Protests. An ugly withdrawal from a botched foreign war. Inflation. Politics riven by anger and partisanship. Puff-sleeve peasant dresses. Shortages of consumer items. New music from ABBA.

This was the 1970s – and perhaps also the early 2020s. History often runs in cycles, and four decades after Watergate and the debut of “M*A*S*H,” the United States at times seems to have gone forward into the past, with the retreat from Afghanistan evoking the flight from Saigon, Black Lives Matter protests echoing ’70s civil rights and anti-war marches, and a spike in the cost of living reviving painful memories of a decadelong economic malady known as “stagflation.”

Remember vinyl LPs? They’re back, and if not bigger than ever, then big enough: They’re the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format. Swedish 1970s pop legend ABBA released “Voyage” in September, and it’s now the fastest-selling vinyl release of the century. Bucket hats are back, too, in all their floppy glory. Target’s even selling a tie-dye version. Loose-fitting pants are called “flares” now, but that shouldn’t fool anybody. They’re bell-bottoms by another name.

The 1970s and early 2020s are far from twins, of course. They differ in ways both small and profound. A half-century ago, the nation still had a common culture, with TV shows and music and mainstream news that most of the population consumed. The Vietnam War was seismic in the extent it spread disillusion and distrust in government. COVID-19 has no parallel in U.S. history since the influenza pandemic of 1918. Smartphones and social media have led to technical and cultural revolutions.

Olle Lindeborg/TT News Agency/AP/File

The Swedish pop group Abba was one of the hottest bands of the 1970s.

Baillie Walsh/Reuters

The group has released a new album that is a hit.

But the 1970s struggled with new kinds of challenges that needed new and creative fixes, and the 2020s may, too. They had gas lines; we have supply chain shortages. They had a generation riven between hippies and “squares,” and we have one split between progressives and conservatives. Crime rose then, and it’s rising now. Both eras have been infused with a feeling that the nation is on the wrong track. Dare we call it “malaise”?

The question is whether today’s leaders will be better than those of the past at solving things, instead of muddling through. Today the nature of the U.S. population is far different. It’s much more diverse than 40 years ago. It’s also more fragmented than the years when “All in the Family” could draw 20 million households an episode.

You could consider that change a roadblock to consensus and solutions, says Bruce Schulman, professor of history at Boston University and author of “The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society.” Or you could judge it as a way to bring new thinking and points of view to bear. “You can see that as presenting a set of opportunities about different ways to deal with those problems,” he says.

Americans not old enough to remember the decade of the 1970s might think of it as transitional, a trough between the high energy of the boisterous 1960s and the high “morning again” optimism of the early Reagan years. At the time some chroniclers agreed with this low regard. Journalist Tom Wolfe famously dubbed it the “Me Decade,” a time of rampant narcissism.

Stan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe/Getty Images/File

Two university students shop in Boston in 1977 in bell-bottoms.

Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images

Emma Mannswirth, in what today are called flared pants, and Eric Jess attend art week in Miami.

“It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote the editors of New West magazine. They proposed that the decade be officially ended in 1979, “one year early and not a moment too soon.” In truth it was more eventful than these gibes suggest. In politics, the country was fashioning the foundational reforms of the post-Watergate era, while three great “-ism” movements continued to accelerate: consumerism, feminism, and environmentalism, the latter of which couldn’t be properly practiced without wearing Earth shoes. 

The decade had some cultural heft, too. The Beatles’ last studio album, “Let It Be,” was released in 1970. Much of the fashion associated with the ’60s was actually introduced – or reached its apotheosis – in the early and middle years of the ’70s. Bell-bottoms moved into the Middle American mainstream, popularized by “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.” Clothing morphed seamlessly into the satin and sequins of the disco era after the film “Saturday Night Fever” came out in 1977. Will any of today’s popular songs have the staying power of “Let It Be?” Would any TV show or movie now move mass fashion?

In the 1970s, “there was much more of a common culture,” says Dr. Schulman. “You might not have watched ‘M*A*S*H’ or ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ or ‘All in the Family’ in the 1970s, but it’s almost impossible that you would not have been aware of them. Whereas now I’m sure that you are watching things that I’ve never even heard of.”

At the same time, the 1970s saw artists begin to reject the model of the mass audience and develop alternative and iconoclastic followings. Disco, punk, and new wave music arose as a counterweight to KISS, Alice Cooper, and other stadium acts. Method acting and cutting-edge films such as “Taxi Driver” were direct counters to blockbuster movies such as “Jaws.”

“I think we see a lot of similarities to that kind of pop cultural struggle of the 1970s in the environment that we have today,” says Dr. Schulman.

