Thoughts on a permanently transformed nation

What's the most important thing about all the tumult that has come down the pike in the last five weeks?

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So everyone agrees the situation is dire.

Well, not everyone. There’s a certain swath of the post-American public that thinks things are going swimmingly, that sensible policy and a reacquaintance with our national inner compass are ascendant. You know where you can find their stuff: Townhall, The Federalist, American Greatness.

But for anyone who doesn’t have to wipe the drool off his or her chin every five minutes, it’s clear that frightful transformation is taking place at a dizzying rate.

But let’s do our best to make distinctions between what is secondary and what is primary.

The US decoupling from Europe, the humiliating and sidelining of Ukraine, and “rapidly changing” foreign policy that “largely coincides with [Russia’s] vision” , while hair-raisingly alarming, is secondary. As is the US’s deliberate alienating of its immediate neighbors to the north and south.

The DOGE rampage through the federal government and Elon Musk’s giddiness at being perceived as impishly unpredictable, even though it is fomenting upheaval in such departments as State, Defense and Justice and the Interior, to name a few, and even though the Social Security Administration is on wobbly footing, is secondary.

The fact that the Very Stable Genius has an obvious affinity for people whose marital track records and sybaritic pasts are similar to his, as evidenced by such cabinet appointments as Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy and Kristi Noem, as well as his bromance with the aforementioned Musk, while further corroding the moral underpinnings of societal stability, is secondary.

Our longer-term problems, such as US students’ historical illiteracy, the loneliness epidemic, withering family formation, collapse of church attendance, and plunging levels of trust in our institutions are still not the primary matter at hand.

Is there, at this late date, any point in trying to have a conversation about a working definition of conservatism? The term has been so hopelessly usurped by Trumpism that such a task has gone from being daunting to being Herculean.

There are laudable attempts being made. For my misgivings about Principles First (mainly having to do with its horse-is-out-of-the-barn stance on identity politics), it seems they had a constructive recent annual summit in Washington, and some solid thinkers among their speakers and panelists. The Dispatch and Commentary remain reliably grown-up and focused. (National Review is in kind of a strange place these days. Several of their opinion writers are among the alarmed at what Trumpism has wrought in the last month, but editor Rich Lowry and a few others can be hard to decipher.) The gang I got to know a little bit from writing for The Freemen News-letter is admirably staying in touch and forming associational outlets trying to spread the Reaganite message to Gen Z.

You can look back through the archives here at Precipice to see the ways in which I’ve strived to come at the question of what conservatism’s essence is.

If you do, you’ll note that transcendence figures prominently into the effort.

That has often taken the form of referring to a book I still regard as one of the most important of the first quarter of the present century, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution by Carl Trueman.

In a post from September of last year titled “A Permanent Me Generation,” I discussed where Trueman’s work next led me:

Longtime Precipice readers know that I set great store by the analysis Carl Trueman laid out in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. He insists that we have to go back to Rousseau’s man-was-good-in-a-state-of-nature-before-he-corrupted-himself-by-getting-civilized argument. Then we have to stop by the Romantic era in European arts, when poets and painters taught us to emphasize how being in nature makes us feel. And we need to pay particular attention to the disdain Percy Shelley had for the institution of marriage, about which he said that it constrained people’s natural urges and the range of outlets for satisfying them. Trueman takes us on through the “contributions” of Marx, Freud and Dewey, and on up to Hugh Hefner, and the rise of modern feminism as a reaction to that.

Read some Trueman. His columns regularly appear on the Ethics and Public Policy Center website.

After digesting his book, I wanted to explore the question of how we got here further. My next step was to read Community and Power by Robert Nisbet. That’s actually the title of the second edition, which came out in 1961. I find the original 1953 title, The Quest for Community, a more specific indication of what Nisbet is looking at. It’s a prescient work. For all the mythologizing about the 1950s as a time of picket fences and stable norms, the currents presently at work were underway then. It’s kind of a precursor (by fifty years) to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Nisbet detected erosion of the institutions - churches, civic organizations, a general societal orientation toward family - that most were taking for granted at the time. To put it succinctly, that era was when we began to prioritize ways in which we as individuals or interest groups might amass power over belonging to each other.

