David Brooks believes he has diagnosed the problem with America: We’re too mean. In an essay in the Atlantic, titled “How America Got Mean,” the right-leaning New York Times columnist bemoans the rise of rudeness in American society. He presents the now-all-too-familiar statistics about depression, sadness, suicide, loneliness, and alienation—charting the worrisome trends in our nation—and cites the usual sources: social media, changing demographics, economic uncertainty, and the decline in participation in community organizations (PTA, bowling leagues, fraternal clubs, etc.). But Brooks believes he has identified another culprit: the lack of moral education.
He writes:
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The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
There once were societal efforts, he points out, to teach virtue as a public value—and that knitted us together. Yet (he continues) after World War II, we as a nation became more focused on such pesky internalities as our feelings and our desire to address individual resentments and worries through the feverish pursuit of personal needs. (The Me Decade! Or is it the Me Decades?) Consequently, Americans are not taught how to “restrain their selfishness,” how to develop “basic social and ethical skills” (such as disagreeing with someone constructively), and how to “find a purpose in life.”
I will leave it to the sociologists to assess the basics of Brooks’ argument. But I was intrigued by his failure to point a finger at a certain roster of politicians and pundits who have encouraged the rude-ification of American discourse. This seems quite the blind spot.
Brooks doesn’t ignore the realm of politics in his piece. He contends that in a “culture devoid of moral education,” Americans “have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.” In this bleak world, he asserts, people have sought to find meaning and belonging through participation in divisive and destructive politics.
Brooks offers a dismissive depiction of political involvement as not much more than joining “partisan tribes in search of belonging.” He writes, “The person practicing the politics of recognition is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself. He’s trying to use politics to fill the hole in his soul. It doesn’t work.” These folks “end up in a lonely mob of isolated belligerents who merely obey the same orthodoxy.”
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This is a rather snobbish view. Many people turn to politics out of necessity and communal concern. They give a damn about climate change. They or their neighbors need help obtaining health care or economic security. It’s not merely the selfish pursuit of ego satisfaction. If you worry about creeping authoritarianism, inequality, gun violence, racism, women’s freedom, and whatnot and want to do something about any of this, you turn to politics.
Brooks is equating political activism with the desire (or need) to fill an empty soul. No doubt, for many, politics is a performative act of self-identification, perhaps even self-validation. But generalizing that politically active Americans are robotic zombies desperately seeking recognition over purpose is an insult to many who give up their precious time to serve causes and campaigns. (Remember Twitter is not real life.) I wonder if Brooks would characterize churchgoers in a similar fashion.
And not all politics is mean—or has been. The national debate has been coarsened by a certain set of politicians, and they have mostly been Republicans.
“Political and media personalities gin up dramas in which our side is emotionally validated and the other side is emotionally shamed,” Brooks writes. This is bland both-sidesism. He doesn’t name names, but he glancingly refers to Trump as an amoral authoritarian. Brooks doesn’t acknowledge the long line of Republicans and conservatives who have purposefully encouraged and exploited meanness in the era he chronicles.
We can go back to Joe McCarthy and his crude dehumanization of political foes, branding liberals and Democrats as subversive commies and insidious enemies of the state. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew took attack-politics to a new level in the White House. Ronald Reagan sought to whip up racist grievances with his phony assault on welfare queens. George H.W. Bush (with the help of Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater) ginned up sleazy politics in 1988.
After that, the GOP truly shifted into high gears on the Vituperation Express. Newt Gingrich rose to power explicitly urging his Republican comrades to be meaner. He counseled them to brand Democrats as immoral traitors. Republicans embraced Rush Limbaugh, who peddled hatred to millions, and named him an honorary member of the House GOP caucus. They promoted conspiracy theories about their political foes. (Hillary Clinton was involved in Vince Foster’s death!) With Fox News, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and, certainly, Trump, this trend worsened.
Commercial break: My book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy chronicles the party’s decades-long descent into malice. A new and expanded paperback version comes out on September 12.
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While there have been Democratic meanies, this has not been a both-sides problem. In 2020, Joe Biden vowed he’d try to bring the country together to solve the challenges it faces. Trump assailed Biden for supposedly scheming with the Deep State, the media, antifa, communists, and Black radicals to destroy the United States. His unparalleled use of malevolent rhetoric has been accepted and embraced by the GOP and its leaders. Within the Republican cosmos, his meanness is a feature, not a bug. And as I point out in American Psychosis, it is the continuation of the party’s long-running turn toward viciousness.
Look at what Trump said at a rally last month in Waco, Texas:
With you at my side, we will totally obliterate the Deep State, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.
In a recent email he sent out to fleece his supporters, Trump, who has cheered on “Lock Her Up” chants, denounced his recent indictments and Biden: “Our once-free Republic where citizens were presumed innocent until proven guilty is gone. In its place is a Marxist Third World dictatorship led by an incompetent yet crooked tyrant… Communism has finally reached America’s shore.”
Trump spreads incivility, disrespect, hysteria, and paranoia. His inflammatory language—his racism and xenophobia—has inspired many and even led to bullying in schools. A 2020 investigation by the Washington Post found a rise in “Trump-connected persecution” of school children. Yet his abusive and vile conduct has been normalized and validated by a Republican Party and a conservative movement that for decades has increasingly relied on insults, cruelty, and conspiracy theories that demonize fellow Americans.
Pondering a rise in American rudeness without fully considering the GOP-driven rise in acrimony within our national discourse requires a willful avoidance of reality. I can imagine why this might be an uncomfortable subject for Brooks or anyone else who ever identified with and cheered on the Republican Party. All of that drumbeating led to the Trumpification of the GOP and the corrosive impact of that political phenomenon on the rest of the nation.
I’m not suggesting there is no need for moral education—though we would need a form unlike those of yore, one that addresses deep-rooted inequalities and biases. (Yes, woke moral education.) But it is not acts of hyper-politicization to observe that the quality of our politics shapes the quality of our national character (if there is such a thing) and to assign culpability, as would any good moral scold. If Brooks doesn’t agree that Trump and his fellow Republicans share a decent-sized portion of blame for America’s increased meanness, I’d be happy to debate him—politely.
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Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