U.S. troop involvement in the Vietnam conflict began in the early 1960s. But the heaviest American bombing of the long Indochinese war, dubbed Operation Linebacker II, occurred in December 1972. Anti-war protests roiled the U.S. that same year.

AP/File

U.S. President Richard Nixon and Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev chat near the Black Sea in 1974.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

President Joe Biden speaks virtually with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Nov. 15.

Vietnam was a central issue in the 1972 presidential election, as it had been in 1968. By ’72, the U.S. public would no longer tolerate sending large numbers of troops composed partly of draftees to fight in Southeast Asia. But President Richard Nixon’s strategy of “Vietnamization” didn’t work. Saigon fell to advancing North Vietnamese divisions in April 1975.

As South Vietnam collapsed, Vietnamese who had worked with Americans and members of the country’s elite besieged evacuation points, including the U.S. Embassy. The desperate even clung to helicopter skids in bids to escape. It was an inglorious episode echoed by the frantic crowds fighting to get past the perimeter of the Kabul Airport during the fall of Afghanistan in 2021.

In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, the U.S. learned a bitter strategic lesson: For local troops, the will to fight is more important than Western military equipment, training, and money. On paper Saigon and Kabul were set to defend themselves. In reality the departure of American power proved catastrophic to their forces’ morale. 

That said, Vietnam was a defining issue of its era in a way the Afghanistan War has never been. The toll was much higher – U.S. combat deaths in Vietnam were about 47,000, as opposed to some 2,000 in Afghanistan. It was a much more divisive political issue, as thousands took to the streets of America to oppose the war. U.S. radio was filled with anti-war protest songs, such as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” about the Kent State University shooting of four protesters by the Ohio National Guard in 1970 (“Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own”).

AP/File

In a defining moment of the era, Ohio National Guard members fatally shot four anti-war protesters at Kent State University in 1970.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/File

Black Lives Matter marchers gather near the White House in Washington on Aug. 28, 2021.

The “forever war” in Afghanistan lasted 20 years, eroding trust in government and the U.S. military. But overall “the disillusionment seems bigger and more thorough with Vietnam than it does with Afghanistan,” says Kevin Mattson, a professor of contemporary history at Ohio University in Athens and author of “‘What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?’: Jimmy Carter, America’s ‘Malaise,’ and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country.”

With the year-end shopping season, President Joe Biden faces a crisis both material and political – bare shelves. The great supply chain blockage of 2021 has stacked up container ships at ports, pallets in U.S. warehouses, and boxes in retail backrooms. Everything seems in short supply, especially if it comes from Asia: electronics, clothing, auto parts, even the chains and buckles foresters use to stabilize old tree limbs.

Mr. Biden vowed to alleviate the situation in time for Christmas. He’s pushed to unclog ports and ease truck driver shortages. But his political problem is that there is only so much he can do. Private firms control the supply chain, and many of the blockages are caused by larger forces, such as the surge in demand from consumers in the wake of COVID-19 vaccinations. 

What he hasn’t, and probably won’t, do is what President Jimmy Carter did: try to get ordinary Americans to look inward and examine their role in the shortages’ creation. Yet Mr. Biden’s overall situation bears some similarities to that once faced by Mr. Carter. “I think that Biden’s in kind of the same place ... as Carter was at the end of the ’70s, feeling kind of trapped,” says Dr. Mattson. “No matter what he does, there’s going to be an immediate pileup of criticism.”

Whether the 1970s was a transitional decade or not, Mr. Carter might fairly be judged a transitional chief executive. Elected following the Watergate scandal as an antithesis to the disgraced President Nixon, Mr. Carter was replaced after one term by a president who in many ways was his opposite in demeanor and politics, Ronald Reagan.

Gas lines, not empty shelves, were Mr. Carter’s supply crisis. The U.S. had already gone through an energy panic in 1973 when OPEC had raised prices in response to the Yom Kippur War between Arabs and Israelis. Then in 1979 Iran ousted the shah, who was replaced by a theocratic administration. Iran’s oil production dipped. Consumers, perhaps spooked by the previous shortage, rushed to fill up. Gas prices spiked again.

The second oil shock, on top of the first, seemed to threaten a pillar of the American dream. Pretty much every car on U.S. roads was still a gas guzzler by modern standards, and Americans were dismayed to find that cheap gas and V-8s were apparently no longer their birthright. “The people out there are getting frantic,” said the protagonist in John Updike’s novel set in the period, “Rabbit Is Rich.” ”They know the great American ride is ending.”

