Introduction

When aiming to answer the question of “what is going on with America?” one must look first at what the underlying feelings currently held by Americans, by asking the first question: “what do Americans agree on?” The contemporary feeling is overwhelmingly one of estrangement, felt from those in all facets of American life. This feeling, an internal feeling of Americans in relation to their political system, can be felt from sea to sea, from those living in rural factory towns in the midwest, to the metropolises on the coasts, from the ghetto of West Baltimore, to the gated communities of suburbia, from atheists and christians, and from rich to poor. This feeling of estrangement and isolation is the root of an extremely internally divided public. Divided are Americans, not merely on one dimension as was the case with previous divisive issues such as the institution of slavery, but on many dimensions. Estrangement, which makes each group feel more isolated from a future of autonomy, is instead controlled by the prevailing winds of politics. That Americans feel estranged is deeply troubling for anyone looking to find hope for American democracy. After all, one common refrain for supporters of democracy is its ability, a la Thomas Jefferson, to find a public good, common ground to stand on for a majority of Americans. But as the majority is feeling estrangement, the public good seems far from sight. The goal of this paper is multi-faceted. First is to look to the writing of contemporary public intellectuals in search of the varieties and types of estrangement, second is to find the source of that estrangement, and third is to seek to find a solution to it. This journey will ultimately lead to radical conclusions about American democracy and the future of the nation as a whole. 

Economic Estrangement

Since America has over 300 million citizens, it makes sense that estrangement would be varied in its forms and flavors. To distill the thought of many contemporary public intellectuals, types of estrangement can be classified into a few categories: economic, religious, cultural/racial and political. It should be noted with the disclaimer that each category is not perfect nor neatly defined, and public intellectuals usually describe them in a way that they are not always exclusively one or the other. They exist as rough parameters so that one can understand the content of the estrangement more than simply grouping all types together under one umbrella, since there are important differences between them.  Since the purpose of this paper is in part to discuss what estrangement means for democracy, after an overview of the types of estrangement, it will be important to relate each type of estrangement to the political framework in which it exists. The first type of estrangement is described by Robert Putnam, in Our Kids. Putnam, who grew up in a rural Ohio town in the 1950’s, goes on to say that the kids he grew up with were blessed with the opportunities they were afforded in life, even if they didn’t grow up wealthy. What Putnam describes as life in the town of his childhood, Port Clinton, is the oft-romanticized American Dream. This dream is one in which the children he grew up with may have had different difficulties in life, as is the case with anyone, but everyone had a certain high level of opportunity provided they work hard and aim for achievement, regardless of their starting point. The rich of his hometown were active in social life and went to the same schools as the poor, and all participated as valued parts of a community. Families were together, and people were paid wages that enabled them to support their families. To contrast, Putnam’s description of Port Clinton today is nothing short of a tragic tale of cultural and economic decline. In a town that once had the sense of equality and togetherness, even if there were some with more than others in the past, that feeling of equality was replaced by a sense of a divided community. As is mirrored with the cases of many small towns across the nation, the closing of the town’s industrial center drove up inequality and caused a division between the haves and the have-nots, where the lives of rich and poor were so radically different that one would hardly believe they live in the same town. The lives of people in Port Clinton are now largely dependent on where the people in them live, whereas before, experiences were shared across the whole community. In the wealthy section of town, its inhabitants thrive, and continue to produce the types of outcomes one could expect in the American Dream. But, the poor part of town is marred by lack of cohesion, lack of sense of drive to improve material conditions, riddled with drug addiction. Since no type of estrangement exclusively fits neatly into just one category, the type of estrangement Putnam describes is both economic and cultural. Without diving too deep into the causes of this estrangement, it is worth mentioning that a similar type of experience is felt across not just rural towns of America, but even towns that have recently experienced a boom, such as Bend, Oregon, which Putnam cites in his book. This economic inequality contributes to a larger feeling of a society in decline in the minds of Americans like Putnam. Even using this town as an isolated example, estrangement is felt as an effect of the lack of equality and lack of the sense of common experience among both rich and poor. To the rich, everyone is rich, and to the poor, everyone is poor, whereas before cohesion reigned supreme. This is the defining feature of economic estrangement: the lack of shared experience within a community due to economic inequalities. It is important to keep note of this feature moving forward, since it will inform perspectives about our contemporary political moment. 

