Part I: America’s Negative Cultural Drift  

Historically Americans think of themselves as strong, optimistic, resilient people, and America as a positive, “can-do” nation. But we no longer live in such hopeful times.  America seems caught in a negative cultural drift.  What happened to hope and optimism?

The sad answer is that we ourselves made the conditions in which they no longer flourish. It didn’t just happen. We make the culture that makes us. We did it to ourselves—with a little nudge here, a shove there, from those among us who most profit from sowing fear and division.

That’s the quick question, and the quick answer. Making more sense of it all, even briefly and in summary form, however, needs some context and discussion. Doing that will make this a little longer than most of my blog posts and will continue in the subsequent four posts in this series.  

Here’s the first part of the story. It’s not such a complicated story to tell, at least in its main outline—it’s just that there are, as it were, a lot of moving parts.

Our Cultural Drift Southward

An Earlier American Era of Optimism and Hope

By M. Maggs, Canada. Downloaded from Pixabay 2018-11-11

The America I grew up in—mid-20th century America—by and large was a hopeful age.  Oh, it had its faults, its inherited failings, its irrational pursuits: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, McCarthyism, segregation. The United States pursued often cruel foreign and economic policies that imposed brutal dictatorships on other countries, especially in Latin America and the Middle East, “to fight Communism”—and just incidentally protect the profits of American corporations. Highways and sprawl ate the hearts out of local communities. One could go on at length.

But for all that, the mid-1900s remained a time of “can-do” and optimism. That optimism helped fuel the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the environmental movement. Its currents ran through and helped energize the “counter-cultural” uprising that characterized the 1960s and early ‘70’s. It found a voice in Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; and a quieter, less revolutionary voice in publicly funded education systems that invested social and economic resources in the nation’s youth.

Not everyone likes those particular events and movements, of course. They were too much for many people. But whatever else you can say about them, they were alive with hope and possibility. And there were many other quieter, less turbulent, aspects of daily life that we’ve lost that expressed that same spirit in less tumultuous ways. I’ll mention some more of those in a moment.

But first, a brief word on the cultural shift or drift that we’re experiencing.  Right or Left, Up or Down, almost everyone feels that America is Not going in a good direction.  Even some of the more upbeat assessments of our situation rely on the hope, summarized in the title of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s popular book, The Upside of Down (2006)— that decline and disintegration might clear the way for something better.  That kind of hope is not the same thing as an optimistic outlook on our future.     

Cultural Drift

If most people think that America is not moving in a good direction now, what exactly does that mean?  Well, you could point to a lot of things: school shootings, increasing inequality and a dwindling and insecure middle class, the country’s deepening and polarizing political divide, ever more rancorous campaigns, drug overdoses…. But for me these things and more can be summed up as cultural drift—meaning cultural change that seems to be heading in a particular direction, apparently without guidance. (We’ll get to that “without guidance” part later, and especially in the final post in this series.)

As an anthropologist, I don’t use the term“culture” lightly.  Without delving too deeply into definitions or analyses of this complex term, I will say that we are, in our most basic natures, cultural beings. That’s what makes us distinctively human; and there is no part or aspect of being human, even our physical selves, that is not affected by, involved in, or in some way expressive of our cultures.

Also, however, it is critical to realize that as conscious beings we can, and do, shape or change the culture that shapes us.  This is a relatively new, often overlooked, yet immensely consequential insight.  It follows from recognizing ourselves as cultural beings—an idea or theory that became widely accepted only in the late twentieth century.

Knowledge is power. It also is responsibility.  Knowing ourselves as cultural beings is so consequential because it means that large—and in many ways the most important—parts of who and what we are lie in the realms of culture which is infinitely variable and substantially within our powers to shape.  And, for some among us, to manipulate.  That is, as cultural beings, we are not primarily determined by some fixed human nature, by instinct, by racial inheritance or other genetic features, by geography, or even by history.  Those things may set limits, but they are broad limits within which we have options.

