ESSAY Why Is America In a Blue Funk?

By Charles Krauthammer

Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress last week that the economy was not doing all that badly yet consumer confidence was weaker than he had ever seen it. In a nation of consumers, low consumer confidence is more than an unwillingness to buy. It is a loss of faith, a statistical measure of national anxiety. As the year ends, a morbid pessimism has settled over the nation, a Great Depression not of the economy but of the psyche.

It is precisely this disparity between economy and psyche, between how bad things really are and how bad we think they are, that begs explaining. Obviously, we are in a recession, but by any historical standard, a mild one. U.S. GNP has fallen 0.76% over the past year. In 1930 it dropped 9.4%; in 1932, 13.4%. During the most recent recession, 1981-82, the fall was 2.3%, three times the current contraction.

Perhaps this recession has produced more publicized malaise than most because it has hit the upper classes more than most. White-collar workers usually escape recessions. In 1981-82, for example, the white-collar unemployment rate increased one-sixth as much as the blue-collar rate. This time it has increased fully half as much. The factory worker has the ballot box, but he has less access to the national soapbox than do the manager and the office worker, the M.B.A. and the journalist now on the street looking for work. In part, then, this recession has been hyped for the same reason plane crashes get far more ink than bus accidents: it hits a lot closer to home, and is thus far more interesting, to the chattering classes.

Hype is hype, but surely it cannot be the whole story. Being told that you are depressed, or ought to be, can be mildly depressing. But you have to be reasonably demoralized in the first place for such a suggestion to have serious effect.

So where does the original gloom come from? The question is all the more puzzling when you consider that historians are sure to write of 1991 as America's best year since 1945. (They are not deflected from such judgments by GNP declines of 0.76%.) The year began, after all, with the most smashing military victory this side of Agincourt, a victory that demonstrated not just American military prowess but also diplomatic skill, technological pre- eminence and national will. And the year ended with the collapse, indeed the total evaporation of America's most implacable foe, a global giant that had vowed to bury us and spent the better part of 45 years trying.

A year bookended by such extraordinary triumphs is a year whose close finds the nation in a blue funk. Doctor?

The most tempting diagnosis is postpartum depression, the paradoxical melancholy that settles in after a supreme act of human fulfillment. What follows, Peggy Lee once explained, is the "Is that all there is?" syndrome. For two generations we lived with the expectation that if we could only end the endless twilight struggle with the Soviet Empire, if we could only turn from swords to plowshares, if we could only climb down from J.F.K.'s ramparts of freedom, life would be rosy. Peace dividend. Nuclear tranquillity. National repose. Rewards for all the sacrifices endured, for all the gratification deferred for 45 years.

We discover instead that life being life, the end of this great war no more brings the Edenic revival than did the end of World War I or II. The first effect of the peace dividend, we learn, is unemployed defense workers. Far from revival, we come home to recession.

And maybe not just any recession. General Motors, that synonym for American enterprise, sounds a massive retreat with unprecedented plant closings and layoffs. Is this a metaphor for the American economy, for American destiny? We are seized with a sudden fear: maybe the current recession is not just a cyclical downturn, which would make it tolerable, but the harbinger of long- term decline. Maybe the bill for the cold war (or the Decade of Greed or the wages of sin -- pick your poison) has come due, and we are now beginning our inexorable descent. Maybe this is not America 1945 but Britain 1945: triumphant, exhausted and finished.

One cannot prove -- only history can -- that such a fevered reading of a shallow recession is unwarranted. But one can show that it is not that unusual. America has a deserved reputation for optimism, but it does have a tradition of pessimism that would do any Middle European nation proud.

Most of us remember Carter's malaise and Kissinger's Spenglerian forebodings. We tend not to remember John Adams' lament that "democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself."

"When competition and enterprise were rising," wrote the distinguished American historian Richard Hofstadter, "men thought of the future; when they were flourishing, of the present. Now . . . when competition and opportunity have gone into decline, men look wistfully back toward a golden age." Written in 1948, the very beginning of the great American ascendancy.

Today we are experiencing one of those periodic flowerings of American pessimism. It is a minute past our "finest hour" (December 1941 -- December 1991, when America saved the world, twice). The parades are over. Things are tough. America is down.

Fine. We are entitled to a bit of a wallow. But let's be realistic. There is not a refugee in the world who does not dream of America. Not a newly liberated nation not eager to emulate our institutions. Not a country on earth that would not trade places with the most economically, militarily and politically powerful nation on earth. There are nine years left in the American Century, and no nation is in a better position to seize the 21st.

Cheer up.