As gas stations instituted sales restrictions, Mr. Carter canceled a scheduled energy speech and retreated to Camp David, where he spent 10 days meeting with civic, religious, and political leaders. He reemerged with an address that touched on the energy crisis – and also unemployment, inflation, and a nebulous “crisis of confidence.”

AP/File

Drivers and a man pushing a lawn mower line up at a station in San Jose, California, during the oil shortage in 1974.

Noah Berger/AP

A sign at a Shell station in San Francisco shows how pump prices have escalated in recent months.

“We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of unity of purpose for our nation,” he said.

The speech was daring. It said all the legislation in the world couldn’t fix what ailed America. Citizens shared responsibility for the nation’s problems, and they needed to look within to see how they had come to define themselves by what they owned. In essence, the problem wasn’t a shortage of gas, but an excess of materialism.

Delivered on July 15, 1979, the speech was initially a great success, boosting the president’s poll numbers by 11 points. Then he fired his Cabinet two days later, and the subsequent uproar swamped his message. Today it is remembered as the “malaise” speech (a word Mr. Carter never used) and as a downer of a presidential message.

Both Mr. Carter and Mr. Biden have preached personal responsibility as a solution to U.S. ills, says Dr. Mattson. Mr. Carter urged citizens to buy less gas. Mr. Biden has urged them to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Both tried to lead by example, with Mr. Carter turning down the White House thermostat and Mr. Biden getting vaccine shots on-air.

That might speak more to the distrust people feel toward Washington than to either of them personally, says the Ohio University professor. 

Besides supply problems, the 2021 U.S. economy has begun to experience another unfortunate trend that blighted the 1970s. No, not the return of wide neckties – inflation.

Today the price of everything from cars to cantaloupes has surged as the economy roars back from its pandemic depths and consumers rush to make purchases they have put off. More money chasing insufficient goods is the classic recipe for inflation.

The rise was something of a surprise. A recent Bloomberg survey of economists predicts inflation at the end of 2021’s fourth quarter will measure 5.8% over the previous year, up from a forecast of 5.3% only a month earlier.

To those who lived through the 1970s, such creeping numbers might inspire creeping worry. Starting at about 2% in the late 1960s, inflation rose to 12% in 1974 and 14.5% in 1980. The cost of mortgages and other consumer loans skyrocketed.

You’d go to look at a car that cost $5,000 and decide it was too expensive. A short time later, the same car was $10,000. “Back in those days, things would double in price over relatively modest periods of time. ... We haven’t really seen that in recent decades,” says Scott Sumner, chair of monetary policy with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The inflation era finally ended after Mr. Carter picked Paul Volcker, a bald, fly-fishing, 6-foot-7-inch economist to run the Federal Reserve. Mr. Volcker raised the rates the Fed charged banks to borrow funds, clamped down on the money supply, and tamed the inflation rate. The cost was a severe economic recession. 

Joe Benton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/AP/File

Authorities secure a shooting scene in Lawrenceville, Georgia, in 1978 – a time of high crime in the U.S.

Matt Rourke/AP

Police investigate a shooting in Philadelphia, which, like many cities, is seeing violence return. Violent crime has been rising again in many cities.

Most economists don’t think inflation today will be as virulent as in the 1970s. Goods are rising in price today, not services. Manufacturers also have strong incentives to iron out their supply chain problems, and the pent-up demand driving many of the high costs now may not last.

“For young people that haven’t experienced the ’70s, this might seem like a lot of inflation,” says Dr. Sumner. “For someone like me, it seems more like a one-time burst of inflation that’s not that dramatic.”

The Black Lives Matter protests that filled American streets following the death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis were a phenomenon likely unmatched in U.S. history. Polls suggest that 15 million to 26 million Americans engaged in BLM demonstrations in nearly 550 locations across the U.S. By some measures that makes them the largest social movement of all time. Most of the marches were peaceful. Some ended in violence.

The protests of the 1970s were intense but not as pervasive. The era of marching for civil rights peaked in the 1960s and lasted only into the early ’70s. In that sense they are an example of what some historians call “the long ’60s” – an extension of the previous decade as much as a feature of their own. The protest energy of the 1970s was directed into anti-war demonstrations – at the 1971 May Day march in Washington, D.C., police arrested 12,000 people, likely the largest mass arrest in the U.S.

Even so, there are still useful comparisons to make between the end of the 1960s and early ’70s civil rights demonstrations and those of today. Start with the makeup of the activists.

“One really big difference between the 1960s and ’70s to now is the degree to which the protest movement is integrated,” says Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who studies protests and race.

