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p The changes which have occurred in the world after the Second World War have left their imprint on all levels of Utopian consciousness, including that of the official utopia.

p A new stage in its development was connected above all with the presidency of John F. Kennedy. His team formulated the New Frontier concept, designed to sketch the outlines of a social ideal capable of revitalizing American society, making the American model of capitalism attractive to millions of people outside the United States, and offsetting the growing influence of socialism on the international scene. "What we need now in this nation," President Kennedy said, "more than atomic power, or airpower, or financial, industrial, or even manpower, is brain power.”  [160•2 

p The very term "New Frontier" Kennedy chose to describe his official course had a profound political and psychological meaning. The President was actually telling his countrymen that there was room for further expansion, that the Frontier which had been closed in the last quarter of the 19th century, when the nation had completed its westward drive by reaching the Pacific, was “open” againalthough this was now a different, global frontier.

p A world power, a model to be emulated, a great nation which, having recaptured the bold spirit of the pioneers, 161 is exploring outer space, unraveling the mysteries of science and creating the most advanced technology, a nation which has put an end to poverty and disease at home and is assisting "free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty",  [161•1  a just but stern guardian of world peace which protects its friends and is capable of dealing with any foe—such was the picture of the new society President Kennedy promised to build with the help of his fellow Americans. "Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, ... a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.”  [161•2 

p Like all the previous versions of the official credo, the New Frontier was not the result of a dispassionate analysis of the objective trends in the development of the United States and the world as a whole. Providing a peculiar reflection of the new processes and phenomena in the life of the nation and of the international community, the new version of the official utopia generally reproduced not so much America’s real prospects derived from an objective analysis of world developments (these showed that the United States was gradually losing its former status in international affairs) as the outlines of an ideal society constructed arbitrarily and serving propaganda purposes.

p The New Frontier left its imprint on the nation’s consciousness. Although most expectations the Americans connected with John Kennedy’s program remained unfulfilled, the very fact that such expectations appeared, the revival of hope and faith in a better future was a force which accelerated the development of the United States over several years.

p To a certain extent, another contributing factor was Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program. A logical continuation and specification of the New Frontier (as most historians believe), it differed from it in emphasis. In fact, Kennedy, too, was speaking of transforming America into 162 a great society. But, unlike Kennedy, whose credo had a high-sounding ring to it and stressed above all the interests of the nation as a whole, Johnson accentuated problems of more immediate, everyday concern to Americans. He also tried to link the goals proclaimed in the official program with the American Dream, ’emphasizing the eternal value of private enterprise and personal initiative. "We," Johnson said, "have never lost sight of our goal: an America in which every citizen shares all the opportunities of his society, in which every man has a chance to advance his welfare to the limit of his capabilities." Johnson stressed that America’s development would provide the " opportunity for almost every American to hope that through work and talent he could create a better life for himself and his family".  [162•1 

p Johnson pictured a "great society" based on freedom for all, in which each young man would be able to receive an education and inherit the entire wealth of human thought, all would live in new, rebuilt cities without slums (Johnson reckoned that this objective would be attained within 40 years), racial equality would reign and—this was virtually the central element of the new program—poverty would be banished forever ("our objective: total victory").

p Essentially, this was an official program of a welfare state, with the welfare of each citizen and the elimination of poverty through a certain redistribution of wealth proclaimed the condition of the nation’s prosperity. "Our history has proved that each time we broaden the base of abundance, giving more people the chance to produce and consume, we create new industry, higher production, increased earnings and better income for all.”  [162•2 

p The critics of Johnson’s program pointed, with good reason, to its impracticability and to its elements of propaganda rhetoric. Indeed, one could proclaim the goal of an end to poverty (poverty as understood by Americans) only if one totally ignored the fact that growth of the national wealth as such was not enough for attaining that objective and that a redistribution of wealth which could really solve the problem was blocked by the existing structure of social relations. One would be hard put to believe 163 that Johnson failed to understand that, just as it would probably be wrong to dismiss the whole program as pure demagoguery, although no American official Utopia is free of it.

p More than any other postwar U.S. President, Johnson reflected in his program the Utopian ideals of many Americans. (This refers only to the domestic aspects of the program with which the unpopular foreign policy of the Johnson Administration was at variance.) And that was, in all probability, deliberate. For the Great Society program was drawn up under direct pressure from the public which neither Johnson nor the U.S. ruling class he represented could ignore, especially with mass democratic movements on the rise in the 1960s.

