosive because it can't be expressed.

What’s depressing to me is that, in today's climate, the 1950s start to look pretty good. I find myself wondering: did the hypocrisy we challenged and the changes we championed in the 60s never happen? Nowadays, merely having a secure, decent-paying job seems more important than having one that provides genuine fulfillment. The question now is how to get any leisure time, not how to spend it engaged in something meaningful. That women should work is no longer a liberating choice, but a bread-and-butter necessity. And given the high number of single-parent households and a 50% divorce rate, nuclear families -- even the oppressive kind in which my parents, the Drapers, and the Wheelers were trapped -- start to seem like islands of safety.

The current economic climate is only the most recent of a serious of blows to our rebellions of the ‘60s. First, our idealism became corroded under the weight of the greed and rabid individualism of the late 1980s. Next, our political hopes were dashed by the disappointments and betrayals of the Clinton years, and finally, at the start of the new millennium, our remaining energy was cynically stolen by what felt at the time like a right-wing coup. The "deals" made between husbands and wives and mothers and fathers in the 1950s in which spontaneity, authenticity and passion were swept under the rug of economic growth seem to be on the table again today in the current conditions of insecurity in which we find ourselves.

Perhaps the political tide of hope and passion that swept Obama into office will change all this. Maybe it will provide the context again in which we can revisit some of the values inherent in our opposition to the ethos of the 1950s -- values like caring for each other, the belief that workers should derive meaning from their work, that isolated nuclear families are bad for our mental health, that women should be able to fulfill themselves in the public as well as the private world, that play and spontaneity ought to be incorporated into everyday life, not just relegated to the rare vacation, and that people experience their highest selves when they're part of communities, not isolated from each other. It seems to me that only then the Wheelers and Drapers that lie inside all of us will finally be exorcised.
 

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Michael Bader is a psychologist and psychoanalyst in San Francisco. He is the author of "Arousal: The Secret Logic of Sexual Fantasies" and "Male Sexuality: Why Women Don't Understand It -- and Men Don't Either." He has written extensively about psychology and politics.

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