White people were on the front lines of the older civil rights movement, and some of them put their bodies on the line. But today they make up a larger share of racial justice protesters, and are more likely to have sophisticated views on race, says Dr. Wasow. “That reflects a kind of broadening of the coalition of support,” he says.

AP/File

Youth at Walden School in New York test computer games in 1979.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File

Sydney Lee, Addison Andrade, and Maddie Lee scan their cellphones in Mountain View, California.

Another difference is social media. Activists in the 1960s and 1970s had to copy flyers and spread them around churches and other civic meeting places to muster a crowd. Today they can do that with a tweet. But this ease comes with costs – it may rally more people who feel less strongly about a cause. It also makes it easier for people who may want to sabotage or counter the demonstration to join in.

“It’s easier to mobilize, and it’s also easier to infiltrate,” Dr. Wasow says.

A final difference is the increase in political pressure and political division. Social media means people have fewer secrets – and perhaps no sideline on which to stand and just observe what’s going on. Young people especially feel they live in a panopticon, where they are watched at all times. They have to choose one side or the other. Thus a backlash to any movement is ensured, according to Dr. Wasow.

“If there’s a Black Lives Matter movement, then almost by definition there’s going to be something that steps in to fill the [role of] the anti-Black Lives Matter movement,” he says.

“Culture was ahead of politics in the early 1970s in reflecting the way the country was changing, and I believe that we are in a very similar situation now.”

So says Ron Brownstein, a veteran Washington journalist who is currently a CNN analyst, writer for The Atlantic, and author of “Rock Me on the Water: 1974 – The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television, and Politics.”

Back in the ’70s, shows like “M*A*S*H” and “Maude” spoke to and reflected the way the country was changing at the time, says Mr. Brownstein. The former was set in the Korean War, but everybody knew it was really about the turmoil surrounding Vietnam. The latter, a spinoff of “All in the Family,” dealt with women’s rights, racial equality, and other topical themes.

Those same sorts of progressive and diverse appeals are on TV today, according to Mr. Brownstein, even in something as banal as a burger ad. Beginning in the 1970s studio heads, music executives, and corporate marketers began to realize that they had to reflect the country’s demographic and social changes to remain relevant. They knew they had to cater to different tastes – first the baby boomers, now millennials and Generation Z.

“You are seeing the reality of an increasingly diverse audience and workforce creating pressure for more diverse storytelling,” says Mr. Brownstein, who often writes about demographics and their effects on broad U.S. trends.

Politics is on a different timetable, perhaps. When the “Maude” run began in 1972, President Nixon was about to win a second term as president, taking 49 states. His platform generally stood against the cultural change that “Maude” espoused.

While an effective campaign appeal, his cultural message didn’t accomplish its goal. Gender and racial change came to America anyway, Mr. Brownstein notes. Now former President Donald Trump is gearing up for a 2024 run that leans heavily on promises to “take back” a changing nation. Win or lose, he won’t be any more successful in that attempt than President Nixon was, says Mr. Brownstein.

“I think very much what will be the lesson of now is that while you can build a political majority around the idea of stopping the change, what you can’t actually do is stop the change,” he says.

There’s repetition in history, no doubt. In fashion, the old often looks new again. In politics and economics, similar problems can arise at regular intervals.

To those who lived through them, the 1970s were like today in that the nation had a similar feel of anger and polarization. This abated somewhat after Watergate played out and President Nixon resigned. But now the nation is led by a Democratic president with sinking poll numbers who may simply be a transition figure. Sound familiar?

Mr. Biden is in fact a physical link between the eras. He was elected a U.S. senator from Delaware in 1972 and has been a Washington insider ever since. But under the surface far more is different now than the same. Different demographics and coalitions power U.S. politics. The economy is vastly bigger and dependent on different industries. Visual art and music take old tropes and cut and mix them in new ways.

When it comes to the 1970s and 2020s, the past may not really be prologue. It may be more of an outline and a few notes, from which valuable lessons nonetheless can be gleaned. 

Dwight A. Weingarten contributed to this report.

Michelle Hallford has always enjoyed gardening. She and her husband have in part depended on their small harvest for meals since they began building their homestead in Iola, Texas, seven years ago. Now, she’s growing a larger vegetable patch to avoid the grocery store at all costs.   

Ms. Hallford, a registered nurse currently on medical leave, isn’t avoiding food aisles because of pandemic caution. She’s wary of the price tags, as inflation soars nationwide. 

