Yascha Mounk: "... Trump replaced Obama’s optimism and faith in America with a hostility to the country’s political traditions and an apocalyptic vision of its present condition....The attempt to empathize with those who hold different political views, once recognized as a key civic virtue, is now condemned as a moral vice."
Here's an example of Obama's optimism and empathy toward half the country:
"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"
That was followed by his divisive and racially exploitive rhetoric after events in Ferguson, Missouri-- which set race relations back a couple of decades (seriously, look at the polls). And, of course, we also have Hillary Clinton denouncing 70 million Americans as "deplorables." Optimism and empathy, indeed!
Stop and consider this for a moment: the mounting hostility and division is a concomitant of the increasingly expansive government that you (Yascha) are so fond of. Expansive govt. works great when you're Iceland or Finland and everybody is on the same page. As a society becomes more diverse, the question of who controls the govt. becomes ever more contentious. The bigger and more intrusive the govt. is, the more bitter and divisive the contest becomes. If govt. isn't such a leviathan and so intimately involved with every detail of our lives -- what we're allowed to say, what kind of showerheads we can have, etc. -- there is little motivation for the rancorous opposition and attempts to crush the other side.
The full Obama quote shows he was actually being very sympathetic to those he appeared to be criticizing. He was saying when people get treated badly enough for long enough, the can adopt some unhelpful ideas. Here's the quote:
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
"Because they're downtrodden, they're gun-toting racists and religious fanatics who hate people that aren't like them..." doesn't sound sympathetic to me at all. It sounds patronizing and supercilious.
No, he said it. And it was derogatory, even if delivered in an "I care" manner. "Who can blame those simpletons for clinging to archaic, worn-out notions such as God, a shared culture, and the rights of self-determination and personal liberty. It's hard out there for a pimp."
My take on this Steven is that Obama’s « bitter clingers. » Romney’s « 47%, » and Clinton’s « déplorables » are the same people. I think that Romney and Obama were typically patronizing while Clinton’s dismissing so many people as belonging in a « basket » is the commonplace contempt that the ruling class has for the working class.
I like your across-the-board approach, but I see it as caught in a similar trap to the one you're seeing but misunderstanding. My view is that except for some sociopaths most people are trying to be good and fair, and get blinded by ideologies and lack of information. Obama for example was clearly struggling to explain to his SF audience why the Republicans his audience hated should be regarded with a lot of sympathy for their plight.
I think he failed to understand their views of guns and religion and consequently trivialized them which was condescending. But seeing him as "ruling class" is just an old fashioned kind of identity politics.
I apply the same thinking to you. I disagree and think what you said was condescending. But I don't blame you. I blame the ideology that's affecting you -- and I don't think that's condescending because I know that's happened to me many times (and probably still is in ways I don't see). In fact I think those who are good hearted have a particular weakness for a range of damaging ideologies. And being brilliant has proven to be very little protection. We need to all cut each other some slack in the face of the virulent ideologies that so often control us.
Hi Steven. I have tried to find a better word than ruling class, but know of none. I am trying to see towards whom I am being condescending. Neither do I know what ideology I espouse. I do have a strong interest in the plight of the working class and growing inequality. Towards that end I have read Anne Case and Angus Deaton, along with Oren Cass, Nicholas Eberstadt, Thomas Piketty, and Melissa Kearney, among others. My views and reading are heterodox. I belong to no political party.
To be clear. Are you saying that I am being condescending to some of the wealthiest and most powerful Ivy graduates? Those who are never stuck in traffic? I guess that I should be honored to be considered in their company.
Perhaps I should use the word oligarchy. I am a big Schlesinger fan and of The Vital Center « The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel showed long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file. »
Rather than an ideology, I have a personal philosophy that, like Franklin, I struggle to abide by.
Hi Guy, Sorry for upsetting you; that truly was not my intent. My feeling was, and I may be wrong here, that you felt you were morally better than the three you label as of the same type (ruling class or whatever). Regardless of incomes I think it is possible to feel morally superior. As to ideology, I think we all have one, and they are all different, heterodox. So that involved no judgement about you.
A peculiarity of my ideology is that I don't think any of us have much control over who we are, although it's important to try to do better. If I would not have made Obama's mistake, I would just count myself lucky, nothing more. I understand, perhaps not as well as you, that a social/economic class or ascriptive identity can cause people to have immoral views. I try to separate that from the elusive idea of the person's true self.
I think we catch ideologies much like we catch the flu. And I think I'm lucky, not better, if I didn't catch the flu. I admit that's a difficult (perhaps impossible) concept to pin down. But I think we are better off trying to make that distinction, so I try to spread that bit of my ideology. I think this is the path to depolarizing politics. That's all I was really trying to do. I can see I need a lot of improvement in doing that.
'The bigger and more intrusive the govt. is, the more bitter and divisive the contest becomes." Really? The government is more intrusive now than in 1960? Maybe that depends on who you are. Back then the government regularly enslaved* millions of young men (mostly white), and could send them out to be killed by the thousands. Did you forget about that while worrying over shower heads? (Let me know if you can't change your shower head.)
* The draft (conscription) is considered an exemption to the 13th Amendment, not because it isn't slavery but because it's "supreme and noble duty" of citizens," or because Article 1, Section 8, gives Congress the right to raise an army. In any case, there is no governmental intrusion on law-abiding citizens that's more intrusive.
And gay people couldn't legally have sex. And white people couldn't marry someone of the wrong color -- you can't top that for intrusiveness. And Black people, could not buy the house I lived in at any price, and ... That was when the country was quite unified, not long after WWII when it was 98% unified and the government was far and away more intrusive than in 1960.
But now, we are "bitter and divisive and rancorous" because ... showerheads? I agree entirely that the environmentalists like to meddle annoyingly. And I find all the new National Park regulations annoying, and hiding trans indoctrination from parents is the worst. But somehow, your long-term correlation is completely backward. When the government was rationing the basics, and you were not allowed to buy a car, and a few million were drafted (enslaved) how was it that Uncle Sam was the most popular he has ever been?
The 1960s, when the draft was meaningful (sending people to their deaths), abortion was illegal, and you couldn't marry people of a different race, were quite divided and rancorous, weren't they?
Much of this intrusion was abandoned through the 1980s. The number of pages in the federal register dropped between 1980 and 1990, and government spending as a percent of GDP actually declined between 1980 and 2000.
But since then, there has been a resurgence of intrusive govt -- much revolving around identity politics: employment and contracts based on the racial and ethnic group you're born into; speech codes, and so on. The role of govt. in everyday life has expanded, with the Federal Register tripling in size since 1990. All of that has been accompanied with an increase in political and ethnic diversity.
A divided society combined with a govt. that controls a lot of stuff is a recipe for social toxicity.
Right. But so is a divided society combined with a Lack of gov. controls, or combined with better computers, or a falling birth rate. And the reason is: A divided society is a recipe for social toxicity. Period.
Gov controls, pages in register, gov spending just do not correlate. Check it out! They were all very low when social toxicity was max, in 1860. Two were the highest ever when social toxicity was lowest 1945. Computers are so much better and ... social toxicity is up. So the cause is good computers?? That's a two point correlation. As Yasha almost named this series, There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
This essay is great. I get the sense that from the perspective of the far left, which I assume many of those City College students would fall into, has a strong aversion to recognizing progress, and along with it the people who have helped bring progress. I have noticed it time and time again - progressives ardently deny actual progress. I think it's a way to resolve cognitive dissonance - if historical progress is recognized, it sort of undermines the progressive sense that America is structurally unjust and oppressive. I have had progressives tell me that policing has not changed since the 1960s. When everything needs to be burned down, the actual progress happening within our existing systems is an inconvenient concept. But I must admit, for myself, I vacillate between optimism and wanting to buy some land and stock it with freeze dried food and weapons. I also understand the deep mistrust of our current political class.
Your observation is exactly right, but here's a different interpretation of what you're seeing. Those who call themselves "progressives" today have stolen that term to cloak their true beliefs. Real progressives follow the Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, MLK, Obama line. They are the American left.
Today's "progressives" are extreme left and follow the international/ anarchist/ communist/ socialist/ DSA/ Sanders tradition. They are revolutionaries, but hard to recognize now because they've given up violence for subversion. Revolutionaries always deny progress, it undermines the need for revolution. This is why CRT, as formulated by Derrick Bell, is what Yascha calls "proud pessimists." That term is correct, but a more accurate one is "strategic pessimists." They know what they're doing.