Then I read Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, the first edition of which came out in 1988. It was a collaboration among a group of sociologists, and they updated their findings a couple of times, the latest being 2012. Throughout their editions, they followed various people in various lines of work and from various parts of the country to see how their attitudes about what makes for a worthy life played out.

Relevant to the present matter is the fact that one of the sociologists, Robert N. Bellah, coined the term “expressive individualism,” which Trueman and others have employed in their takes on contemporary life:

When defining expressive individualism, it might be best to start with the slogans behind the movement:

• You be you.

• Be true to yourself.

• Follow your heart.

• Find yourself.

Slogans orient us to the philosophy in popular culture. History points us back to where it comes from. Robert Bellah and the sociologists who wrote Habits of the Heart trace the origins of expressive individualism back into the 1800s. The authors point to the writer and poet Walt Whitman as one of the best representatives of the philosophy.

And here’s another relevant book mention (from the article immediately excerpted above). I haven’t read it yet, but I check out anything I come across by the indispensable Yuval Levin:

Yuval Levin in The Fractured Republic describes it well:

That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. It is a drive both to be more like whatever you already are and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding.

Consider what Charles Taylor has to say about “authenticity”:

There’s a similar definition given by the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, who uses “the age of authenticity” as a descriptor. We could define “authenticity” in different ways. When we’re talking about “authenticity” as the opposite of “hypocrisy,” then striving for authenticity becomes a good thing. (Jesus had a lot to say about hypocrites and the deceit that masks inauthenticity.)

But Taylor does not use “authenticity” as a synonym for integrity or honesty. He uses the term in a way that pits authenticity against conformity. Here’s Taylor’s definition:

I mean the understanding of life which emerges with the Romantic expressivism of the late-eighteenth century, that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority.

The key here is that the purpose of life is to find one’s deepest self and then express that to the world, forging that identity in ways that counter whatever family, friends, political affiliations, previous generations, or religious authorities might say. (Many a Disney movie has followed a narrative plot line of someone finding and forging one’s self-identity in opposition to the naysayers.)

Now, in such a fractured environment, how are we to begin to agree on a definition of transcendence, let alone anything more specific, such as a Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God?

And how are we to enlist institutional Christianity, when the utter charlatans in power in the current administration espouse a belief in its basic tenet, namely the salvific nature of God’s spilled blood, and then blindly do the bidding of the out-of-control man-child in the Oval Office? In a time when post-American citizens have never felt like the message of redemption and reconciliation is less relevant, with what are we to persuade them?

That, dear readers, is the primary issue before us. How do we spark interest among our fellows in that which is true, noble, just, pure and lovely when the notion that they are their own gods has been so thoroughly inculcated in them?

I suppose it starts with one-on-one interactions, demonstrating hints of grace wherever possible, and making it clear that we don’t succumb to tribalism.

We also need some actual art, it seems to me. When the Best Picture of the Year Oscar goes to a Cinderella story about a sex worker, it’s clear our aesthetic landscape is barren indeed. Ted Gioia does a stellar job of covering that beat at his Substack, which I can’t recommend enough.

I’d recommend starting with his March 5 post “The World Was Flat. Now It’s Flattened.” He paints a grim picture of what happens to meaning when transcendence is replaced by complete immersion in the material:

That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community.

The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.

Barack Obama and Donald Trump were spawned from the same cultural river, to use shorthand for the breadth of what I’m saying. We don’t ask anyone we might consider for leadership in any realm to have any kind of conviction that there is a wisdom and authority beyond the human being.

And human beings are fallen and fallible. Every last one of us. So we entrust our safety and prospects for a secure future to the hands of those who, from a moral standpoint, are no more reliable than you or me.

Are you comfortable with that?