It still hasn't busted up
Post-America has not yet cracked up; it's still growing more brittle
At various points over the last decade, the cracking point has seemed imminent.
When the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the largest spending bill in the federal government’s history, was passed in 2009, exacerbating a public debt crisis that saw the debt-to-GDP ratio grow to 105 percent, lots of folks wondered if the pretense at solvency could be maintained much longer.
When the cycle of police incidents resulting in urban chaos previous to our current one burst onto the landscape, many citizens grew concerned about the sturdiness of the foundations of public order.
When a backlash to states passing religious-freedom legislation grew so fierce that boycotts by professional sports leagues, major entertainers and corporations rushed over the cultural scene like a tidal wave, it was clear to those who who set store by centuries-old norms that those norms were in genuine peril.
No sooner had social media become the backdrop to our daily lives and we delighted in reconnecting with friends from long ago, its platforms became minefields and savage evisceration became as common as birthday wishes and pet pictures.
The Right grew tired of its natural political home, the Republican party, proving inadequate to deliver policy victories even in times of legislative majorities. Its presidential candidates were so moderate as to appear uncomfortable espousing conservative principles. Even the Tea Party movement failed to move the needle. Into this atmosphere of pent-up frustration swaggered a reality-show host and brand-hustler who, while obviously incapable of the consistency to be a conservative, displayed a combativeness that caused a cult to form around him and propel him to the presidential nomination.
The Left, meanwhile, was clearly not content with the Cloward-and-Piven point on the spectrum to which Barack Obama had brought the Democrat party. A new generation of activists and candidates wanted to go further left, and quickly. This generation of progressives wanted to accelerate the imposition of identity politics and redistribution as aggressively as its ideological opposite wanted to move in the other direction.
Thus, it was inevitable that the squaring-off between the new iterations of the parties would be unprecedentedly ugly.
A complication arose on the Right that continues to the present. A minority that found Donald Trump objectionable not only for his low character and erratic personal behavior but for his complete lack of a philosophical rudder has persisted and refused to be marginalized.
No one needs to be convinced that the year 2020 has seen all these developments become even more pronounced. Impeachment made fissures not only between Left and Right, but within the Right side of the terrain more clear than ever. The coronavirus pandemic has had the same effect. George Floyd’s murder has set in motion yet another cycle of marches, riots, calls for a focus on inter-demographic dynamics within institutions such as the corporate sector and the sports world.
Consider the last month.
City councils of major urban centers have voted to dismantle police forces and paint the phrase “Black Lives Matter” on the pavement of major thoroughfares. In Minneapolis, ground zero for the current cycle of all this, it appears that the police force is one step ahead of the city council. One-fifth of it is leaving.
Small-business proprietors - for that matter, personnel at big-box stores - are in dread of opening each day, wondering if they’ll get screamed at, have their establishments vandalized, or see someone get shot because they enforce the must-wear-a-mask rule.
Bari Weiss has been bullied out of her job as an editor at the New York Times. She is a centrist lesbian Jew who made space on that paper’s opinion pages for a range of figures including
the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.
Peter Navarro, the Trump administration’s trade policy director and a fierce protectionist - completely at odds with the administration’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow, pointing up Trump’s basic inconsistency - penned an op-ed at USA Today entitled “Anthony Fauci Has Been Wrong On Everything I Have Interacted With Him On,” setting a new lowering of the bar for public airing of sharp disagreements within an administration. In response, Fauci has used the terms “bizarre” and “nonsense” to characterize the tone emanating from the administration he serves.
Yesterday, the Very Stable Genius used a Rose Garden appearance - traditionally the setting for occasions that rise above partisanship - to spew his wildest, most unfocused, most feebly articulated rant to date, and as we know, that’s saying something. His signature vituperation was on display, but in fits and starts, interspersed with excursions into incoherence.
Trump is doing increasingly poorly against Biden in polls, and this has his team distressed. The team is also desperate to hear him articulate some kind of theme or program for a second term.
His slavish devotees know this - how could they not? - but they continue to put forth the same in-your-face tone in opinion pieces that has been a mainstay since the excitement first took hold five years ago.
This isn’t going to subside in the foreseeable future. Quite the contrary. There will be more backlash to the warnings of public-health experts about rushing to normalization in wake of coronavirus case spikes. There will be more backlash to the heavy-handedness with which local governments and corporations are spreading the message of collective demographic guilt. There will be more longstanding friendships and family ties that will be severed. There will be more splits within religious denominations. Our culture’s feeble attempts at art will grow more pornographic.
And, at some point, we will indeed reach the moment of crackup.
If your response to that assertion is some variation of “No, we won’t; we’re a fundamentally stable society and it’s going to eventually be okay,” let’s see your substantiation.
You have a very large number of your fellow post-Americans to convince of your position.