Religious Estrangement

The second type of estrangement is laid out in Robert P. Jones’ The End of White Christian America. It should be obvious what type of estrangement is experienced here based on the title: religious estrangement. Jones, in his book, charts a history of the decline of Christianity in America, mainly from the start of the Twentieth century until today. Religion, specifically Christianity, according to Jones, used to dominate American society, especially prior to the Twentieth century. Back then, the church was integral to holding together American communities. But, mainly due to the supersession of Christianity by markets and capitalism as primary motivating agents of action, Christianity fought a battle it could not win. This shift is described in by Jones in a description of the New York skyline over time, where “Today, accustomed as we are to monuments to commerce, it is difficult to imagine church steeples as the most common defining characteristics of civic space. It is even harder to imagine the transformation in social consciousness this architectural revolution ignited, Where church spires once stirred citizens to look upward to the heavens, skyscrapers allowed corporate leaders to look down upon churches from their lofty offices.” A result of the slow decline of Christianity was the incorporation of capitalist economic values of achievement and economic success into the discourse of Christianity itself, as evidenced in 1980’s Evangelical “megachurches” which finally sent record numbers to the pews by promising believers financial success in exchange for piety, rather than belief as a good in and of itself. This transformation, not just of society as a whole but even of Christianity, leaves many traditionalist Christians in a world of materialism and sin. Rod Dreher points out in The Benedict Option that “changes that have overtaken the west in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves.” True believing Christians find themselves at an impasse where larger culture, even if it does care about religion, only cares about it to the extent that it provides other ends. But the estrangement is not merely felt inside the church. It is the product of a larger cultural shift away from religion in America by its largest demographic, whites, represented in the form of the rise of what Jones calls the neo-atheists, who he says “bluntly declared that ‘God is not great’ and aimed to dispel the ‘God delusion,’ all in the name of saving society from the backwardness of religion.” The neo-atheists would not have risen to cultural prominence in any society but one where religiosity was on the downswing. This downswing, as well as the feeling of internal conflict within Christian circles throughout the Twentieth century and proceeding into the Twenty-first, similarly to the rise of inequality in towns across America, produces estrangement, as people begin to recognize, consciously or not, that their tactics in the current political environment have not been working. In fact, religious and economic estrangement are intimately linked, and often when there is one, there is also the other. As Putnam had pointed out: “Poor families are generally less involved in religious communities than affluent families, and this class gap, too, is growing.”

Racial/Cultural Estrangement

The third category of estrangement is the main topic of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Coates, who appears at first glance to be the yin to Putnam’s yang, expresses his distance from what he calls The Dream, obviously referring to the white picket fenced 1950’s idyllic American Dream that Putnam laments having been lost. The form of estrangement which Coates expresses is one of culture and race. Rather than chart a decline, as Putnam and Jones have done, Coates details the grim realities that he and other Black Americans have faced since they were created as Blacks in America. Between the World and Me is a long letter to Coates’ son, who growing into adulthood is coming to see that the world around him is not designed for him. The world which he inhabits is instead the world of the Dreamers, who are the antagonists of the book.. Coates, while describing the system devised by the Dreamers, tells his son “The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows.The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food.” Coates in this quote is describing the system of oppression set up by Dreamers that created The Dream, and which set up the ideas of Whiteness and Blackness to be used as tools of oppression. The quote makes clear that although the oppressive institution of slavery was abolished, and although the oppressive institution of sharecropping was dropped, the same oppression has merely shifted and taken a different form. This ongoing theme of “hate gives identity” is the most powerful aspect of Coates’ book. Racial and cultural estrangement sadly is a form of estrangement that has always existed in America, and it is one that is deeply felt and not easily understood. Coates holds resentment for the narrative pushed in American schools of liberal progress. This progress, to be understood on their terms, has resulted in the liberation of Black people, women, LGBT, and other minority groups. But this is of intentional design, to Coates, who uses the example of the Prince George’s County in Maryland to show how the Dream is replicated by affluent Blacks, who turn themselves into oppressors. This false progress merely takes away from one’s ability to articulate their feelings of estrangement from society. So, the cultural or racial form of estrangement is one that Americans cannot hope to solve by looking to the past, since the past is just more blatant forms of oppression. This is contrasted with, perhaps, economic and religious estrangement (setting aside the overlap of the three.) 