And yes, a really strange part of the new progressive dispensation is a deep mistrust towards recognizing any form of moral or political progress. I wrote about that in both The Great Experiment and (more briefly) The Identity Trap. It's especially strange because it's completely unrealistic to hope for any form of effective movement for social change without holding out the hope to people that things could actually... improve.
Perhaps not so strange. Consider a simple explanation. The new “progressives” are part of the far-left tradition: Robespierre, Marx, Debs, early Bernie Sanders, DSA. They have just stopped saying “revolution.” Instead, they say, “Progress is impossible; we seek utopia.” I’ve seen this for 50 years—the more pessimistic my radical friend sounds, the more unrealistically optimistic they actually are.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, godmother of CRT in education, is the perfect example. She repeats every no-change talking point and then explains: “CRT argues that racism requires sweeping changes, but liberalism has no mechanism for such change.” They do hold out hope for fantastic change (E.g., the Green Deal). They are pessimistic about liberal change, not revolutionary change.
Of course, the new style revolution is the cultural revolution, so people don’t recognize it. This is the message of Horkheimer’s Traditional and Critical Theory. There are plenty of links from Critical Theory to CRT (which is named after it). Crenshaw is plenty clear about this. Crits hate “incrementalism,” claim pessimism, act extremely optimistic, and have every reason to be. Revolutionaries are always 100% pessimistic about “change,” all except for the utopia they will soon bring us.
“Pessimism” is a necessary strategy for revolution; heighten the contradiction! And talk of liberal, true-progressive change is Kryptonite for revolutionary thinking.
As someone who predates you (by a lot), with all of that time spent in America, I wanted to share a thought about your sense of nostalgia for that old friend who's taken a wrong turn. Consider that you may not have enough nostalgia under your belt yet.
The more past I've accumulated, the more perspective I've gotten on the nostalgias of our very limited lives. Just to take one decade, I've had nostalgia for the 1960s, but know that there are multiple '60s to have fond memories of: the revolutionary one, which was so very optimistic, and so easily confused with simplistic idealism; the comfortable '60s, having family and cousins celebrating all occasions, and a suburban neighborhood with friends whose houses I can still remember the locations of exactly; the '60s of JFK and Jackie. Those are the things Ronald Reagan's Morning in America was nostalgic for, which proved very successful for him.
America was a wonderful place in the '60s, but it was also pretty terrible, as today's progressives insistently beat us up with. All of those good memories evolved into less hopeful realities. That's how it is. My parents in the '60s were nostalgic for the '40s and '50s. The cultural critic Raymond Williams has a wonderful book, The Country and the City, which proposes an ever-moving "escalator" in literary works about the country and the pastoral fantasy that traces that kind of nostalgia back to the Twelfth Century, and stops there. But, he writes, it continues right back to Eden.
You're right that there have been significant changes in America (and the world) in the 21st Century, and the woman on the subway is only one manifestation of those regrettable movements. The list of people with bad attitudes is long. But it was also long in the '60s, '50s, '40s, '30s, and the decades and centuries before.
Your concern seems much closer to the one Yuval Levin lays out in his new book, that the Constitution is not failing us, but we are failing the Constitution. We don't need to change the Constitution, we need to change ourselves. The fundamental structure of this nation remains right, and in fact was designed exactly with our human failures in mind.
A lot of us do need to change ourselves, but there are a lot of selves in this nation, not all of whom live in a city or on the East Coast. And not all of them have adopted vulgarity as a second language, or have given up a sense of pride in America. I suspect there is a lot of perspective you might be missing. You mention, for example, a change when you were here in 2007 (which you call "Back then. . .") that ". . . the country’s problems seemed to make up neither its essence nor its inevitable future." That's been true on a much longer time frame -- I'd say since the nation's start -- than you're giving it credit for. Our nation was built, not for quick change, but for stable change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. All of those changes take generations, not years or even decades. Our obsession with our own moment makes us want better faster than it takes to correct a generational error.
That's fair! And just as Orwell (in his wonderful essay on Gandhi) said that one should beware of saints in politics, so too one should probably beware writers who are nostalgic. But I'll just say in my defense that I don't feel a similar nostalgia for the Germany of the 1990s, in which I grew up. I do think that America is at a particular low point right now in a way that goes beyond nostalgia - but of course I know that things can always get worse, and that we might end up being nostalgic for the 2020s at some point!
Well said, David. Cultural progress or evolution is like sailing a ship in strong wind - there is no straight course, zigzag is the only way. I have been hugely impressed by the resiliency of American Democracy, despite the strong winds of recent decades. Anyone can single out a special period of time in history as "the golden age" and became nostagic about it. That's a disease, not a cure. There is no justification to think that at any significant time scale somehow our ancestors had it easier than we do. Overall, human life span has at least double in just the last 100 years. We enjoy a quality of life that our ancestors never dreamed of. The political and social elite of America got carried away by the peace dividends after winning the cold war and inflicted huge damages on itself (e.g., Iraq and Afghan Wars, DEI, etc.) But indications are that a large number of people realized that and the cultural tides are turning. We still have a solid supreme court (sorry, I am not a 'progressive' by popular standard). We may be a election or two away from righting our ship and enjoy smooth sailing again :)
I love your perspective and focus on self-deprecating satire — its absence is a sure-fire tell. We had a primetime NBC news show, "That Was the Week that Was," including Tom Lehrer. (1965 Music links at the end.)
But let me provide a longer perspective on your experience; it may give some hope as well as clarify the danger. In May 1960, I watched on TV as the orderly, well-dressed demonstrators were dragged and washed down the steps of the S.F. courthouse with fire hoses. I was in 7th grade and decided I would attend UC Berkeley to join the demonstrators.
I missed the well-behaved and effective Free Speech movement by one year, and to my disappointment, it had been replaced by the filthy speech movement by the time I arrived. Whenever real progressives are successful, the extreme left shows up to grab power and wreck things. Vietnam protests followed the same pattern. MLK’s Civil Rights Movement was attacked by Malcolm X (Nov 10, ‘63) two months after MLK’s March on Washington. Nov. 10th was the “all revolutions are bloody” speech that called the Civil Rights leaders Uncle Tom’s and launched the (not yet named) Black Power Movement.
Then came a point that looked as hopeless as today. (Although, as you'll see, there's an unseen reason that today we may be in much more danger.)
By 1972, the Democrats had lost 20 million (40%) compared to 1964, and Trump’s base had been formed—all because of left extremism. I’d backed the Panthers, but that loss in ‘72 really woke me up. I figured my entire generation of lefties needed to die out (politically). Finally, when Obama arrived, I saw the college students supporting him and thought, “Fantastic, the good left is back, and they’re much smarter and more fun than we were.”
But before Obama was elected, I heard an old radical lefty, who’d learned nothing, ranting about what a reactionary, capitalist stooge Obama was. I looked online, and there they were. I knew they would wreck things again as they tried to grab power.
The radical left tradition is tenacious and will not die out until the moderates stop falling for their we’re-so-righteous-and-woke BS. The trouble is the Black Power infiltration that started in 1968, brought in Derrick Bell, morphed into CRT, and is now a $4 billion DEI industry that is strongest in elite private schools. Google Scholar counts 50,000 CRT papers published in 2003. Black Power duped most Democrats in the ‘60s, but it was light-years away from owning a Supreme Court justice.
Being a math nerd, I estimated the BP-CRT growth rate, and it's been quite steady for 60 years, with a doubling every 4 years. This is no short-term fad. But I think we still have a chance.
P.S.
Country Joe’s Fixin’ to Die Rag, Anti-war Anthem (We elected his mom city manager)
Hi Steven. My favorite Tom Lehrer songs are Vatican Rag and National Brotherhood Week. The term genius is thrown around too much but Lehrer fits the bill. We need smart people who use humor and art to starkly delineate the normalization of idiocy.
I agree, I'd put those two above the two I linked. Also agree on genius and what we need. Lehrer was/is? also a rather brilliant mathematician. I think he's still at UC Santa Cruz. I think he gave up the satire because he thought it didn't convince people (I'm sure that's over simplified) but I think he may have overlooked that millions of us his humor sustained for so long.
Love that this comment section has turned into a Tom Lehrer appreciation session! You also need to give "Wernher von Braun" some love though: Somehow I think our attitude / should be one of gratitute / like the widows and cripples in Old London Town / who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun."
And whenever I think of a VP who's being sidelined, I am reminded of Whatever Became of Hubert?: "Second fiddle's a hard part, I know / When they don't even give you a bow."
