clairecloutier
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I wanted to share an article that I read in the Atlantic this week. I found it really interesting and thought other people here might enjoy it.
How America Fractured into Four Parts
www.theatlantic.com
The author, George Packer, argues that there are currently 4 major viewpoints, or narratives, about America and its politics that are fighting for dominance.
He identifies these as:
-- "Free America," the traditional conservative/libertarian view of the country, as sold by Reagan
-- "Smart America," the liberal meritocratic viewpoint common among traditional Democrats over the last 50 years, partly represented by Clinton/Obama
-- "Real America," the viewpoint of Trumpland (rural, non-professional America)
-- "Just America," the worldview of young, educated GenZers and millennials, which focuses on the historical faults, weaknesses, and inequity of America and society as a whole
Packer writes so well, and I found some of his descriptions of the positive/negative sides of each worldview super-resonant. His take on "Just America" was especially interesting to me. The existence/principles of this worldview is something that I feel like I've learned about more on Twitter and to some extent FSU than anywhere else. It's a worldview that kind of came into being without being "announced," so to speak, by someone like a politician or speechwriter who would break it down and streamline its main ideas. It's a way of thinking that I've sometimes struggled to understand/describe. So it was interesting to see Packer roll some of its ideas into a more complete thought construct.
I'll post some longish excerpts here just to give an idea of what's discussed in the article. It is a long read, but I found it pretty darn interesting.
On "Free America"--
On "Smart America"--
On "Real America"--
On "Just America"--
How America Fractured into Four Parts

How America Fractured Into Four Parts
People in the United States no longer agree on the nation’s purpose, values, history, or meaning. Is reconciliation possible?
The author, George Packer, argues that there are currently 4 major viewpoints, or narratives, about America and its politics that are fighting for dominance.
He identifies these as:
-- "Free America," the traditional conservative/libertarian view of the country, as sold by Reagan
-- "Smart America," the liberal meritocratic viewpoint common among traditional Democrats over the last 50 years, partly represented by Clinton/Obama
-- "Real America," the viewpoint of Trumpland (rural, non-professional America)
-- "Just America," the worldview of young, educated GenZers and millennials, which focuses on the historical faults, weaknesses, and inequity of America and society as a whole
Packer writes so well, and I found some of his descriptions of the positive/negative sides of each worldview super-resonant. His take on "Just America" was especially interesting to me. The existence/principles of this worldview is something that I feel like I've learned about more on Twitter and to some extent FSU than anywhere else. It's a worldview that kind of came into being without being "announced," so to speak, by someone like a politician or speechwriter who would break it down and streamline its main ideas. It's a way of thinking that I've sometimes struggled to understand/describe. So it was interesting to see Packer roll some of its ideas into a more complete thought construct.
I'll post some longish excerpts here just to give an idea of what's discussed in the article. It is a long read, but I found it pretty darn interesting.
On "Free America"--
In 1980, the first year I cast a vote, I feared and hated Reagan. Listening to his words 40 years later, I can hear their eloquence and understand their appeal, as long as I tune out many other things. Chief among them is Reagan’s half-spoken message to white Americans: Government helps only those people. Legal segregation was barely dead when Free America, using the libertarian language of individualism and property rights, pushed the country into its long decline in public investment. The advantages for business were easy to see. As for ordinary people, the Republican Party reckoned that some white Americans would rather go without than share the full benefits of prosperity with their newly equal Black compatriots.
The majority of Americans who elected Reagan president weren’t told that Free America would break unions and starve social programs, or that it would change antitrust policy to bring a new age of monopoly, making Walmart, Citigroup, Google, and Amazon the J.P. Morgan and Standard Oil of a second Gilded Age. They had never heard of Charles and David Koch—heirs to a family oil business, libertarian billionaires who would pour money into the lobbies and propaganda machines and political campaigns of Free America on behalf of corporate power and fossil fuels. Freedom sealed a deal between elected officials and business executives: campaign contributions in exchange for tax cuts and corporate welfare. The numerous scandals of the 1980s exposed the crony capitalism that lay at the heart of Free America.