In some sense, it’s surprising to Ms. Hallford that their working-class house of two – at times more when their daughters are visiting – feels the tremors of the nation’s latest financial shake-up. They raise cows and chickens, and they keep a lone pig fat each year for slaughter, on their 40-acre homestead. Their diet is one that’s cheaper off the vine than it is off shelves.  

“Most of our food,” Ms. Hallford says, “comes from here at the house.” 

The problem: It’s becoming more expensive to run their homestead. Feed for their livestock has increased in price by about 25% in recent months. Plus, not all prices are changing equally for everyone. So, when the Hallfords took one cow to market a few weeks back, the highest price they managed to get amounted to just 66 cents per pound – about 50% less than the $1.37 per pound they would regularly get a few years ago.   

It adds up, Ms. Hallford says. 

While average wages have been rising too, for many Americans expenses are adding up faster than their income can keep up. Government data this month showed the highest rate of inflation in nearly 40 years. It’s a far cry from the bland, price-level changes that Alan Greenspan oversaw while heading the Federal Reserve. As many consumers wait for some sense of stabilization, they’ve begun to wonder what the future holds – if it will be affordable or not. 

“For decades, we had exactly the kind of inflation that former Chair Greenspan used to say we sought,” says Eric Leeper, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. “But suddenly, when you see an overall inflation jump [from 1% or 2%] to 6%, and prices of things that you’re buying go up fantastically, people get unsettled.” 

What remains to be seen is how long-lasting the current price spiral – and the psychology around it – will be. 

For now at least the challenge is hard to brush aside. Acceleration has occurred almost every month this year, and November was the sixth consecutive month in which prices were 5% higher than the previous year, from energy (a 33% increase since 2020) to food (6%). 

Courtesy of the Holloways

The Holloway family of eight lives in the Houston area. Family outings to amusement parks like Six Flags have been the norm in recent years. But as inflation rates impact theirs and others' households, Mr. Holloway foresees belt-tightening on the family's finances in the coming weeks and months.

Why prices are “out of whack”

Mr. Greenspan famously described price stability – a policy goal for the Federal Reserve – as “that state in which expected changes in the general price level do not effectively alter business and household decisions.” In shorthand, he meant inflation so subtle that people don’t really notice the gradual price increases in their daily lives. 

Now, inflation is not just rapid but also anomalous, some economists say. An unusual confluence of factors have been fueled in different ways by the pandemic: Highly expansionary fiscal policy (with $4.5 trillion in COVID-19 relief) is coupled with accommodating monetary policy. Atop that, the pandemic created supply chain disruptions across the globe – resulting in shortages and affecting some prices much more than others. 

Each individual good or service has its own price. And those prices are always changing relative to each other, but the pandemic’s effect on consumer behavior and supply chains has thrown “relative prices really out of whack,” explains Dr. Leeper. 

The cost of a new or used car – and also renting a car or doing automotive bodywork – has risen well above the average level of inflation in the past 12 months, for example. 

“Past inflations haven’t really had these huge swings in relative prices that we’re seeing, and they haven’t been as widespread as they have been here,” Dr. Leeper says. “For example, ask yourself, what’s the price of a haircut if all the barbers are closed? I don’t know.” 

The Holloway family in the Houston area felt the price spike early on. Eric and Jenna Holloway run a brand merchandise marketing company. Not only has their company experienced inventory challenges as commercial supply lines remain backed up across the globe, but their operating costs “are also going up drastically,” Ms. Holloway says. “We’ve seriously tightened our belts as far as what we’re spending” in our household, too. 

The Holloways have six children – the oldest is 17 years old; the youngest, 4. That means there are eight mouths to feed in their household. Mr. Holloway does the grocery shopping. 

“I see the difference,” Mr. Holloway says. “I see the price increases in the store.” 

He’s seen the difference in how much their family is paying for fuel at the pump, too.  

A family the size of theirs requires a large vehicle. Filling their van’s 30-gallon gas tank was one of the first price differences he noticed. Mr. Holloway says he expects to see energy prices surge next. Preparing to afford a more expensive life in general, they’re making sure this year’s Christmas season spending is leaner. 

Nic Antaya/Detroit News/AP

A shopper loads his car with groceries at the Kroger in Novi, Michigan, on Jan. 23, 2021. Average hourly wages have risen close to 5% over the past 12 months. For some households, income gains have outpaced 6.8% inflation during that time. But for many Americans, rising expenses strain household budgets.

Can Federal Reserve do much? 

Many American families say they’re worried about daily affordability in the near future. 

Michael Sposi, an international trade researcher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, says it’s a time for households to be careful, and watchful. 