Now. What to do? I live in the world of South Park (Colorado). Colorado had the most bipartisan regulation passed last year, although it must also be acknowledged that it is primarily blue. It also has one of the highest ratios of independent voters, although many vote for Democrat leaders, they do not vote for all Democrat policy. Preventative self censorship definitely happens, but I believe, to a different degree. What is the difference? My belief is, acknowledging no research on this, that many people don't wear their partisan badges as the first symbol of their identity. It is still "I'm outdoorsy", "I'm a skier", I flyfish", or "I'm from Boulder" (I know, I know ... getting close to the line).
My question is -
where are the seeds of new hope? I find it in my Employee Ownership world - one where partisanship tries to sneak in, but people in this ecosystem tend to know that it is exactly partisanship that risks harming a close to perfect bipartisan idea.
Yes, I think the decline of other identities has made it much easier for people to focus on their political ones--as, more broadly, has a decline of genuine community (often replaced with constant invocations of various artificial "communities" of one type or another in political rhetoric.)
> They insisted—without hesitation or qualification—that there isn’t a single person in public life they admire.
However, I wonder if the people saying it really believe it. It's always dubious to doubt someone's stated beliefs, but that example makes me think of the example you like to give of affluent people at conferences saying monogamy and no children until marriage are outdated ideas, but who then in their own lives still follow the ideals they say are outdated.
My experience with people saying "there isn't a single person in public life I admire" is the same sort of thing. It's important to be seen as a true believer in the fallen state of America, even if in private you might feel differently.
I also agree with you on the transformation of the left and the mainstream being especially dismaying. But my favorite quality of America is the deep-seated belief that no one is inherently better than anyone else. The rage from the right toward "elites" I think comes largely from what the right perceives as a violation of this value--they feel condescended to, as if they aren't the equals of people who went to college and live in the cities. The left's fixation on equity is coming from a similar place, I think, even if they're going about it in a way I don't like. If I'm right, then a lot of the current tension in the country is coming from one of the best core American values.
> A country’s mood can fluctuate from decade to decade. Vibe shifts happen on the regular.
This is spot on. Jonathan Haidt (at least I think it was Haidt...) traces the first signs of the vibe shift of the Great Awokening happening around 2013 or 2014. That also checks out with the way it felt to me living through it. Two years later Trump entered the scene with his deranging effect on the left. Three years later, covid and lockdown. Those are all big, outlier events that made this an unusual decade.
I'm still optimistic that, underneath this new callus of pessimism, American values are alive and well.
Yes, I do think that many people are keen for a reason, perhaps even merely for an excuse, to shed what you nicely call their callus of pessimism. But of course they're also always tempted by the sugar high of indulging their hatred for the other side. We'll see how these two forces shape up against each other...
In 2000 self-identified critical race theorists re-launched "micro-aggressions." By 2009, they were written up on Psychology Today. By 2014 the Crits had launched an online campaign and were in the UC Office of the President making CRT presentations on micro-aggs. In 2015, UC sent a list of about 60 to its campuses with about half a million students. Other big school copied that list. And that year there was a micro-agg awakening on many campuses. This is all part of a much longer-term movement, that we all need to become aware of.
I have thought about this fine essay since it was first published. Yascha’s belief in a politician is endearingly naive. Only rarely does one rise to the level of a Lincoln. Further, it is typically the circumstances that make the leader as much as he or she shapes the world.
The sad reality is that those truly worthy of admiration are the ones we stone, burn, hang, torture, and jail. They are rarely popular. Yes, we had the luxury of admiring Nelson Mandela, but we did it from afar and without risk to ourselves. My heroes were Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Armando Valladares, and Martin Luther King, among others. They took risks. I didn’t.
What Yascha seems to miss is not the overt corruption that he correctly cites, but the growing ranks of forgotten people for whom the slogan « Make America Great Again » is as hopeful as Obama’s « Hope and Change. » John Edwards recognized this with his « Two Americas, » even if he proved to be an imperfect messenger.
The reality has been there for everyone to see. A lack of courage by the leadership class ceded the message to Donald Trump. Race is important, but inflation harms the black truck driver and nurse as much as the white ones. Barbers, hairdressers, gardeners, service workers, and so many more are suffering. They are not being heard. There is no compassion for their plights, which are a matter of class and not of race. The racial obsessions of the ruling class silences those who should speak and act. It will take courage and the courageous will be vilified. I believe that Yascha is showing courage.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Guy! I did not really mean to put Obama on a pedestal, though I can see how the essay would read that way. What I miss is less him (though I certainly prefer him to the current set of options) than the optimism and self-confidence he inspired at the time.
Yascha, while I share your admiration for Obama the candidate, that comes with two caveats: 1) His bailout that benefited the bankers while millions lost their homes, and 2) His winning invocation of "No Black America, no White America" that now appears to have been (in the era of "Black Lives," recast as merely "aspirational") a duplicitous bait-and-switch. Taken together (along with Hillary's "Nurse Ratched" persona), that's how we (unfortunately) ended up with the embitterment of Obama/Trump voters.
BtW, while I understand your nostalgia, the seeds of the "woke" predicament (and its attendant pessimism) had been germinating for decades. When I was an undergraduate (U of Michigan, 1967-71), the likes of Herbert Marcuse (with his denigration of "repressive tolerance") and Angela Davis had their well-established fan clubs among both faculty and the SDS-style activist milieu. By 1992, I was held accountable for destroying Queer Nation in San Francisco by opposing a speech code focused on microaggressions -- aimed at those deemed "privileged" and policed by Orwellian-named "vibes-watchers." The Oppression Olympics was already in full swing.
What happened seems to have been that this attitude began to leach out of activist and academic circles (where an army of acolytes had already been trained) and into governmental and corporate bureaucracies (where those acolytes found employment as functionaries or de facto apparatchiks). That's when a broader spectrum of people became impacted and took notice (especially after Covid) -- and thus (perhaps) when the process might have begun to reverse.
The question now is whether we can pull out of this without being whip-sawed into travesties like Project 2025. Kamala has a very delicate needle to thread.
Yascha, I greatly respect your writings and what you say. Much of this article has some truth, but there is another side of this story, which you don't address.
To write a column like this - confining pretty well all that is wrong with America is laid at the feet of Trump and the Republicans, without even touching on the effect on the politics of America by the Progressive wrecking ball, (now making itself felt in all our western institutions,) that you call the "identity synthesis" and what most of us now call ..."those Woke," seems a biased omission by yourself.
I have nowhere near the brain power that you possess but it is difficult to understand how you failed to address the effect of the Woke ideology clearly expounded in their Critical Theories, and the dogma of DEI, gender issues, racial issues and most of all, the divisive Progressive ideology that embraces identity politics, and the harmful and detrimental effect that this clearly has had on America and western culture as a whole. "When America sneezes the rest of the western world, nay the World, catches a cold."
Most of us with open minds and in favour of free speech, accept that we are not going to persuade those on the other side of the political divide to change their minds, nor their political position, but omitting even a reference to the damage that Wokeness has wrought on western society, seems to be your Nelsonian blind spot.
Thanks! I think the essay contains plenty of implicit criticisms of that ideology, and as you know, I've made those criticisms more explicitly at length in my last book! But this was a much more essayistic piece of writing, so it didn't feel stylistically appropriate to take the ideology apart in detail in this context.
I share a lot with Yascha. I am a recent immigrant. I am an academic. I am Jewish. I started coming to the US regularly around 2007 as well. But the difference is that I was born in the country that defeated Germany in World War 2, only to take over all totalitarian mantle of its enemy - the USSR. I escaped as a teenager, but I remember the stifling atmosphere or corrupt conformity, self-censorship, deep disillusionment, and bitter cynicism as the socialist utopia was crumbling around my generation. And now I recognize the same features in the American culture today. The progressive left has adopted the ethos of the Soviet officialdom but with the fervor of true believers. Niall Ferguson had an essay comparing the US today with the USSR of 1990. I scoffed when I read the title. Now I think he is right.
A very disturbing column, that captures an element of contemporary reality. But I wonder if you exaggerate? As an American provincial, I'd say that New York City has long been the focal center of American cynicism, while the social culture of elite universities has become a grotesque outlier.