p Today, both the New Frontier and the Great Society are things of the past, although the ideals proclaimed by Kennedy and Johnson have never been officially disavowed or declared achieved. The 1970s introduced corrections both into the life of American society and into the official Utopia—which, incidentally, reflects changes in the situation much more promptly and precisely than theoretical, let alone literary Utopias.

p Jimmy Carter moved into the White House during a difficult period: in his own words, "the tragedies of Cambodia and Viet Nam—the shock, embarrassment and shame of Watergate—the doubt and confusion surrounding the economic woes of our nation have created unprecedented doubt and soul searching among our people.”  [163•1  Against this background, the President’s task (as he and those who brought him to power saw it) was apparently not to advance a fundamentally new credo but to reaffirm his commitment to earlier principles and to emphasize those especially important at the moment. As some of his predecessors used to do, Carter stressed moral values and proclaimed moral society as the social ideal. He wrote in his policy book Why Not the Best!: "As the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, ’Every man is an exception’. We Americans are proud of such individuality and diversity. But we still share common dreams. Neither Viet Nam, nor Watergate, nor the hardships of a mismanaged 164 economy can change that.

p “Some of our shared dreams are easy to state, if not always so easy to achieve. They include the beliefs that all Americans should stand equal before the law, that our country should, among the community of nations, set an example of courage, compassion, honor and dedication to basic human rights and freedoms, and that government should be controlled by our citizens.”  [164•1 

p In his day, John Kennedy made it clear that he saw America as a “just” world policeman, or rather as a latterday world pioneer and squatter. Fifteen years later the situation called for a new Utopian picture of America, for the image of a "just moral arbiter" honestly observing the law at home and jealously guarding against any illegal attempts on the international scene.

p Of course—and an analysis of the actual domestic and foreign policy pursued by the Carter Administration proves this easily-the United States did not, and could not, even if the President had really wanted it, have acted as the world’s moral arbiter, and America itself did not develop in the direction of a moral society. But the official Utopia sets a rigid set of rules by which the President must play and which, one might repeat, are an inalienable element of American political culture.

p It was easy to forecast that the new problems and contradictions American society would face in the 1980s would force the ruling class to adjust the official credo and to reformulate the social ideal. That was what happened when power passed to Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican.

p Unlike Kennedy or Johnson, the new President did not offer any integral or comprehensive program of the New Frontier or Great Society type. But Reagan’s numerous speeches, addresses and interviews make it clear that he and the group of the ruling class behind him have a social ideal of their own which they offer to America as an official Utopia.

p In his Post-Conservative America, the well-known American sociologist and journalist Kevin Phillips speaks about the mood of nostalgia the new President has brought to the White House. "No sooner was Ronald Reagan inaugurated as president in 1981 than the era of F. Scott 165 Fitzgeraid became fashionable again, invoked by White House aides paying great tribute to Andrew Mellon’s economics or applauding Calvin Coolidge’s refusal to tolerate strikes by public employees. The Gatsby years were a decade when politicians and preachers extolled the lost virtues of the kerosene lamp as they confronted the revolution produced by radio, transatlantic flights and the vote for women. The nostalgia of the 1980s is even bolder.”  [165•1 

p Naturally, Reagan and his supporters are nostalgic not after the kerosene lamp or other accounterments of the past but after the times which, in the nation’s awareness, evoke memories of economic success, social stability, a firm dollar and a firm faith of the majority in traditional institutions, values and America’s "great mission". "Ronald Reagan and his supporters, on coming to power," Phillips develops his idea, "were not really trying to maintain the status quo. On the contrary, in some important ways they sought to restore the status quo ante of fifteen, twentyfive or even sixty years earlier.”  [165•2 

p Today it is already clear what kind of “restoration” they are after. Above all Reagan would like to restore the Pax Americana-a term frequently used in the West to denote the first postwar decades, when the United States, economically and technologically stronger than other nations, used this strength openly, imposing its goods, views, tastes and, naturally, an economic and political course favorable to U.S. capital, on its friends in Europe and elsewhere.

p But Reagan and his team also dream of mass revival of the social and moral values inherent in the "utopia of a traditional America". They see a country whose citizens would recapture the spirit of diligence and industry the Protestant ethics has maintained for over two centuries, revive the spirit of individualism and enterprise, rely more on themselves and on luck than on the government, and look for the roots of "perfectly natural" social injustice in their own mistakes and not in the social system. It is a country where the "traditional family" would again become a central social virtue, where the spirit of religious 166 brotherhood and class collaboration would be strong, and where the people would trust firmly in the institutions of government.

p No doubt, Reagan’s official utopia may appeal to a certain part of American society—above all to those who, like the President, yearn for a return of the times when America was Number One, when it felt militarily invulnerable and economically and technologically superior, when problems were fewer and simpler.