“We might have a longer spell of inflation than initially thought,” Dr. Sposi says, referring to how Fed predictions of a “transitory” bout of inflation have already gone by the wayside. “Only time will tell what’s really in store for us, as far as being worried about inflation.” 

Economic predictions vary among economists, however. 

“I think people are a little too worried about this,” Dr. Leeper says.  

Some of the worry, he says, is natural “because young folks – not me, but others – have never seen inflation.” 

Still, he notes, the Fed has a tall task ahead of it. Not only are its hands mostly tied in terms of coping with a hobbled global supply chain, but it’s also been forced to work with an incomplete data set to some extent. It’s unclear when – or if – those who left the labor force during the so-called Great Resignation earlier this year will return to the market.

“That makes it much harder to read the employment statistics to understand what’s going on,” Dr. Leeper says.  

Seeds cost more too

In the meantime, what’s clear for folks like Ms. Hallford is that they have to be resourceful. But even for the most self-sufficient, resourcefulness has its limits. Ms. Hallford notices that even the price of seeds has gone up, from 99 cents a package to as high as $1.49 for the same amount. 

She plans to let her crops begin to wilt and go to seed next growing season, so she can save and store the seeds to plant the following year. They’ll continue hunting and fishing, too. 

“I can’t complain,” Ms. Hallford says. “I’m walking, talking, and breathing.” 

Pendyala Pavana is no stranger to the world of social activism and government repression. Ever since she was a child she has seen her father, a revolutionary poet and activist, subjected to repeated criminal charges, accused of everything under the sun, including murder.

Twenty-four times he has been charged; 24 times he has been found not guilty. Still, Ms. Pavana is shocked by the way her father, Varavara Rao, is being treated in his latest ordeal. “It’s quite against natural justice, and his rights are completely denied,” she says.

Mr. Rao is one of 16 people, including respected human rights lawyers and university professors, detained in 2018 for allegedly plotting with a banned Maoist group to overthrow the government.

They have been charged under India’s principal anti-terrorism law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, known as UAPA. This is a draconian, vaguely worded catchall law, dating from 1967 but amended several times since then, that allows detention without charge for 180 days, a duration far exceeding international standards. It also makes securing bail almost impossible, but its use very rarely leads to court convictions.

“There is no doubt the law is being abused,” says retired Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur. “Strengthening the rule of law is one aspect of a liberal democracy; fairly implementing the law is another aspect. I think we are deficient on both counts." 

Critics complain that the UAPA is used indiscriminately. Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch, says it is part of “an increasing trend in India where the authorities are abusing laws to punish peaceful dissent.” Police even used the UAPA to arrest Muslim students celebrating Pakistan’s recent victory against India in a cricket match, she points out.

Mr. Rao’s case has attracted particular attention because one of his fellow accused, tribal rights activist Father Stan Swamy, died in custody in July after being repeatedly denied bail in spite of his deteriorating health. Aged 84, he was the oldest person ever to be accused of terrorism in India, and his death led to widespread international outrage and condemnation.

Bikas Das/AP/File

Revolutionary poet Varavara Rao, on his way in 2011 to lodge a complaint about the killing of a Maoist leader. Mr. Rao's arrest in 2018 sparked complaints that he was being targeted for his activism on behalf of poor and marginalized people in India.

A sense of fear

India has a history of passing strict but temporary pieces of anti-terrorist legislation and then letting them lapse or repealing them in the face of criticism that they were being unfairly used against government opponents and marginalized communities. Legal experts say that the UAPA, which is permanent legislation, is the most stringent law yet; critics see it as a weapon that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is using to crack down on civil society.

UAPA cases have been on the rise since 2014, when Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won office. A recent report by the Swedish V-Dem Institute rated India as an “electoral autocracy,” noting that India’s democratic decline was “one of the most dramatic shifts among all countries in the world over the past 10 years.”

In 2019, a total of 1,948 people were arrested under the UAPA, according to government figures, a 37% increase from the year before. But complaints that the law is used indiscriminately against government critics rather than against the terrorists it is officially meant to target appear to be borne out by another statistic: Of the 7,243 arrests made under the UAPA since 2016, only 212 – fewer than 3% – led to a conviction.

The law is not being used against any particular group or political party, says Suresh Veeraraghavan, general secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a human rights watchdog. Rather, he says, police use it to target people speaking up for the rights of others. “The government is using UAPA as its preferred legal weapon to crush human rights and the democracy movement,” he charges.

“Those who are active and at the forefront [of demonstrations] are being arrested and investigated,” adds Asif Iqbal Tanha, a student detained last year under UAPA for his alleged role in a conspiracy related to Hindu-Muslim violence in New Delhi in 2020. “This is being done to give a message to the others that if they stand up in protest, this will happen to them, too. This is to create a sense of fear.”