I found “Luxury Beliefs” a great way to start. It was big, intriguing, and deserved more than a news cycle. So, I put in a few hours of work and found a solution to your status-seeking paradox, which also puts status (a crucial factor) back into the definition. The result suggests re-focussing from the beliefs of single individuals to shared beliefs. I’m hoping you can take a look back at my comment on LBs. —Steve
I know that I am in the minority on this opinion, but I believe that America changed when its pastime went from the subtle sport of baseball to the gladiatorial sport of American football. Baseball does have its violence, the hard slide and the brushback pitch, but the intent is not to injure at least permanently the opponent. Further with baseball when there appears to be nothing happening, there is a lot happening. With football there are long interludes when nothing is happening and you can zone out.
(BTW: My favorite sport is soccer football for which I have been a referee for twenty-five years.)
Yes. As a former fan—former because the last time I went to a game, everything about the experience, the organ fanfares, the instant replay, the “wave,” made it almost impossible to pay attention to what was actually happening on the field—I think you have a point. The last time I enjoyed a game was decades ago at Fenway Park in Boston; a friend who worked for a downtown law firm had been given a couple of the tickets the firm used to treat visiting clients. Close in on the third base line, very near home plate. Watching that game, I had a similar thought, that baseball was a form of meditation, and that if you didn’t watch carefully all the time, if you got distracted because the pitcher shook off the catcher too often, the batter stepped out of the box one too many times, if you didn’t notice the way the fielders shifted position, then when the coiled action sprang, you might miss it. One way I have marked the changes in this society also involves sports. When I was a kid, the sports cliché, the maxim we were all taught, was “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” The sports maxim that I saw take off in the Reagan eighties was “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Wikipedia says that phrase dates to a football coach of the fifties; I associate it with Vince Lombardi. The attitude is hardly limited to American football. Its implications for society, economics, politics and personal relations are profound.
I appreciate your comments about 30 Rock, a show I still love. My wife, son, and I have been rewatching it lately, and it seems like a time capsule from a different time. Still irreverent and hilarious--amazed it got made and stayed on as long as it dide.
I agree, more or less, on the state of TV comedy, but with one important exception: Hacks.
Have you seen it? It's hilarious because it contrasts the sensibilities of two different women comics: a 70-something, Joan Rivers-type comedian and Gen Z comedy writer. The show makes equal fun of both women but also respects some of their views. The older comedian has to confront the new sensibilities of a more censorious generation while the younger comedy writer comes to appreciate the more free-wheeling comedy of an older generation. I think you'd like it.
Perhaps you have it backwards. When you speak of "Trump’s enormously corrupting influence on American society..." Do you mean his ardent undoing of repressive regulations, or his tax reductions that actually increased revenues? (They also, on a percentage basis were far more helpful to lower and middle-income taxpayers than to "the rich." Of course on a dollar basis a much smaller percent yields a much larger dollar reduction to the rich.) Do you mean his recognition of China's threatening and damaging behavior so aptly discussed with Anne Applebaum yet invisible to so many others? Or his strengthening of NATO by impolitely reminding Europeans they needed to fulfill their responsibilities? Or by cutting through the red tape and paralysis of FDA processes to provide the world with a timely COVID vaccine so valuable that others made mandatory in spite of approval only for voluntary use? Or was it his backing out of the Paris accords that did little to reach unachievable goals at a high cost to Americans? Or his impolite realization that shutting down American energy production does nothing to curb American or international demand, only impoverishes American workers, consumers and investors? Or his backing out of the Iranian deal that enriched Iran enabling their terrorist initiatives and their ability to proceed with nuclear weapons development? Or his closing our southern border to those who crossed it illegally and without vetting? Or are you just repelled by his personality? Do you speak so fondly of Obama because of his long and close relationship with his spiritual guide who preached, "God Damn America?" or because he started the rumors of his birthplace by applying for entry to college as a foreign student? (How could he do that using a SS record with Hawaiian birth?) Or because he exceeded all prior presidents in the use of executive orders to usurp congressional powers (as measured by Federal Register pages)" In your longing for the old America, try longing for the time politicians did not demean those who vote for the opposition, accusing them of, "clinging to their guns and bibles" or calling them "deploribles" or who collect billions of dollars for their private foundations or just for being the Big Guys son. If you think of these things, you may even become a deplorable and perhaps hope someone can help to Make America Great Again, even if it requires breaking a few eggs.
You write, about Germany in the 1980s and 1990s: "in a country still marked, in those later postwar years, by the extreme levels of homogeneity forged through the genocides and expulsions of the 20th century"
This is nonsense.
Germany was more homogeneous pre-Hitler than when you lived there, when the population of recent immigrants from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Morocco, later Russia etc was already higher than any noticeable minority population in 1930 (not counting the Frisians and the Sorbs here, as they are still among us and at any rate would have been read as German by a young immigrant like you). The Jewish population in Germany was only about 300 000 in 1930. They were German speaking, with Germanic first names, highly assimilated and intermarrying in droves (except for recent "Ostjuden" arrivals from Eastern Europe who clustered in Berlin). Sinti were also German speaking and a tiny part of the population. It was not Germany, it was Poland, Ukraine, Czechia, the Baltics, Hungary/Romania that got homogenized by the genocides and expulsions. All of these countries used to be multicultural, with very high percentages of linguistically and culturally diverse people, most notably and numerously Yiddish-speaking Jews and ethnic Germans. It is Eastern Europe that changed its character from multicultural to homogenous nation states via the 20th century wars,, not Germany proper which had already been largely homogenized before that.
Post war, and especially post 1990, we have a complete historical reversal: Germany is now massively multicultural, with people from recent immigrant stock now being almost half of all children of elementary school age in West Germany, while all the countries ravaged by the Nazis are largely homogeneous nation states whose remaining minorities (like Roma from Kosovo or Bulgaria) also tend to immigrate to Germany.
Perhaps you have it backwards. When you speak of "Trump’s enormously corrupting influence on American society..." Do you mean his ardent undoing of repressive regulations, or his tax reductions that actually increased revenues? (They also, on a percentage basis were far more helpful to lower and middle-income taxpayers than to "the rich." Of course on a dollar basis a much smaller percent yields a much larger dollar reduction to the rich.) Do you mean his recognition of China's threatening and damaging behavior so aptly discussed with Anne Applebaum yet invisible to so many others? Or his strengthening of NATO by impolitely reminding Europeans they needed to fulfill their responsibilities? Or do you decry cutting through the red tape and paralysis of FDA processes to provide the world with a timely COVID vaccine so valuable that others made it mandatory in spite of approval only for voluntary use? Or was it his backing out of the Paris accords that did little to reach unachievable goals at a high cost to Americans? Or his impolite realization that shutting down American energy production does nothing to curb American or international demand, only impoverishes American workers, consumers and investors? Or his backing out of the Iranian deal that enriched Iran enabling their terrorist initiatives and their ability to proceed with nuclear weapons development? Or his closing our southern border to those who crossed it illegally and without vetting? Or are you just repelled by his personality? Do you speak so fondly of Obama because of his long and close relationship with his spiritual guide who preached, "God Damn America?" or because he started the rumors of his birthplace by applying for entry to college as a foreign student? (How could he do that using a SS record with Hawaiian birth?) Or because he exceeded all prior presidents in the use of executive orders to usurp congressional powers (as measured by Federal Register pages)" In your longing for the old America, try longing for the time politicians did not demean those who vote for the opposition, accusing them of, "clinging to their guns and bibles" or calling them "deploribles" or who collect billions of dollars for their private foundations or just for being the Big Guys son. If you think of these things, you may even become a deplorable and perhaps hope someone can help to Make America Great Again, even if it requires breaking a few eggs.
I largely agree about Trump, but not about the Iran deal. This was Trumps biggest mistake. Iran had abided by the regulations (as had Iraq before Bush attacked it) and the deal made Israel more, not less secure. He shouldn't have listened to Netanyahu, whose judgement is not necessarily sound, as can be seen, once more, by the killing of Haniya which again makes Israel less, not more secure on net balance, and by his aiding and abetting the settlers in Judaea/Samaria to a degree that left the southern border with too little protection.
Yascha Mounk: "... Trump replaced Obama’s optimism and faith in America with a hostility to the country’s political traditions and an apocalyptic vision of its present condition....The attempt to empathize with those who hold different political views, once recognized as a key civic virtue, is now condemned as a moral vice."
Here's an example of Obama's optimism and empathy toward half the country:
"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them"
That was followed by his divisive and racially exploitive rhetoric after events in Ferguson, Missouri-- which set race relations back a couple of decades (seriously, look at the polls). And, of course, we also have Hillary Clinton denouncing 70 million Americans as "deplorables." Optimism and empathy, indeed!