That insight raises the question about guidance, and responsibility—about who or what sets the course we’re on: Are we, or is someone, directing the negative drift of American culture?  And if so, how truly conscious of what they’re doing are they?

A culture is deeper and more enduring than most of us realize. But a culture also may undergo shifts or rapid transformations that take even most of its own members by surprise or unawares.  The rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s is a textbook instance.  After emerging from it, even those who lived through the Nazi era could hardly believe what had happened to them. Wrapped up in daily life and routines, somehow we don’t remember how things were. We cede our power, and seem to remain effectively blind to changes taking place under our feet and all around us.

The Direction of American Cultural Drift Today

Over the last generation or so, American culture experienced a significant shift that reminds many people of the slow rise, over more than a decade, of Nazism in Germany—so far not to the extreme we saw in Germany, of course, but troubling nonetheless.  It shows up for us now in part as an erosion of that positive “can-do” spirit—a weakening of the general sense of optimism or possibility that I mentioned above. Optimism and hope give way to heightened levels of fear, helplessness, and anger throughout the culture.  Why, asks Madeleine Albright in her new book Fascism,  A Warning,“are we once again talking about fascism?”

As conscious beings we can shape or change the culture that shapes us. That raises the question: Are we, or is someone, directing the current drift of 21st century American culture?

Growing polarization, callousness toward the plights of those who are different, a shocking rise of scapegoating and divisiveness in our public life, all attest to the cultural shift we’re experiencing.  Our American President openly demonizes Latino immigrants and others to the cheers of angry crowds.

And finally, a surprising growing tolerance for blatant lying, deceit, corruption, and authoritarianism on the part of our leaders—especially among those who recently proclaimed themselves “the moral majority”—strikes me as an especially symptomatic and worrying sign of the negative cultural drift we’re caught in.

A healthy society needs to be anchored in truth. The seemingly purposive creation of a new “post-truth” era paves the way for all kinds of mischief.

Many of us who lived through it will be able to relate to this negative cultural drift we’re in on the feeling level. If you grew up after the shift it represents was well under way—let’s say from roughly the last quarter of the twentieth century on—however, and have experienced only the tamped-down more sullen and fearful post-shift America, the reality of the change as an event may seem more abstract.

Even so, it’s amazing how quickly people forget what they have lost.  That’s one of the reasons why events like the rise of Nazi Germany are even possible. Let’s hope we’ll be more conscious this time around.

In our case, if we look, there are plenty of tangible indicators of the direction we’re going, that anyone can relate to.  Here’s a few such indicators from my own life; you can probably think of others from your experience. Such change makes the negative cultural drift we’re caught up in real.

When I was young in the late 1940s and early ‘50s in Denver, Colorado, USA, we used to go out and play pretty much any time, any where.  I and my sisters, all under 10 years old, wandered freely through nearby parks and neighbourhoods.  We went to friends’ houses on our own and found vacant lots to play in.  We walked to school by ourselves or with classmates, often for many blocks.

Back then, all this was taken for granted. Now parents are fearful to let their children out of their sight, and drive them everywhere.  Back then, the idea that someone would go into a school and start shooting children was unthinkable. Now it happens with some regularity.

The threat of abject poverty and homelessness was more remote—it was there, but much less prevalent, and certainly much less visible. We didn’t regularly meet homeless people sleeping on sidewalks or camping in wooded fringe areas or along railroad tracks. Over-dosing and teen suicide were not widespread public health problems. These things would have seemed appalling rather than normal.

Back then in-state tuition for colleges and universities, believe it or not, was almost free. Student debt was largely optional. I was able to finish college with only a little help from my parents, and my post-graduate studies with no outside help and no debt. In part public investment in education responded to the Cold War; but it also expressed American idealism and the idea of American progress—that our children would know more, be able to do more, have better lives than their parents.

The idea that Americans would pay more for prisons than for higher education for their children would have seemed bizarre. (It still does, if you think about it). But now it’s the American reality, has been for some time; and student debt soars.