In recent years, journalists, activists, and lawyers across the country have been booked under the UAPA.

“These laws exist to protect the public from indiscriminate [terrorist] attacks, not to punish views that the government may not like,” says Ms. Ganguly of Human Rights Watch.

Blurred lines

“The present government has been clamping down on dissent in various ways,” says Mihir Desai, a lawyer representing several of those detained with Mr. Rao. “But UAPA becomes the most dangerous because of your liberty being denied for years, together without any evidence being presented.”

Under the UAPA, bail is automatically denied if the court finds that police evidence makes a prima facie case that an offense has been committed. It can take years before that evidence is tested in court. Last year a man returned home after spending 11 years in a jail in Gujarat state on unproven terrorism charges, and two others were cleared of all charges, due to lack of evidence, nine years after they had been arrested.

Because the denial of bail is written into the law, “the moment the law is invoked, these procedures are not being misused; they are being used,” says Kunal Ambasta, who teaches at the National Law School of India University. “The moment you have such a law, you are waiting for ... abuse to happen.”    

Experts have also found indications that some of the evidence against Mr. Rao and his co-defendants in the case has been fabricated and planted on them. Earlier this year, studying the computers of activist Rona Wilson and human rights lawyer Sunil Gadling at the request of defense lawyers, Arsenal Forensics, a Massachusetts-based digital forensic firm, found that more than 30 fake documents had been inserted by an unknown hacker into their laptops.

In July, Ms. Pavana learned that her phone number was among those selected for surveillance using Pegasus spyware by a client of the manufacturer, Israel’s NSO Group. NSO says that it has sold its spyware only to governments. While she had always expected some form of surveillance on her father, “what was shocking to me was knowing that even my life is being completely observed by someone else. It really troubled me,” she says.

Such surveillance, and the use of the UAPA, seem to match the current public mood, says Mr. Ambasta. “The general discourse, both public as well as political, has shifted towards the greater prioritization of national security,” he says. “It’ll be political hara-kiri for someone who is ... contesting elections to say that they are going to repeal an anti-terror law.”

And courts almost always accept police evidence, keeping suspects locked up while they await trial. But in July the High Court balked, and granted bail to Mr. Tanha, the student being held on a conspiracy charge, and two others.

In its ruling, the court noted that “in its anxiety to suppress dissent, in the mind of the State, the line between the constitutionally guaranteed right to protest and terrorist activity seems to be getting somewhat blurred.”

“If this mindset gains traction,” the High Court judges warned, “it would be a sad day for democracy.”

In Times Square, the longest line isn’t for the discount Broadway show ticket booth. Nor is it for photo opps with the costumed Mickeys and Minnies milling about like theme park escapees. The big queue is for a booth where one can write wishes for 2022 on small squares of multi-colored paper. On New Year’s Eve, just after the ball drops at midnight, the wish lists will be blasted into the air as confetti. I imagine it’ll look like an explosion at a Post-it note factory. 

I’ve journeyed here from Boston to see what people’s wishes reveal about hopes and aspirations for 2022. Many of the notes, pinned to a board, express a wish for the pandemic to end. (Days after my visit, some tourist attractions shut down due to concerns about the Omicron COVID-19 variant, and conditions around Broadway and the New Year’s Eve party in Times Square are fluid.) But a closer look at the individual wishes reveals a rich picture of day-to-day lives – including reminders that genuine happiness can flourish in hard times.

Take, for instance, the note that Simon Floyd from Britain scrawled just after proposing to his girlfriend, Sophie Belcher. 

“I wish that Sophie – my fiancée – and I have a happy wedding and a happy marriage,” says Mr. Floyd. Her engagement ring is almost as dazzling as the mega screens in Times Square that create a daylight-like luminescence long after sunset. 

Stephen Humphries/The Christian Science Monitor

Visitors to Times Square write down their wishes for 2022 on pieces of paper that will be used as confetti on New Year's Eve, on Dec. 8, 2021.

Despite the cold, people patiently wait in line like voters about to cast ballots to elect a better 2022. Many express gratitude for the good they’ve experienced in 2021. Massage therapist Victoria Fishman is exultant about landing a new job after the pandemic shut down her industry. Rebecca Cornell of Long Island reunited with her grandparents after not being able to see them for a year-and-a-half. “We cried,” says Ms. Cornell, who wished for a wonderful wedding ceremony on New Year’s Eve 2022.