Stop and consider this for a moment: the mounting hostility and division is a concomitant of the increasingly expansive government that you (Yascha) are so fond of. Expansive govt. works great when you're Iceland or Finland and everybody is on the same page. As a society becomes more diverse, the question of who controls the govt. becomes ever more contentious. The bigger and more intrusive the govt. is, the more bitter and divisive the contest becomes. If govt. isn't such a leviathan and so intimately involved with every detail of our lives -- what we're allowed to say, what kind of showerheads we can have, etc. -- there is little motivation for the rancorous opposition and attempts to crush the other side.
The full Obama quote shows he was actually being very sympathetic to those he appeared to be criticizing. He was saying when people get treated badly enough for long enough, the can adopt some unhelpful ideas. Here's the quote:
"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
"Because they're downtrodden, they're gun-toting racists and religious fanatics who hate people that aren't like them..." doesn't sound sympathetic to me at all. It sounds patronizing and supercilious.
You hear what you want to hear, but he did not say what you quote.
No, he said it. And it was derogatory, even if delivered in an "I care" manner. "Who can blame those simpletons for clinging to archaic, worn-out notions such as God, a shared culture, and the rights of self-determination and personal liberty. It's hard out there for a pimp."
Condescending armchair psychology - the Democrats' forte'.
My take on this Steven is that Obama’s « bitter clingers. » Romney’s « 47%, » and Clinton’s « déplorables » are the same people. I think that Romney and Obama were typically patronizing while Clinton’s dismissing so many people as belonging in a « basket » is the commonplace contempt that the ruling class has for the working class.
I like your across-the-board approach, but I see it as caught in a similar trap to the one you're seeing but misunderstanding. My view is that except for some sociopaths most people are trying to be good and fair, and get blinded by ideologies and lack of information. Obama for example was clearly struggling to explain to his SF audience why the Republicans his audience hated should be regarded with a lot of sympathy for their plight.
I think he failed to understand their views of guns and religion and consequently trivialized them which was condescending. But seeing him as "ruling class" is just an old fashioned kind of identity politics.
I apply the same thinking to you. I disagree and think what you said was condescending. But I don't blame you. I blame the ideology that's affecting you -- and I don't think that's condescending because I know that's happened to me many times (and probably still is in ways I don't see). In fact I think those who are good hearted have a particular weakness for a range of damaging ideologies. And being brilliant has proven to be very little protection. We need to all cut each other some slack in the face of the virulent ideologies that so often control us.
Hi Steven. I have tried to find a better word than ruling class, but know of none. I am trying to see towards whom I am being condescending. Neither do I know what ideology I espouse. I do have a strong interest in the plight of the working class and growing inequality. Towards that end I have read Anne Case and Angus Deaton, along with Oren Cass, Nicholas Eberstadt, Thomas Piketty, and Melissa Kearney, among others. My views and reading are heterodox. I belong to no political party.
To be clear. Are you saying that I am being condescending to some of the wealthiest and most powerful Ivy graduates? Those who are never stuck in traffic? I guess that I should be honored to be considered in their company.
Perhaps I should use the word oligarchy. I am a big Schlesinger fan and of The Vital Center « The technical necessity for organization, as Robert Michel showed long ago, sets in motion an inevitable tendency toward oligarchy. The leadership after a time is bound to have separate interests from the rank-and-file. »
Rather than an ideology, I have a personal philosophy that, like Franklin, I struggle to abide by.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Hi Guy, Sorry for upsetting you; that truly was not my intent. My feeling was, and I may be wrong here, that you felt you were morally better than the three you label as of the same type (ruling class or whatever). Regardless of incomes I think it is possible to feel morally superior. As to ideology, I think we all have one, and they are all different, heterodox. So that involved no judgement about you.
A peculiarity of my ideology is that I don't think any of us have much control over who we are, although it's important to try to do better. If I would not have made Obama's mistake, I would just count myself lucky, nothing more. I understand, perhaps not as well as you, that a social/economic class or ascriptive identity can cause people to have immoral views. I try to separate that from the elusive idea of the person's true self.
I think we catch ideologies much like we catch the flu. And I think I'm lucky, not better, if I didn't catch the flu. I admit that's a difficult (perhaps impossible) concept to pin down. But I think we are better off trying to make that distinction, so I try to spread that bit of my ideology. I think this is the path to depolarizing politics. That's all I was really trying to do. I can see I need a lot of improvement in doing that.
'The bigger and more intrusive the govt. is, the more bitter and divisive the contest becomes." Really? The government is more intrusive now than in 1960? Maybe that depends on who you are. Back then the government regularly enslaved* millions of young men (mostly white), and could send them out to be killed by the thousands. Did you forget about that while worrying over shower heads? (Let me know if you can't change your shower head.)
* The draft (conscription) is considered an exemption to the 13th Amendment, not because it isn't slavery but because it's "supreme and noble duty" of citizens," or because Article 1, Section 8, gives Congress the right to raise an army. In any case, there is no governmental intrusion on law-abiding citizens that's more intrusive.
And gay people couldn't legally have sex. And white people couldn't marry someone of the wrong color -- you can't top that for intrusiveness. And Black people, could not buy the house I lived in at any price, and ... That was when the country was quite unified, not long after WWII when it was 98% unified and the government was far and away more intrusive than in 1960.
But now, we are "bitter and divisive and rancorous" because ... showerheads? I agree entirely that the environmentalists like to meddle annoyingly. And I find all the new National Park regulations annoying, and hiding trans indoctrination from parents is the worst. But somehow, your long-term correlation is completely backward. When the government was rationing the basics, and you were not allowed to buy a car, and a few million were drafted (enslaved) how was it that Uncle Sam was the most popular he has ever been?
The 1960s, when the draft was meaningful (sending people to their deaths), abortion was illegal, and you couldn't marry people of a different race, were quite divided and rancorous, weren't they?
Much of this intrusion was abandoned through the 1980s. The number of pages in the federal register dropped between 1980 and 1990, and government spending as a percent of GDP actually declined between 1980 and 2000.
But since then, there has been a resurgence of intrusive govt -- much revolving around identity politics: employment and contracts based on the racial and ethnic group you're born into; speech codes, and so on. The role of govt. in everyday life has expanded, with the Federal Register tripling in size since 1990. All of that has been accompanied with an increase in political and ethnic diversity.
A divided society combined with a govt. that controls a lot of stuff is a recipe for social toxicity.
Right. But so is a divided society combined with a Lack of gov. controls, or combined with better computers, or a falling birth rate. And the reason is: A divided society is a recipe for social toxicity. Period.
Gov controls, pages in register, gov spending just do not correlate. Check it out! They were all very low when social toxicity was max, in 1860. Two were the highest ever when social toxicity was lowest 1945. Computers are so much better and ... social toxicity is up. So the cause is good computers?? That's a two point correlation. As Yasha almost named this series, There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
But Jan 6th rightist are deplorable, as are Hamas supporters and similar extremist. Unfortunately we seem to have millions of them in this country.
That’s why our Constitution was designed the way it was….something lost on those who want to ignore/destroy it (most haven’t read it)..
This essay is great. I get the sense that from the perspective of the far left, which I assume many of those City College students would fall into, has a strong aversion to recognizing progress, and along with it the people who have helped bring progress. I have noticed it time and time again - progressives ardently deny actual progress. I think it's a way to resolve cognitive dissonance - if historical progress is recognized, it sort of undermines the progressive sense that America is structurally unjust and oppressive. I have had progressives tell me that policing has not changed since the 1960s. When everything needs to be burned down, the actual progress happening within our existing systems is an inconvenient concept. But I must admit, for myself, I vacillate between optimism and wanting to buy some land and stock it with freeze dried food and weapons. I also understand the deep mistrust of our current political class.
Your observation is exactly right, but here's a different interpretation of what you're seeing. Those who call themselves "progressives" today have stolen that term to cloak their true beliefs. Real progressives follow the Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, MLK, Obama line. They are the American left.
Today's "progressives" are extreme left and follow the international/ anarchist/ communist/ socialist/ DSA/ Sanders tradition. They are revolutionaries, but hard to recognize now because they've given up violence for subversion. Revolutionaries always deny progress, it undermines the need for revolution. This is why CRT, as formulated by Derrick Bell, is what Yascha calls "proud pessimists." That term is correct, but a more accurate one is "strategic pessimists." They know what they're doing.
Thank you!
And yes, a really strange part of the new progressive dispensation is a deep mistrust towards recognizing any form of moral or political progress. I wrote about that in both The Great Experiment and (more briefly) The Identity Trap. It's especially strange because it's completely unrealistic to hope for any form of effective movement for social change without holding out the hope to people that things could actually... improve.