Political Estrangement

The last category of estrangement is one which applies simultaneously to all the other categories of estrangement. This is to say that though there are important differences between all of the categories, the current, ever expanding political system dictates that every category must be related to the political in one way or another, since the political order contributes to the estrangement felt by Americans. Political estrangement the only possible result in a democracy when one realizes that conventional models of democratic policy making are riddled with fallacies. One such model is the main punching bag of the book Democracy for Realists, by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels. Achen and Bartels mark out their target as being the folk theory of democracy. The folk theory of democracy can be widely interpreted as a populist model, whereas Achen and Bartels are advocates of a more elitist model of government, which advocates for what they call “leadership selection”. It is concluded after an exhaustive empirical undertaking, in Democracy for Realists, that popular judgements by the mass of people that make up America bear no relation to rationality, and give an inordinate amount of credit to recent events, with inconsequential events that happen two months before an election having much more impact than highly important events very early in a politician’s term. Additionally, they argue, politicians are given all the credit or blame for how the economy has acted in the leadup to an election. A sudden downturn before election day could spell disaster for an incumbent, for example. This also creates perverse incentives for politicians if they understand this system: whereby they can hold interest rates just long enough to make it to election day, rather than advocating for policies that are smart in the long run. Among other factors that cause an election to swing for one candidate or another is whether one can identify with that candidate, which has the obvious consequence of the running of a country on the basis of a glorified popularity contest. Although Achen and Bartels make a convincing argument against populism, and against the conventional wisdom regarding democracy and the blind faith in the majority, of which Constitutional framers such as Alexander Hamilton were skeptics, they do not perform a convincing defense of their own theory to replace folk theory. In fact, one would struggle to say that they have a cohesive “realist” theory of any sort, other than merely an argument against folk theory. But overcoming the myth of folk theory is not a satisfactory answer. One can look in the implicit biases of Achen and Bartels in their lack of criticism of elitist groups, despite elitism being the obvious alternative to populism. Despite engaging in political science, by following the intuitive flow of Democracy for Realists, one will likely end up with views much more favorable towards elitism. But, elitism too has its flaws, despite the fact they were not the topic of Achen’s and Bartel’s book. For even if a democracy were to output fully rational decisions and produce a sort of perfect leader who would be an “expert” in the field of policy-making, since the scope of government is near all encompassing in modern America, this expert would also need to employ a number of other experts on every single regulatory field, from agriculture and medicine, to automotive safety, to regulation of tattoo parlors and pet stores, and so forth. The result of any kind of an elitist democracy would be a massive bureaucracy, since elitism includes the premise that the experts know better than the common man. And with a bureaucracy of this scale, most people working in government and deciding the rules for society would be unelected. The end result is anti-democratic at its core, to the degree that the idealist looking to preserve democracy should scoff at the idea of it, since those in the system of a bureaucracy are protected from being thrown out of office by the public. Thus, we have the conclusion that neither elitism nor populism are capable of producing policies which benefit the public, and are accountable to it. This conclusion also implies that there is no possible way, under either of these forms of democratic thinking, for an estranged group or person to make substantive positive changes to the political system.

