You’ve heard the explanations for our disintegrating country. Social media amplifies our differences and promotes extremism. Growing inequality and urbanization create rage and resentment. The gradual un-whitening of the society threatens an old social order.
These are persuasive, and yet not entirely satisfactory. We experienced versions of all these things in the 20th century — transformative technologies, massive immigration, stifling plutocracy — and somehow made it through without destroying our political system.
That’s not to say there weren’t moments of heartbreaking violence or frightening chaos; the 1960s are remembered, still, for both. But even then, we never let our tribal instincts overwhelm our shared faith in democratic norms. Court orders were obeyed, however reluctantly; laws were enacted. We did not, in the end, spin apart.
To really understand our current moment, maybe you need to go back to what transpired in the 1990s — and to a gaping vacuum in our national psyche that we’ve never managed to fill.
Americans, for better or worse, have always been defined by existential struggle. From the founding of the country, grounded not in any shared ethnicity or religion but rather in the novel idea of human liberty and self-rule, we’ve been bound together by the idea that the country isn’t just a place to live. It’s a living force for the advancement of humankind.
This self-image, I grant you, demanded more than a little denial. We wrought genocide across the American continent, fought a war over the enslavement of other human beings, subjugated women and remained, in whole swaths of the country, an apartheid state into the late 20th century. All true. And yet this idea of what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion” — a nation bound together by its faith in laws and liberties, not just for ourselves but for the world as a whole — endured in the public mind.
It’s fair to say that other countries find this baffling. For most nations, having experienced millennia of empires and invasions, it’s enough to be safe and prosperous and proud of a common heritage. But for us, there has always been a higher purpose, if not a form of political zealotry. Simply by settling towns and raising up cities and sending our kids off to school in the morning, Americans believed we were striking a blow for freedom.
And in a very real sense, we were. The 20th century was defined by clashes with tyranny that shadowed every aspect of American life — first with fascism and then with communists. If much of the world saw us as the latest in a long line of imperial powers, Americans saw ourselves as a bulwark against the darkest forces of humanity. Our internal differences could be wrenching — the Red Scare and the battle over civil rights come to mind — but what we shared was a common enemy and a constant threat of annihilation.
Then came the end of the Cold War — what the social theorist Francis Fukuyama optimistically called “the end of history.” By this, he meant that absolutism in all its forms — monarchy, fascism, communism — had finally exhausted itself, to be permanently replaced by liberal democracies created in our image. We were supposed to be living through, in effect, the last battle of the broader American revolution.
Fukuyama was wrong, of course; liberty did not enjoy some final triumph over autocracy in the world, or even much of a honeymoon. But he was right in the sense that the civilizational clashes that had long dominated our political discourse suddenly disappeared.
Our first instinct was to fill that vacuum with distractions and triviality. (I wrote an entire book and movie about this moment in our politics, when politicians suddenly became celebrities, in part because now we had the luxury of treating them that way.) By the late ’90s, we were living in a country where the sex life of the president completely eclipsed his foreign policy.
There was a brief moment, after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when our political leaders seemed to cast radical Islam as the new Soviet empire — a global nemesis that might fill the gaping hole in America’s self-image. But it wasn’t long before we realized how remote the threat actually was, and how damaging our response. Conditioned as we were to find meaning in existential conflicts, we whipped out a howitzer to do battle with a wasp.
Our need for some existential contest, however, remained. And we seem to have found it in the collision of cultures in our own cities and towns — an escalating divide between highly urban, educated leftists who denounce white privilege and theocracy and gun culture, on one hand, and rural Trumpists who see themselves as being overrun by modernism and multiculturalism on the other.
The further we get from the Cold War-era consensus, the more inclined we are to see political adversaries as a force hellbent on destroying us. We find our national purpose now in online communities whose common theme is binary conflict; either your side wins, or soon it will cease to exist. (No less influential a culture warrior than Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said as much in a recent, surreptitiously taped conversation.)
I’m not suggesting that what we need is another world war to unite us; there’s enough romanticizing of the last, extremely bloody century and the costs it extracted. Nor am I saying that all our political fears right now are illusory. Would former president Donald Trump’s election to a second term seriously jeopardize the rule of law that binds us as a society? I think so, yes. Trumpism is a direct consequence of our penchant for political Armageddon.
What I am saying is that our devolution into civil unrest stems from a long-standing lack of leadership. Biden may be the closest thing we have today to an American statesman, but when I hear him urging the country to dial back on the messianic political rhetoric, I hear it as an admission of generational failure.
All of these political leaders shaped by the Cold War consensus had an opportunity, if not an imperative, to redirect our national passion toward some new larger mission — to safeguard the planet from extinction, to dominate the digital economy, to rebuild factory towns decimated by neglect.
They talked about all these things, of course, but mostly in poll-tested clichés. They eschewed complicated truths. They asked for nothing by way of sacrifice. They promised what was popular — endless and reckless tax breaks on the right, ever expanding government on the left — and demonized their opponents for getting in the way.
Biden is right (and so is Trump, to the extent he means it after enduring a near-death experience) that it’s past time to pull back from discourse that seems to be leading us toward a second civil war. But, as I wrote last week in suggesting a new campaign strategy for Biden, it’s also time to retire the generation of leaders who got us here, who let our differences — cultural, religious, racial — fill the absence where common struggle had always bound us before.
America’s aging leaders did not preside over the end of history, after all. They simply failed to figure out where it was supposed to go next.
Read More