Perhaps not so strange. Consider a simple explanation. The new “progressives” are part of the far-left tradition: Robespierre, Marx, Debs, early Bernie Sanders, DSA. They have just stopped saying “revolution.” Instead, they say, “Progress is impossible; we seek utopia.” I’ve seen this for 50 years—the more pessimistic my radical friend sounds, the more unrealistically optimistic they actually are.
Gloria Ladson-Billings, godmother of CRT in education, is the perfect example. She repeats every no-change talking point and then explains: “CRT argues that racism requires sweeping changes, but liberalism has no mechanism for such change.” They do hold out hope for fantastic change (E.g., the Green Deal). They are pessimistic about liberal change, not revolutionary change.
Of course, the new style revolution is the cultural revolution, so people don’t recognize it. This is the message of Horkheimer’s Traditional and Critical Theory. There are plenty of links from Critical Theory to CRT (which is named after it). Crenshaw is plenty clear about this. Crits hate “incrementalism,” claim pessimism, act extremely optimistic, and have every reason to be. Revolutionaries are always 100% pessimistic about “change,” all except for the utopia they will soon bring us.
“Pessimism” is a necessary strategy for revolution; heighten the contradiction! And talk of liberal, true-progressive change is Kryptonite for revolutionary thinking.
As someone who predates you (by a lot), with all of that time spent in America, I wanted to share a thought about your sense of nostalgia for that old friend who's taken a wrong turn. Consider that you may not have enough nostalgia under your belt yet.
The more past I've accumulated, the more perspective I've gotten on the nostalgias of our very limited lives. Just to take one decade, I've had nostalgia for the 1960s, but know that there are multiple '60s to have fond memories of: the revolutionary one, which was so very optimistic, and so easily confused with simplistic idealism; the comfortable '60s, having family and cousins celebrating all occasions, and a suburban neighborhood with friends whose houses I can still remember the locations of exactly; the '60s of JFK and Jackie. Those are the things Ronald Reagan's Morning in America was nostalgic for, which proved very successful for him.
America was a wonderful place in the '60s, but it was also pretty terrible, as today's progressives insistently beat us up with. All of those good memories evolved into less hopeful realities. That's how it is. My parents in the '60s were nostalgic for the '40s and '50s. The cultural critic Raymond Williams has a wonderful book, The Country and the City, which proposes an ever-moving "escalator" in literary works about the country and the pastoral fantasy that traces that kind of nostalgia back to the Twelfth Century, and stops there. But, he writes, it continues right back to Eden.
You're right that there have been significant changes in America (and the world) in the 21st Century, and the woman on the subway is only one manifestation of those regrettable movements. The list of people with bad attitudes is long. But it was also long in the '60s, '50s, '40s, '30s, and the decades and centuries before.
Your concern seems much closer to the one Yuval Levin lays out in his new book, that the Constitution is not failing us, but we are failing the Constitution. We don't need to change the Constitution, we need to change ourselves. The fundamental structure of this nation remains right, and in fact was designed exactly with our human failures in mind.
A lot of us do need to change ourselves, but there are a lot of selves in this nation, not all of whom live in a city or on the East Coast. And not all of them have adopted vulgarity as a second language, or have given up a sense of pride in America. I suspect there is a lot of perspective you might be missing. You mention, for example, a change when you were here in 2007 (which you call "Back then. . .") that ". . . the country’s problems seemed to make up neither its essence nor its inevitable future." That's been true on a much longer time frame -- I'd say since the nation's start -- than you're giving it credit for. Our nation was built, not for quick change, but for stable change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. All of those changes take generations, not years or even decades. Our obsession with our own moment makes us want better faster than it takes to correct a generational error.
That's fair! And just as Orwell (in his wonderful essay on Gandhi) said that one should beware of saints in politics, so too one should probably beware writers who are nostalgic. But I'll just say in my defense that I don't feel a similar nostalgia for the Germany of the 1990s, in which I grew up. I do think that America is at a particular low point right now in a way that goes beyond nostalgia - but of course I know that things can always get worse, and that we might end up being nostalgic for the 2020s at some point!
Well said, David. Cultural progress or evolution is like sailing a ship in strong wind - there is no straight course, zigzag is the only way. I have been hugely impressed by the resiliency of American Democracy, despite the strong winds of recent decades. Anyone can single out a special period of time in history as "the golden age" and became nostagic about it. That's a disease, not a cure. There is no justification to think that at any significant time scale somehow our ancestors had it easier than we do. Overall, human life span has at least double in just the last 100 years. We enjoy a quality of life that our ancestors never dreamed of. The political and social elite of America got carried away by the peace dividends after winning the cold war and inflicted huge damages on itself (e.g., Iraq and Afghan Wars, DEI, etc.) But indications are that a large number of people realized that and the cultural tides are turning. We still have a solid supreme court (sorry, I am not a 'progressive' by popular standard). We may be a election or two away from righting our ship and enjoy smooth sailing again :)
I love your perspective and focus on self-deprecating satire — its absence is a sure-fire tell. We had a primetime NBC news show, "That Was the Week that Was," including Tom Lehrer. (1965 Music links at the end.)
But let me provide a longer perspective on your experience; it may give some hope as well as clarify the danger. In May 1960, I watched on TV as the orderly, well-dressed demonstrators were dragged and washed down the steps of the S.F. courthouse with fire hoses. I was in 7th grade and decided I would attend UC Berkeley to join the demonstrators.
I missed the well-behaved and effective Free Speech movement by one year, and to my disappointment, it had been replaced by the filthy speech movement by the time I arrived. Whenever real progressives are successful, the extreme left shows up to grab power and wreck things. Vietnam protests followed the same pattern. MLK’s Civil Rights Movement was attacked by Malcolm X (Nov 10, ‘63) two months after MLK’s March on Washington. Nov. 10th was the “all revolutions are bloody” speech that called the Civil Rights leaders Uncle Tom’s and launched the (not yet named) Black Power Movement.
Then came a point that looked as hopeless as today. (Although, as you'll see, there's an unseen reason that today we may be in much more danger.)
By 1972, the Democrats had lost 20 million (40%) compared to 1964, and Trump’s base had been formed—all because of left extremism. I’d backed the Panthers, but that loss in ‘72 really woke me up. I figured my entire generation of lefties needed to die out (politically). Finally, when Obama arrived, I saw the college students supporting him and thought, “Fantastic, the good left is back, and they’re much smarter and more fun than we were.”
But before Obama was elected, I heard an old radical lefty, who’d learned nothing, ranting about what a reactionary, capitalist stooge Obama was. I looked online, and there they were. I knew they would wreck things again as they tried to grab power.
The radical left tradition is tenacious and will not die out until the moderates stop falling for their we’re-so-righteous-and-woke BS. The trouble is the Black Power infiltration that started in 1968, brought in Derrick Bell, morphed into CRT, and is now a $4 billion DEI industry that is strongest in elite private schools. Google Scholar counts 50,000 CRT papers published in 2003. Black Power duped most Democrats in the ‘60s, but it was light-years away from owning a Supreme Court justice.
Being a math nerd, I estimated the BP-CRT growth rate, and it's been quite steady for 60 years, with a doubling every 4 years. This is no short-term fad. But I think we still have a chance.
P.S.
Country Joe’s Fixin’ to Die Rag, Anti-war Anthem (We elected his mom city manager)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu9c10xmVCI 1965
Tom Lehrer’s Folksong Army (satirizing the left).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tDZ5lriIIc 1965
And yes, Lehrer was a lefty. Send the Marines was featured on the NBC television show "That Was the Week That Was" in 1965.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc
Hi Steven. My favorite Tom Lehrer songs are Vatican Rag and National Brotherhood Week. The term genius is thrown around too much but Lehrer fits the bill. We need smart people who use humor and art to starkly delineate the normalization of idiocy.
I agree, I'd put those two above the two I linked. Also agree on genius and what we need. Lehrer was/is? also a rather brilliant mathematician. I think he's still at UC Santa Cruz. I think he gave up the satire because he thought it didn't convince people (I'm sure that's over simplified) but I think he may have overlooked that millions of us his humor sustained for so long.
Love that this comment section has turned into a Tom Lehrer appreciation session! You also need to give "Wernher von Braun" some love though: Somehow I think our attitude / should be one of gratitute / like the widows and cripples in Old London Town / who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun."
