Several takes on the broken and bitter post-American landscape

An ironic truth of our time is that the one point of agreement for citizens of all stripes is that post-America and the West generally in characterized by an atmosphere of polarization, decadence and incoherence.

LITD has come across some substantive analysis of the situation lately.

The Hoover Institution's Peter Berkowitz looks at a new article by Eric Liu. Liu is director of the Aspen Institute's Citizenship and American Identity program. Corroborating the point I make above, Liu says these are times of brittleness and joylessness for the nation. Berkowitz points out that Liu's proposed way out, however, is more of what got us here: doubling down on identity politics.

Liu envisages a cultural literacy list that would “catalyze discussion and even debate.” It would be many-colored and inclusive, rich with references to movies and music, and to the ethnic, racial, and religious minorities that populate America. In the spirit of progressives’ “living Constitution,” it would be “an evolving document, amendable and ever subject to reinterpretation.”

The content of this list would demonstrate that “the essence of American life is that it relentlessly generates hybrids.” So would the method by which the list is produced. It would be “an online, crowd-sourced, organic document that never stops changing, whose entries are added or pruned, elevated or demoted, according to the wisdom of the network.” And it would teach that the story of “diversity and hybridity” is “the legitimate American story.” Serving as “the mirror for a new America,” Liu’s cultural literacy enterprise, he claims, would overcome the conflict between the claims of a common culture and multiculturalism by illustrating that multiculturalism “is our common culture.”

But multiculturalism is not our common culture. Nor is the essence of American life hybridity and diversity. It is the American commitment to individual freedom and equality under law that is fundamental, and which makes possible the bounteous American pluralism that Liu justly celebrates. At this moment of dizzying change, recovery and restoration of the enduring principles at the core of the American experiment in self-government is decidedly more urgent than construction of a document that echoes the clamor characteristic of contemporary public life.

Liu confuses a part of the American story for the whole. To be sure, any respectable list of cultural literacy today must reflect the richness of American popular culture. It must also feature women’s and nonwhite people’s contributions to the American experience as well as the injustices to which they have been subject. But it should not banish to the periphery what is most basic to the American experience, what nourishes hybridity, and what enables Americans—amid diversity and disagreement—to forge their own futures while forming a single nation that remains the envy of the world.

Liu obscures this larger picture—call it the American constitutional tradition—in part, it seems, because he dislikes what a significant segment of fellow citizens do with their freedom. 

So Eric Liu is no one to consult about a positive way forward.

Maybe James Peireson, in his new book Shattered Consensus, has some useful input? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post thinks so:

Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived. The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.

That’s my chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,”a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.

To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.

The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.

Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

A bracing splash of cold water right there.

Sam Gerrans, writing at Russia Times, has the diagnosis right, pointing, in bullet-point fashion, to  a litany of contributing factors: the fading of agriculture as an occupational field (something LITD made note of the other day), an economy that has not been robust for some time (here, Gerrans gets on some shaky ground, blaming this in part on the wars of recent decades; he trots out the "hubris" charge and asserts that post-American involvement in Middle Eastern situations has been driven by a perceived need to keep the price of oil stable), the prevalence of mind-altering drugs, and declining morals.

Regarding this last factor, he makes some interesting observations that probably could only come from an outsider's perspective (Gerrans is English):

Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.

Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.

Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.

Indeed. It probably takes this external look to inject some kind of objectivity into our own perception of our behavior. Is not the phenomenon of people getting up from the Thanksgiving dinner table and heading out into the afternoon chill to camp out in front of some big-box store to secure a prime spot for rushing the doors at 3 the following morning just plain bizarre? What would it take for a critical mass of post-Americans to readily see it as such?

There is the sense, and it shows up in a tone of uneasiness in many comment threads under social-media posts or opinion pieces, after all the bitter disagreements have been hashed through, that the status quo cannot be maintained. Let's cut to the chase and spell out the two most likely events that would lance our civilizational infection: economic collapse or a catastrophic attack by an enemy.

Each of those is nearly unthinkable, of course, which sets the mind to searching for some less tumultuous yet equally decisive break from the current state.

Any ideas out there?