Self-Destructive Liberalism

The lack of ability for each estranged group or person to make positive changes to the political system results in a feedback loop which is described by Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed. Political estrangement in effect amplifies, causes, and worsens each other type of estrangement. In his book, Deneen outlines a model of how Liberalism engages in a self-destructive process which undermines its underlying principles, through the lens of an ostensibly ever progressing society. This model, which shows the cause of political estrangement, can help when looking to escape the elitist-populist paradigm of today’s democracy. What then, is Deneen’s model? Deneen specifically chose today’s college education system as an example of how liberalism is self destructive. Liberalism starts with the assumption that it can repair its ills, reform itself and progress further. Within education, Liberalism has the first principle of promoting a liberal arts education, where students, in being challenged to find truth, can find virtue and higher purpose. So, it draws from lessons of the ancients, whose lessons about finding truth are timeless, and a core of texts is built up around the idea of this education. But, in the effort to move forward and repair ills, Liberalism acts as an antibody against the classic literature it endorses, and begins to question its validity in terms of not what can still be learned from such old texts, the enduring deep truths, but the superficialities of the thinkers, such as whether their society permitted slavery, or whether pedophilia was common. The emphasis from the beginning was always on truth, but it is obscured by the moral crusade against every act currently considered wrong according to modern standards. This then leads to an “evacuation” of ideas within the liberal arts, who find themselves without any classics that are not problematic in one way or another, and thus with no curriculum. Beyond this, they lose the original aim of the liberal arts education, truth, and eschew it for a culturally acceptable practice, such as expansion of economic utility. This then leads to the combination of both a University that supports higher education in the form of job training for the business world as a business degree, and a field of humanities sapped of all its fundamental lessons. Deneen’s model can also be used to illustrate how estrangement is caused, as well. If instead of using Liberal Arts education as the main starting point, we instead choose the common good of the open discourse in Liberal society. The open discourse usually occurs in the setting of the public square, which now instead of physically existing in the center of town, outside a government building, it is often found on public internet forums, but the same principles that applied to the square still apply to the online forum: pluralistic rules that regard freedom of speech as integral to a functioning democracy and healthy discourse. But, when hateful speech enters the fray, or any speech that can be seen as offensive, bigoted, or in other ways dangerous to democracy, Liberalism attempts to cure its ill, which in this case is that very speech it deems dangerous. This is a debate that ends debate, with the core question at hand being whether society tolerates intolerant speech. Pluralistic practices are evacuated in the name of ending hate, and certain types of speech are forced out of the public square and acceptable discourse. The first product of this evacuation is the limiting of allowable opinion, and fringe (or “dangerous”) ideas, rather than being debated publicly, are forced along with the people who voice them, to isolated, mini-publics, small areas where free speech is accepted, whether deemed hateful or not. In these miniature public squares, the ideas that were once ridiculed in public now have a sense of internal legitimacy, and are able to survive due to lack of public discussion. Another effect of the evacuation is that political speech becomes inherently risky, since most people don’t want to accidentally misrepresent themselves and be banned from the public square. Thus, political speech is taboo, unless one is certain they are in a group of like-minded individuals. But what is the point of political speech when it can only be done inside a tiny group? The result is estrangement and loss of control over the political system, which relies on a constant public discourse. From the feeling of estrangement comes the next liberal solution, enacting a policy in order to solve the feeling of estrangement. This would cease to be a feedback loop if said policy actually did what it aimed to do, but we have already established earlier, considering Achen and Bartels, as well as an argument against elitism, that in the system of liberalism there is no possible way for an estranged group or person to make substantive positive changes to the political system. 

Decentralization 

What can be done in light of the stunning revelation that liberalism causes political estrangement? There are two natural reactions: one is to reinforce the national myth of the Dream, and try to go back to when it seemed like democracy worked. The flaw in this, however, is that it would still be leaving a major type of estrangement unsolved, the racial/cultural category. If years of public schooling were unable to convince someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates of the national myth, nor bring him into believing in the Dream, then even the sophist should abandon this lost cause, since Coates is now a popular public intellectual with influence. No, in order to be in accordance with the pursuit of truth, it is necessary to go the other direction. If the national myth was going to be the way to tie America together in a basket weaved with lies, then the other option would be to consider whether remaining American as we know it today is worth the feeling of estrangement Americans endure. For if it is worth it, perhaps pursuing the national myth is worth the fools errand. But if they let go of the national myth, Americans, together with their communities could each form versions of societies that they get to help build and that is truly built around their desires and needs. It is not known whether a democracy of this scale, of over 300,000,000 in population, is truly sustainable. Certainly, the feedback loop of self-destructive liberalism should tell us that we should at the very least prepare for its demise. It is only in a decentralized society, a type of society from which America first arose as thirteen loosely connected colonies, that the needs and desires of both Coates and Dreher can truly be met, and the estrangement felt be eliminated. In fact, in both of their works, the two authors express a desire to live in communities of their own making, with Coates harkening to his college days at Howard, the historically Black University he calls Mecca, and with Dreher inspiring this solution of a Benedictine enclave where one can live with God. In these new decentralized communities, a real sense of political autonomy can exist and a new sense of togetherness can be fostered from the ground up rather than instituted from the top down. It may seem like a radical solution, and that is because it is. It would probably be the end of America, but it would be the start of something compatible with the interests of people who can see eye to eye on almost no issue, despite currently being called American.

Sources:

antiwar.com

foolserrand.us

scotthorton.org

libertarianinstitute.org