And whenever I think of a VP who's being sidelined, I am reminded of Whatever Became of Hubert?: "Second fiddle's a hard part, I know / When they don't even give you a bow."
"...and everybody hates the Jews"
Yes. This.
Now. What to do? I live in the world of South Park (Colorado). Colorado had the most bipartisan regulation passed last year, although it must also be acknowledged that it is primarily blue. It also has one of the highest ratios of independent voters, although many vote for Democrat leaders, they do not vote for all Democrat policy. Preventative self censorship definitely happens, but I believe, to a different degree. What is the difference? My belief is, acknowledging no research on this, that many people don't wear their partisan badges as the first symbol of their identity. It is still "I'm outdoorsy", "I'm a skier", I flyfish", or "I'm from Boulder" (I know, I know ... getting close to the line).
My question is -
where are the seeds of new hope? I find it in my Employee Ownership world - one where partisanship tries to sneak in, but people in this ecosystem tend to know that it is exactly partisanship that risks harming a close to perfect bipartisan idea.
Yes, I think the decline of other identities has made it much easier for people to focus on their political ones--as, more broadly, has a decline of genuine community (often replaced with constant invocations of various artificial "communities" of one type or another in political rhetoric.)
Great stuff, as usual. Several thoughts.
This broadly checks out for me as familiar:
> They insisted—without hesitation or qualification—that there isn’t a single person in public life they admire.
However, I wonder if the people saying it really believe it. It's always dubious to doubt someone's stated beliefs, but that example makes me think of the example you like to give of affluent people at conferences saying monogamy and no children until marriage are outdated ideas, but who then in their own lives still follow the ideals they say are outdated.
My experience with people saying "there isn't a single person in public life I admire" is the same sort of thing. It's important to be seen as a true believer in the fallen state of America, even if in private you might feel differently.
I also agree with you on the transformation of the left and the mainstream being especially dismaying. But my favorite quality of America is the deep-seated belief that no one is inherently better than anyone else. The rage from the right toward "elites" I think comes largely from what the right perceives as a violation of this value--they feel condescended to, as if they aren't the equals of people who went to college and live in the cities. The left's fixation on equity is coming from a similar place, I think, even if they're going about it in a way I don't like. If I'm right, then a lot of the current tension in the country is coming from one of the best core American values.
> A country’s mood can fluctuate from decade to decade. Vibe shifts happen on the regular.
This is spot on. Jonathan Haidt (at least I think it was Haidt...) traces the first signs of the vibe shift of the Great Awokening happening around 2013 or 2014. That also checks out with the way it felt to me living through it. Two years later Trump entered the scene with his deranging effect on the left. Three years later, covid and lockdown. Those are all big, outlier events that made this an unusual decade.
I'm still optimistic that, underneath this new callus of pessimism, American values are alive and well.
Yes, I do think that many people are keen for a reason, perhaps even merely for an excuse, to shed what you nicely call their callus of pessimism. But of course they're also always tempted by the sugar high of indulging their hatred for the other side. We'll see how these two forces shape up against each other...
In 2000 self-identified critical race theorists re-launched "micro-aggressions." By 2009, they were written up on Psychology Today. By 2014 the Crits had launched an online campaign and were in the UC Office of the President making CRT presentations on micro-aggs. In 2015, UC sent a list of about 60 to its campuses with about half a million students. Other big school copied that list. And that year there was a micro-agg awakening on many campuses. This is all part of a much longer-term movement, that we all need to become aware of.
I have thought about this fine essay since it was first published. Yascha’s belief in a politician is endearingly naive. Only rarely does one rise to the level of a Lincoln. Further, it is typically the circumstances that make the leader as much as he or she shapes the world.
The sad reality is that those truly worthy of admiration are the ones we stone, burn, hang, torture, and jail. They are rarely popular. Yes, we had the luxury of admiring Nelson Mandela, but we did it from afar and without risk to ourselves. My heroes were Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Armando Valladares, and Martin Luther King, among others. They took risks. I didn’t.
What Yascha seems to miss is not the overt corruption that he correctly cites, but the growing ranks of forgotten people for whom the slogan « Make America Great Again » is as hopeful as Obama’s « Hope and Change. » John Edwards recognized this with his « Two Americas, » even if he proved to be an imperfect messenger.
The reality has been there for everyone to see. A lack of courage by the leadership class ceded the message to Donald Trump. Race is important, but inflation harms the black truck driver and nurse as much as the white ones. Barbers, hairdressers, gardeners, service workers, and so many more are suffering. They are not being heard. There is no compassion for their plights, which are a matter of class and not of race. The racial obsessions of the ruling class silences those who should speak and act. It will take courage and the courageous will be vilified. I believe that Yascha is showing courage.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, Guy! I did not really mean to put Obama on a pedestal, though I can see how the essay would read that way. What I miss is less him (though I certainly prefer him to the current set of options) than the optimism and self-confidence he inspired at the time.
Yascha, while I share your admiration for Obama the candidate, that comes with two caveats: 1) His bailout that benefited the bankers while millions lost their homes, and 2) His winning invocation of "No Black America, no White America" that now appears to have been (in the era of "Black Lives," recast as merely "aspirational") a duplicitous bait-and-switch. Taken together (along with Hillary's "Nurse Ratched" persona), that's how we (unfortunately) ended up with the embitterment of Obama/Trump voters.
BtW, while I understand your nostalgia, the seeds of the "woke" predicament (and its attendant pessimism) had been germinating for decades. When I was an undergraduate (U of Michigan, 1967-71), the likes of Herbert Marcuse (with his denigration of "repressive tolerance") and Angela Davis had their well-established fan clubs among both faculty and the SDS-style activist milieu. By 1992, I was held accountable for destroying Queer Nation in San Francisco by opposing a speech code focused on microaggressions -- aimed at those deemed "privileged" and policed by Orwellian-named "vibes-watchers." The Oppression Olympics was already in full swing.
What happened seems to have been that this attitude began to leach out of activist and academic circles (where an army of acolytes had already been trained) and into governmental and corporate bureaucracies (where those acolytes found employment as functionaries or de facto apparatchiks). That's when a broader spectrum of people became impacted and took notice (especially after Covid) -- and thus (perhaps) when the process might have begun to reverse.
The question now is whether we can pull out of this without being whip-sawed into travesties like Project 2025. Kamala has a very delicate needle to thread.
Yascha, I greatly respect your writings and what you say. Much of this article has some truth, but there is another side of this story, which you don't address.
To write a column like this - confining pretty well all that is wrong with America is laid at the feet of Trump and the Republicans, without even touching on the effect on the politics of America by the Progressive wrecking ball, (now making itself felt in all our western institutions,) that you call the "identity synthesis" and what most of us now call ..."those Woke," seems a biased omission by yourself.
I have nowhere near the brain power that you possess but it is difficult to understand how you failed to address the effect of the Woke ideology clearly expounded in their Critical Theories, and the dogma of DEI, gender issues, racial issues and most of all, the divisive Progressive ideology that embraces identity politics, and the harmful and detrimental effect that this clearly has had on America and western culture as a whole. "When America sneezes the rest of the western world, nay the World, catches a cold."
Most of us with open minds and in favour of free speech, accept that we are not going to persuade those on the other side of the political divide to change their minds, nor their political position, but omitting even a reference to the damage that Wokeness has wrought on western society, seems to be your Nelsonian blind spot.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/mounk2
Here is your interview with Coleman Hughes.
Maybe this will be the subject of a future essay, if you are allowed by your university to approach such a topic without the fear of "cancellation?" 😐
Thanks! I think the essay contains plenty of implicit criticisms of that ideology, and as you know, I've made those criticisms more explicitly at length in my last book! But this was a much more essayistic piece of writing, so it didn't feel stylistically appropriate to take the ideology apart in detail in this context.
I share a lot with Yascha. I am a recent immigrant. I am an academic. I am Jewish. I started coming to the US regularly around 2007 as well. But the difference is that I was born in the country that defeated Germany in World War 2, only to take over all totalitarian mantle of its enemy - the USSR. I escaped as a teenager, but I remember the stifling atmosphere or corrupt conformity, self-censorship, deep disillusionment, and bitter cynicism as the socialist utopia was crumbling around my generation. And now I recognize the same features in the American culture today. The progressive left has adopted the ethos of the Soviet officialdom but with the fervor of true believers. Niall Ferguson had an essay comparing the US today with the USSR of 1990. I scoffed when I read the title. Now I think he is right.
A very disturbing column, that captures an element of contemporary reality. But I wonder if you exaggerate? As an American provincial, I'd say that New York City has long been the focal center of American cynicism, while the social culture of elite universities has become a grotesque outlier.