Nicole Britt and Wayne White from Tennessee are grateful to have met during the pandemic. They’re getting married in May. He wished for a baby. “We’ll have to see about that,” his wife-to-be laughs. 

Joyce Armigos, a coordinator at the wishing booth, has seen it all. Perhaps not surprising, since an estimated 12,000 messages land each day. Someone wished for $800 million. Another had a single-word wish – pizza. Then there are the notes that touched her deeply, like when a child wrote, “I wish my dad didn’t drink a lot.” 

Many wishes are for “health and happiness.” Others express a longing to fall in love. 

“We love the idea of having a wish because we feel like if it comes true, that it means that we’re here, that what we say does matter, and we do matter,” says Ms. Armigos. 

Multiple languages show up in the notes. Libbis Perdigon from Venezuela wished for freedom for her nation. Oleksii Sviliashchuk from Kyiv expresses concern about Russian troops massing on the Ukraine border.

“I feel fear when I think that I could be in war,” says Mr. Sviliashchuk. “And that’s why I think that peace is the main thing that I can wish for.” 

Stephen Humphries/The Christian Science Monitor

New Yorkers Clay Mallo (left) and her friend Kayla Grant write down their New Year's wishes Dec. 8, 2021, at a booth in Times Square.

Many visitors to the booth are grateful to travel more freely now. In the evening rush hour, New Yorkers speed walk past lollygagging out-of-towners. A refrain from a Simon and Garfunkel song starts playing in my mental jukebox: “They’ve all come to look for America.” 

“New York to me, is sort of the heart of America,” says travel tour manager Barbara Palmer, who wished that she and her mother could safely relocate to Connecticut next year after spending the pandemic in Florida. “No offense to the heartland of America – because it’s different – but because [New York] is that collection of different cultures, collection of different peoples, collection of different beliefs that, for better or worse, survive together. When New York is doing well, [everything] thrives together.”

Several New Yorkers mention that Times Square was deserted earlier this year. They’re elated to see it bustling again. 

When it’s finally my turn at the booth, I wonder what to write on my slip of paper. Then I recall a simple wish that Ms. Armigos, the coordinator, told me had touched her heart: “I just want to have a better tomorrow.”

People from around the world can submit their 2022 wishes, to be added to the confetti in Times Square, at this webpage: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/whats-happening/nye-wishing-wall.

Elias Funez/The Union via AP

Volunteers in Grass Valley, Calif., sort hundreds of toys for the annual Toys For Tots giveaway in December 2021.

It’s nearly Christmas morning, when kids will tear into mysterious boxes under the tree hoping to find a toy that will fascinate and amaze them. 

Toy sales in the United States have been strong this year, up 10% over 2020. Some of these toys are packed with the latest technology, including links to the internet that allow the toy to respond to the child in ever more sophisticated ways.

Americans are becoming more and more wary of the way their personal information is being collected on the web. A new Washington Post-Schar School poll, for example, found that 72% of respondents trusted Facebook “not much” or “not at all” to handle the data it collected on them responsibly. And 70% said they believed their smartphone or other tech devices are listening to them in ways they haven’t agreed to.

That wariness is justified. But adult gift-givers may not realize that some children’s toys are collecting personal data, too. Toys with cameras, mobile apps, and requirements to set up online accounts that store data about the toy and its user all present privacy concerns, according to Trouble in Toyland, a report issued in November by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a consumer advocacy organization.

Toys that employ Bluetooth connections, for example, could be susceptible to being hacked from outside the home, perhaps exposing the child to inappropriate content or gathering sensitive information. The Mario Kart Live Home Circuit, the report notes, employs a camera that uploads images of the room in order to create a virtual racecourse. But these images of the room’s layout and the objects in it could be exposed if the game’s website were ever hacked.

Most toy manufacturers are trying to build in protections. And the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, provides another layer of defense by requiring parents to be involved in setting up the toy and giving adults the right to have their children’s online data removed.

Parents should also be aware that some toys no longer sold by manufacturers because of privacy concerns are still available for purchase online. 

PIRG suggests that parents research any smart toy before buying it, in order to understand what technology is being used and the ways their child will interact with it. Adults can check out the toy and its manufacturer online to see if privacy concerns have been raised.

The worldwide market for smart toys is expected to reach almost $70 billion in the next five years, according to Transparency Market Research. These toys can be wonderfully engaging and entertaining – and even educational, such as an interactive globe that speaks to children about a country as they touch it on the map. Action figures, robots, or dolls that talk back and hold conversations can become loved companions.

But  adults need to be sure that these high-tech friends aren’t also snitching on their children to online databases in inappropriate ways.