p But even this part of the public cannot fail to realize that the current social utopia looks not to the future but to the past, that it leads American society into a historical cul-de-sac, opening no new vistas and deaf to the problems awaiting the United States and other countries beyond the turn of the century. Like the Gatsby years, the Pax Americana is long past, and the fact that the official utopia extolls these virtues reflects not only its conservative nature but also its state of crisis.

p Another fact which bears this out is that the current official ideals run counter to the social and political orientations and values widespread in the United States at the mass consciousness level and reflected in the folk utopia.

p But is the folk Utopian tradition still alive in today’s America? Can it be that the development of the mass media, better education and culture and increasing population mobility have made the folk utopia extinct in the United States and other highly industrialized capitalist countries?

p Yet folklore, an independent form of the folk creative effort, lives on in America; spontaneous mass movements (nationwide and local, left-wing and right-wing) continue to spring up and to produce Utopian slogans and programs. This means that the folk utopia, a branch of the national Utopian tradition, is alive.

p It goes without saying that this utopia has undergone considerable change both in form and in content over recent decades. It has lost its erstwhile originality and independence. If one turns to folklore, to Gallup, Harris or Yankelovich polls, to the interviews collected in the books of Studs Terkel, a sociologist and journalist from Chicago, one will see that for all the diversity of popular concepts of the "best possible" society, they essentially 167 coincide with the current theoretical or literary Utopias.

p Take the social ideal proclaimed in the Port Huron Statement, the Utopian declaration of many thousands of American students. It is a society where man is the highest value, a society without violence or wars, where the abundant material benefits are distributed equally among all and where power belongs to the people. "We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.”  [167•1  These social ideals are obviously close to the modern democratic and socialist Utopias.

p The interviews collected by Studs Terkel give an indication of the desired world as seen by the "man in the street" who does not even have a university degree. It is a world of plenty where the worker does not have to work himself ragged, where everything is fair and each can do the job he likes, where there is no oppression or violence; a world which, unlike the real world, is not commercialized or permeated with greed, a world of brotherhood and love. The imagination of the interviewees offers nothing new compared to the Utopias listed above—not surprisingly, since the latter influence, whether directly or indirectly, mass consciousness and mass culture.

p True, the Utopian images formed by an individual or a group of people do not always conform strictly to this or that type of sociotheoretical or literary utopia. They are usually a blend of ideals taken from different Utopias.

p Nevertheless, I do not think that the folk Utopia is gradually disappearing as an independent form of the national Utopian tradition. The spontaneous creative effort ,of the people is inexhaustible, and this alone is sufficient guarantee that the folk utopia will remain stable in modem society—and especially in the United States, with its large, 168 distinct and more or less ethnically autonomous groups. This applies above all to the Black population.

p The Black utopia exists as an integral element of American culture to this day. In his famous speech he delivered at a rally in Washington on August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King stressed the unity between the dream of the Black Americans and the American Dream. "I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream." This is his dream: "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ’We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

p “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

p “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  [168•1 

p It is clear from King’s speeches that the ideals central to the “white” folk utopia, the American Dream, were not alien to him. He saw a prosperous America of equal opportunity, a nation enabling each citizen to realize his potential. Still, in his policy speech King singled out the ideals central to the Black utopia—the ideal of racial equality in the economic, political and social context, the ideal of freedom as freedom of the Black man in white America.

p King advocated nonviolent action and the integration of the Black population into American society. He did not share the ideas of Black separatism several extremist groups preached in the 1960s. However, the social ideal he proclaimed was closer to the traditional Black utopia than to the American Dream. Besides, no matter how widespread, popular or respected his views, King was not the only figure expressing the social ideal of America’s Black minority.

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p “Black Power", the slogan proclaimed by Stokeley Carmichael in the summer of 1966, upheld by a number of extremist groups and generally welcomed by a large part of the Black Americans not affiliated with them, proved that many Blacks had a view of America different from King’s. The separatist trends of the 1960s ensured a degree of revival for the old idea of an independent Black state within the United States and even for Marcus Garvey’s old resettlement-in-Africa scheme. These revivalist attempts were, of course, no more than a curious twist of developments, for no one seriously contemplated these projects; but here the important thing was not so much the project as such as the idea itself, the very expression of protest and the recourse to a radical-and essentially Utopianalternative.

Apparently, as long as the position of Blacks in the United States differs from that of the white majority socially, economically and politically, as long as there is racial inequality, the Black utopia will exist as an independent branch of the American folk utopia.