By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
America is sick. Just about everybody recognizes it, and
we didn’t need two more mass shootings to convince anybody of anything. Most
Americans think the country is on the wrong track, despite a roaring economy.
You can blame Donald Trump, but Americans have been unsatisfied with the
country’s direction for most of the last two decades.
Amazingly, given the level of partisan animosity in this
country, both sides see the problem much the same way: The country is
disordered by selfishness, alienation, variously defined bigotries, inequality,
and a lack of social solidarity. Even more bizarre, both the Right and the Left
have very similar solutions in mind.
Both are very wrong.
On the right, a growing number of intellectuals see
nationalism as the cure for what ails us. The Hudson Institute’s Christopher
DeMuth argues that nationalism is an idea whose time has come (again) because
it reminds us “of our dependence on one another.” He likens it to the religious
“Great Awakenings” of the past. Catholic writer Sohrab Ahmari wants an
awakening that delivers “order,” “social cohesion,” and policies aimed at the
“Highest Good” — in the classical philosophic sense (summum bonum).
On the left, listen closely to the proselytizers of the
new socialist awakening. You’ll notice that it has less to do with economics
than a yearning for more a cooperative and egalitarian alternative to selfish
capitalism, driven not by nationalism but government — which is “the only thing
we all belong to” as a video at the 2012 Democratic Convention asserted.
The vocabulary they use is different, but the underlying
indictment of the status quo is remarkably similar. Nationalism is an obscenity
to the Left, and socialism is anathema for the Right, but a nationalizing or
centralizing spirit suffuses both sides.
Team Trump’s “economic nationalism,” has echoes of the
“economic patriotism” of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who speaks with an almost
Trumpian passion when she talks about how the “system is rigged.” A slew of
wannabe GOP successors to Trump, with Senator Josh Hawley in the lead, seem
desperate to craft a new “daddy state” industrial policy for right-wingers.
As a conservative of a classically liberal bent, I find
this new convergence of Left and Right dismaying and disheartening. But that
doesn’t mean they don’t have a point that something is very wrong. You only
have to look at the rising suicide rates, opioid deaths, declining life
expectancy, and, of course, the onslaught of mass shootings to see the
country’s despair. A recent survey found that more than a fifth of Millennials
say they have no friends — a poignant illustration of the loneliness crisis
that probably has at least as much to do with mass shootings as white supremacy
or video games.
Where everyone loses me is with the idea that the
solution to these maladies can be found in Washington or in nationalizing
movements of the Right or the Left.
One of the reasons social media is so toxic is that it is
a nationalizing force; it makes us feel as if strangers thousands of miles away
are neighbors — and we get mad when neighbors are living the “wrong” way. Cable
news does the same thing, just with better production values, plucking
anecdotal stories and making them part of a “national conversation.” The
problem is that there’s no such thing as an actual national conversation.
What we need are communities, and the idea of national
community is a myth. Conversation is done face to face and person to person,
and so is community.
The nationalization of culture drives centralized
government, and centralized government saps communities of mutual dependence.
It renders the rich ecosystem between the individual and the state obsolete,
yet it is that habitat where humans actually live and find meaning.
The nationalizing movements aim to fill the void left by
the decline or disappearance not just of industrial jobs, but of the healthy
communities that grew up around the factories.
Government has a role in dealing with the challenges of
globalization and automation, but these movements cannot fill the holes in our
souls. And the prospect that either side is eager to try only raises the stakes
for the other. This is how nationalization fuels winner-take-all polarization.
When each tribe seeks to impose a one-size-fits-all “Highest Good” on all
Americans, the paranoid belief that “all we hold dear” is at stake at the
ballot box metastasizes for many.
And, for a few, ballots give way to bullets.
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