The mood is getting mighty grim among progressives. You can feel it in the air of cyberspace -- a dark, gloomy feeling about the future of America. Just today on this blog, one of the premier online gathering places for liberal Democrats, a diary called Pack It In America - You're Done has made it to the #1 spot on the recommended list.
I would like to pose the question: Have we reached "Peak America" -- much like Peak Oil -- a tipping point beyond which there is only an inexorable downward slide for this country? Or, could an American restoration be in our future?
There was a front page story here today called A time for vision. The author quotes Bob Herbert, saying:
I don’t think [John F. Kennedy] would have known what to make of the America of today, where the messages coming from the smoldering ruins of public life are not just uninspiring, but demeaning: that we must hack away at the achievements of the past (Social Security, Medicare); that we cannot afford to rebuild the nation’s aging infrastructure or establish a first-class public school system for all children; that we cannot bring an end to debilitating warfare, or establish a new era of clean energy, or put millions of jobless and underemployed Americans back to work.
I think an argument can be made that the era of JFK and LBJ -- America putting a man on the moon and creating the Great Society with civil rights, social insurance for all, and a large and flourishing middle class -- was "Peak America." Perhaps it's all been downhill from there.
Many things have changed since that not-so-distant time that sometimes seems like it belongs to a whole different age of human history than the time in which we live. But to keep this diary from being too long, I will hit upon the fundamental change that matters the most, which is at the root of all of America's problems during the past few decades: the cultural rot of acceptance (and increasingly even celebration) of mediocrity. This has manifested as worsening educational standards, declining expectations for civic involvement, increasing shortsightedness and anti-social me-first attitudes rather than shared national sacrifice and vision.
In only a few decades, we as a people have gone from believing in "better living through chemistry" and the glory of human space travel, to a culture in which it is now considered a mainstream political position of one of our two major political parties to dismiss the 99% of scientists who accept the reality of human-caused climate change, and to believe that the government should allow basic infrastructure such as roads, rail, and bridges to go unmaintained and unimproved, because somehow it's "too expensive" to do anything with the people's tax dollars other than spending more money on the military and wars than all other nations in the world combined.
How did this happen? I think the basic reason is that too many Americans today no longer have a vision for America to be a great civilization that is at the forefront of human progress. And the reason for that is, cynicism, apathy, and hyper-individualism are now the norm in our culture, rather than engaged citizenship and the belief in a civic duty to want the American people as a whole to prosper and to vote accordingly.
We now are living in an America in which it is considered a normal part of politics for leaders of one party to say, openly, that they want the president of the United States to fail -- just because he belongs to the other party. That's how low our political discourse has sunk and how tribalistic it has become.
And we are now living in a country in which people will vote for a party that is even worse than the party in power which they are frustrated and disappointed with -- a party that only two years ago was known to have destroyed the nation's economy through failed policies -- policies which that same party is still advocating!
These kind of things can only happen when the very foundations of representative democracy are rotting out, bringing the danger of societal collapse. And the rot starts with the culture of today's America. Our culture is increasingly celebrating proud ignorance as "populism." It's even gotten to the point where Republicans now are promoting eating low-quality, obesity-causing fast food, because the kind of wholesome foods that keep people thin and healthy are viewed as "elitist" and therefore to be rejected.
In other words, American culture has degenerated to the point where anything that is empirically good and representative of civilizational progress is seen as bad by a large segment of our society -- healthy food, high-speed rail, clean energy, science, you name it. Somehow, it's now cool and populist to believe that bad is good and good is bad.
This is the mark of a society in collapse. We once were a people who went to the moon; now we are a people who can't even get up off the couch to get another bag of cheesy poofs.
As I wrote in a comment on the diary called "Pack It In America":
Better days lie ahead IF...
- Education is improved.
- Citizenship and civic duty are taken more seriously by most people.
- Being knowledgeable becomes cool and being ignorant comes to be seen as lame.
I think this is the bottom line. A rotting educational system and a culture in which it's cool to be disengaged and cynical about civic duties are fundamentally incompatible, in the long run, with an egalitarian democratic society. They are compatible with fascism and feudalism.
So, which way is America headed? Down the crapper of fascism and feudalism, or perhaps towards a great Restoration? Has Peak America been reached and we are now on the permanent downward slope of our civilization, or could things be turned around and better days lie ahead -- days even greater than those in which we sent the first humans to walk on the moon and we built the Great Society?
I would like to think that better days are ahead for America. But I think that in order for that to be the case, there is going to have to be a massive cultural shift in this society -- a truly dramatic change in the mass culture of the American people. Much of what we, as a people, value (such as consumerism, bubble economics, the financial sector, militarism, the right to be willfully dumb and uninformed without facing social opproprium for it), is going to have to become less valued; and much that we have come to consider of little value (such as scientific literacy, knowledge of history, and civic duty) are going to have to become highly valued.
Is it possible? I don't know, but as an American, I have to hope so. I think one thing is clear: changing the culture is where progressives need to be focusing our energy. Politics may not be the biggest part of the answer. The political situation flows from the prevailing mass culture. If we can succeed in changing the culture, then political change will naturally follow. We are still living in a democracy, after all, as imperfect as it may be. By and large, we get the government the people vote for -- based on their beliefs, values, and habits, i.e. the culture. The sooner we start accepting that fact and thinking about how to deal with it, the sooner our despair at the foul political situation will pass or at least be transmuted into something more constructive.