There were huge problems; but the very acts of seeing, writing about, and even demonstrating against them that characterized that mid-century era expressed the belief that we can fix them.  An overall sense of “We can make things better!” prevailed. That spirit has not totally winked out in the American psyche; but it has become dimmer, patchier, flickering, more uncertain, while the problems we face loom larger.

Too Damn Much Democracy

That mid-twentieth-century hopeful flame of positive can-do energy, burning brighter and more surely than it does now, helped energize an-all-too-brief outbreak of democracy.  Most young people didn’t graduate from college with crippling debt.  Peoples’ concerns about the environment, about the Vietnam war, about the lives of working people, mattered and shaped policy.  The issues got debated in the streets, in the courts, in the halls of Congress.  Legislation and court decisions addressed the public’s concerns—some of them—in ways that affected what happened in our communities, our environments, our jobs, our lives.  It was all too much for the oligarchs of corporate America.

Although it was before my time—and well before the era I’m writing about here, the Social Security Act of 1935 and the many amendments and court challenges that followed laid some of the foundation for the more hopeful, more humane America of the mid-twentieth-century.  Historian Ronald Wright in his A Short History of Progress (pp. 126-127) writes about a “consensus” that emerged after the Second World War “to deal with the roots of violence by creating international institutions and democratically managed forms of capitalism based on Keynesian economics and America’s New Deal.” Although far from perfect, Wright continues, it had some success. “(Remember when we spoke not of a “war on terror” but of a “war on want”?).  Too much success—too damn much democracy—it seems, for some.

Look what that success made possible. It wasn’t all demonstrations, rock-and-roll, and pot.  To name a few: The civil rights movement (1954-1968) finally gave us the Civil Rights Act of 1964 followed by other important acts that targeted discrimination in voting, housing, and education.  Mounting public pressure ended the seemingly endless and destructive Vietnam war. Advances in social and environmental sciences contributed to public awareness of growing environmental problems, and led to the passage of a raft of important environmental legislation spearheaded by the Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, enacted during Republican Richard Nixon’s first term.

For a while, in short, under both Republican and Democrat administrations, Congress passed ground-breaking laws that responded to broad-based public concerns.  Then Congress didn’t answer only or primarily to highly paid lobbyists representing the narrow interests of the very wealthy and the corporations they own (the most powerful of which are transnational and have allegiance only to their own bottom line and not to the well-being of any local community or nation, including the United States). This takes us to the really important question: What Happened?  What happened to push us over the edge of the anti-democratic, socially destructive and dangerous slippery slope we’re now on?

What Happened?

That’s a question we have to grapple with if we want to make a course correction—if we want dial things back and slow or halt the damage, and right what’s been going wrong.  We don’t have to look far for the answer.  In a word, neoliberalism happened.  I’ve written about that in recent posts here,  here,  and here, which include links to other more in-depth writings on the topic.  

The next four instalments of the “America’s Decline” series—will pick it up from here.  They focus on what happened—or more accurately, what was done—to direct us onto the dangerous course we’ve been following.

That means shining the light again on neoliberalism, adding to the earlier posts on that topic.  This time we’ll look more closely at its negative and destructive effects, and at how powerful interests got organized and “engineered” the neoliberal turn.  We’ll see how they poured financial and other resources into legislative lobbying efforts, think-tanks, public media campaigns.  In particular, they targeted educational institutions of higher learning.  It was a deliberate, conscious effort to turn the United States, and other nations as well, in the direction they wanted; and it has been frighteningly and dangerously effective.

Along the way I’ll critique the very common notion that we’re just in a swing of the pendulum, or at a low point in the normal cycle of society’s ups-and-downs. Such ideas make it seem like no one is really responsible for our current ills, and that things will get better on their own.  No, not so. There has been conscious human purpose (however self-serving and uninformed) driving us into the situation we’re in; and it will take conscious purpose-driven action to remedy it.  In the case of mechanisms like pendulums, there is no moral accountability.  In the case of human purpose-driven, socially-engineered change, there is moral accountability.