Dear Yascha,
I found “Luxury Beliefs” a great way to start. It was big, intriguing, and deserved more than a news cycle. So, I put in a few hours of work and found a solution to your status-seeking paradox, which also puts status (a crucial factor) back into the definition. The result suggests re-focussing from the beliefs of single individuals to shared beliefs. I’m hoping you can take a look back at my comment on LBs. —Steve
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/luxury-beliefs-are-real/comment/63295277
I know that I am in the minority on this opinion, but I believe that America changed when its pastime went from the subtle sport of baseball to the gladiatorial sport of American football. Baseball does have its violence, the hard slide and the brushback pitch, but the intent is not to injure at least permanently the opponent. Further with baseball when there appears to be nothing happening, there is a lot happening. With football there are long interludes when nothing is happening and you can zone out.
(BTW: My favorite sport is soccer football for which I have been a referee for twenty-five years.)
Yes. As a former fan—former because the last time I went to a game, everything about the experience, the organ fanfares, the instant replay, the “wave,” made it almost impossible to pay attention to what was actually happening on the field—I think you have a point. The last time I enjoyed a game was decades ago at Fenway Park in Boston; a friend who worked for a downtown law firm had been given a couple of the tickets the firm used to treat visiting clients. Close in on the third base line, very near home plate. Watching that game, I had a similar thought, that baseball was a form of meditation, and that if you didn’t watch carefully all the time, if you got distracted because the pitcher shook off the catcher too often, the batter stepped out of the box one too many times, if you didn’t notice the way the fielders shifted position, then when the coiled action sprang, you might miss it. One way I have marked the changes in this society also involves sports. When I was a kid, the sports cliché, the maxim we were all taught, was “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose; it’s how you play the game.” The sports maxim that I saw take off in the Reagan eighties was “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Wikipedia says that phrase dates to a football coach of the fifties; I associate it with Vince Lombardi. The attitude is hardly limited to American football. Its implications for society, economics, politics and personal relations are profound.
I appreciate your comments about 30 Rock, a show I still love. My wife, son, and I have been rewatching it lately, and it seems like a time capsule from a different time. Still irreverent and hilarious--amazed it got made and stayed on as long as it dide.
I agree, more or less, on the state of TV comedy, but with one important exception: Hacks.
Have you seen it? It's hilarious because it contrasts the sensibilities of two different women comics: a 70-something, Joan Rivers-type comedian and Gen Z comedy writer. The show makes equal fun of both women but also respects some of their views. The older comedian has to confront the new sensibilities of a more censorious generation while the younger comedy writer comes to appreciate the more free-wheeling comedy of an older generation. I think you'd like it.
Perhaps you have it backwards. When you speak of "Trump’s enormously corrupting influence on American society..." Do you mean his ardent undoing of repressive regulations, or his tax reductions that actually increased revenues? (They also, on a percentage basis were far more helpful to lower and middle-income taxpayers than to "the rich." Of course on a dollar basis a much smaller percent yields a much larger dollar reduction to the rich.) Do you mean his recognition of China's threatening and damaging behavior so aptly discussed with Anne Applebaum yet invisible to so many others? Or his strengthening of NATO by impolitely reminding Europeans they needed to fulfill their responsibilities? Or by cutting through the red tape and paralysis of FDA processes to provide the world with a timely COVID vaccine so valuable that others made mandatory in spite of approval only for voluntary use? Or was it his backing out of the Paris accords that did little to reach unachievable goals at a high cost to Americans? Or his impolite realization that shutting down American energy production does nothing to curb American or international demand, only impoverishes American workers, consumers and investors? Or his backing out of the Iranian deal that enriched Iran enabling their terrorist initiatives and their ability to proceed with nuclear weapons development? Or his closing our southern border to those who crossed it illegally and without vetting? Or are you just repelled by his personality? Do you speak so fondly of Obama because of his long and close relationship with his spiritual guide who preached, "God Damn America?" or because he started the rumors of his birthplace by applying for entry to college as a foreign student? (How could he do that using a SS record with Hawaiian birth?) Or because he exceeded all prior presidents in the use of executive orders to usurp congressional powers (as measured by Federal Register pages)" In your longing for the old America, try longing for the time politicians did not demean those who vote for the opposition, accusing them of, "clinging to their guns and bibles" or calling them "deploribles" or who collect billions of dollars for their private foundations or just for being the Big Guys son. If you think of these things, you may even become a deplorable and perhaps hope someone can help to Make America Great Again, even if it requires breaking a few eggs.
You write, about Germany in the 1980s and 1990s: "in a country still marked, in those later postwar years, by the extreme levels of homogeneity forged through the genocides and expulsions of the 20th century"
This is nonsense.
Germany was more homogeneous pre-Hitler than when you lived there, when the population of recent immigrants from Turkey, Italy, Greece, Morocco, later Russia etc was already higher than any noticeable minority population in 1930 (not counting the Frisians and the Sorbs here, as they are still among us and at any rate would have been read as German by a young immigrant like you). The Jewish population in Germany was only about 300 000 in 1930. They were German speaking, with Germanic first names, highly assimilated and intermarrying in droves (except for recent "Ostjuden" arrivals from Eastern Europe who clustered in Berlin). Sinti were also German speaking and a tiny part of the population. It was not Germany, it was Poland, Ukraine, Czechia, the Baltics, Hungary/Romania that got homogenized by the genocides and expulsions. All of these countries used to be multicultural, with very high percentages of linguistically and culturally diverse people, most notably and numerously Yiddish-speaking Jews and ethnic Germans. It is Eastern Europe that changed its character from multicultural to homogenous nation states via the 20th century wars,, not Germany proper which had already been largely homogenized before that.
Post war, and especially post 1990, we have a complete historical reversal: Germany is now massively multicultural, with people from recent immigrant stock now being almost half of all children of elementary school age in West Germany, while all the countries ravaged by the Nazis are largely homogeneous nation states whose remaining minorities (like Roma from Kosovo or Bulgaria) also tend to immigrate to Germany.
Self-correction: By "all the countries ravaged by the Nazis" I meant those to East of Germany where the genocidal killing was done.
Perhaps you have it backwards. When you speak of "Trump’s enormously corrupting influence on American society..." Do you mean his ardent undoing of repressive regulations, or his tax reductions that actually increased revenues? (They also, on a percentage basis were far more helpful to lower and middle-income taxpayers than to "the rich." Of course on a dollar basis a much smaller percent yields a much larger dollar reduction to the rich.) Do you mean his recognition of China's threatening and damaging behavior so aptly discussed with Anne Applebaum yet invisible to so many others? Or his strengthening of NATO by impolitely reminding Europeans they needed to fulfill their responsibilities? Or do you decry cutting through the red tape and paralysis of FDA processes to provide the world with a timely COVID vaccine so valuable that others made it mandatory in spite of approval only for voluntary use? Or was it his backing out of the Paris accords that did little to reach unachievable goals at a high cost to Americans? Or his impolite realization that shutting down American energy production does nothing to curb American or international demand, only impoverishes American workers, consumers and investors? Or his backing out of the Iranian deal that enriched Iran enabling their terrorist initiatives and their ability to proceed with nuclear weapons development? Or his closing our southern border to those who crossed it illegally and without vetting? Or are you just repelled by his personality? Do you speak so fondly of Obama because of his long and close relationship with his spiritual guide who preached, "God Damn America?" or because he started the rumors of his birthplace by applying for entry to college as a foreign student? (How could he do that using a SS record with Hawaiian birth?) Or because he exceeded all prior presidents in the use of executive orders to usurp congressional powers (as measured by Federal Register pages)" In your longing for the old America, try longing for the time politicians did not demean those who vote for the opposition, accusing them of, "clinging to their guns and bibles" or calling them "deploribles" or who collect billions of dollars for their private foundations or just for being the Big Guys son. If you think of these things, you may even become a deplorable and perhaps hope someone can help to Make America Great Again, even if it requires breaking a few eggs.
I largely agree about Trump, but not about the Iran deal. This was Trumps biggest mistake. Iran had abided by the regulations (as had Iraq before Bush attacked it) and the deal made Israel more, not less secure. He shouldn't have listened to Netanyahu, whose judgement is not necessarily sound, as can be seen, once more, by the killing of Haniya which again makes Israel less, not more secure on net balance, and by his aiding and abetting the settlers in Judaea/Samaria to a degree that left the southern border with too little protection.