On "Smart America"--
The new knowledge economy created a new class of Americans: men and women with college degrees, skilled with symbols and numbers—salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. They go to college with one another, intermarry, gravitate to desirable neighborhoods in large metropolitan areas, and do all they can to pass on their advantages to their children. They are not 1 percenters—those are mainly executives and investors—but they dominate the top 10 percent of American incomes, with outsize economic and cultural influence.
They’re at ease in the world that modernity created. They were early adopters of things that make the surface of contemporary life agreeable: HBO, Lipitor, MileagePlus Platinum, the MacBook Pro, grass-fed organic beef, cold-brewed coffee, Amazon Prime. They welcome novelty and relish diversity. They believe that the transnational flow of human beings, information, goods, and capital ultimately benefits most people around the world. You have a hard time telling what part of the country they come from, because their local identities are submerged in the homogenizing culture of top universities and elite professions.
The winners in Smart America have withdrawn from national life. They spend inordinate amounts of time working (even in bed), researching their children’s schools and planning their activities, shopping for the right kind of food, learning to make sushi or play the mandolin, staying in shape, and following the news. None of this brings them in contact with fellow citizens outside their way of life. School, once the most universal and influential of our democratic institutions, now walls them off. The working class is terra incognita.
On "Real America"--
In the fall of 2008, Sarah Palin, then the Republican nominee for vice president, spoke at a fundraiser in Greensboro, North Carolina. Candidates reserve the truth for their donors, using the direct language they avoid with the press and the public (Obama: “cling to guns or religion”; Romney: the “47 percent”; Clinton: “basket of deplorables”), and Palin felt free to speak openly. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit,” she said, “and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us.”
The overwhelmingly white crowds that lined up to hear Palin speak were nothing new. Real America has always been a country of white people. Jackson himself was a slaver and an Indian-killer, and his “farmers, mechanics, and laborers” were the all-white forebears of William Jennings Bryan’s “producing masses,” Huey Long’s “little man,” George Wallace’s “rednecks,” Patrick Buchanan’s “pitchfork brigade,” and Palin’s “hardworking patriots.” The political positions of these groups changed, but their Real American identity—their belief in themselves as the bedrock of self-government—stayed firm. From time to time the common people’s politics has been interracial—the Populist Party at its founding in the early 1890s, the industrial-labor movement of the 1930s—but that never lasted. The unity soon disintegrated under the pressure of white supremacy. Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.
On "Just America"--
In 2014, American character changed .... A large and influential generation came of age in the shadow of accumulating failures by the ruling class—especially by business and foreign-policy elites. This new generation had little faith in ideas that previous ones were raised on: All men are created equal. Work hard and you can be anything. Knowledge is power. Democracy and capitalism are the best systems—the only systems. America is a nation of immigrants. America is the leader of the free world.
Call this narrative “Just America.” It’s another rebellion from below. As Real America breaks down the ossified libertarianism of Free America, Just America assails the complacent meritocracy of Smart America. It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.
But Just America has a dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme. A more accurate name would be Unjust America, in a spirit of attack rather than aspiration. For Just Americans, the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled. In some versions of the narrative, the country has no positive value at all—it can never be made better.
Just America has dramatically changed the way Americans think, talk, and act, but not the conditions in which they live. It reflects the fracturing distrust that defines our culture: Something is deeply wrong; our society is unjust; our institutions are corrupt. If the narrative helps to create a more humane criminal-justice system and bring Black Americans into the conditions of full equality, it will live up to its promise. But the grand systemic analysis usually ends in small symbolic politics. In some ways, Just America resembles Real America and has entered the same dubious conflict from the other side.
The rules in Just America are different, and they have been quickly learned by older liberals following a long series of defenestrations at The New York Times, Poetry magazine, Georgetown University, the Guggenheim Museum, and other leading institutions. The parameters of acceptable expression are a lot narrower than they used to be. A written thought can be a form of violence. The loudest public voices in a controversy will prevail. Offending them can cost your career. Justice is power. These new rules are not based on liberal values; they are post-liberal.
Just America’s origins in theory, its intolerant dogma, and its coercive tactics remind me of 1930s left-wing ideology. Liberalism as white supremacy recalls the Communist Party’s attack on social democracy as “social fascism.” Just American aesthetics are the new socialist realism.