It’s easy to lose sight of the essential priorities, especially when daily events like the Afghanistan difficulties intrude, but it seems to me one of the highest priorities is to try to understand what really is driving the increasing political and cultural and generational polarization in our nation – polarization that might eventually end up destroying us if we can’t control it. The crude stereotypes and glib partisan answers provided by politicians, activists, and the media talking heads are of no help here.
This is not an easy problem with a single simple answer. Cultures are incredibly complex, especially in a nation as large and diverse as ours. As some authors have argued, we are really 7 or 9 or 11 different nations, depending on how one counts*. So the root causes of today’s polarization are likely to by many, and subtle, and perhaps different in different regions of the country, and perhaps different in different economic or social classes, and in some cases counterintuitive.
But it is essential to try to understand why almost half the nation’s voters would vote for a disruptive populist like Donald Trump. Or why so many people object - violently object - to wearing masks or getting vaccinated in a pandemic. Or why school board meetings have suddenly turned raucous and even violent in some places. Or why an escapee from North Korea would report, in print, that speech suppression at Columbia University, where she took some classes, is far worse than anything she ever experienced in North Korea.
A useful starting place – but just a start – might be David Brooks’ recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled How Bobos Broke America, a rethinking of the thesis he propounded in his 2001 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. (“Bobos” comes from the conjunction of “bourgeois” and “bohemian”, the synthesis of meritocratic entitlement and counterculture pretention). It might also be useful afterward to read Peter Berkowitz’s critique David Brooks Reproaches Elites, Recycles Cliches About the People.
Also useful as a start is David Goodhart’s 2020 book Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect, Ezra Klein’s 2020 book Why We’re Polarized, Joan Williams’ 2017 book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, Richard Reeves 2017 book Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It., Arlie Russel Hochschild’s 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Jonathan Haidt’s 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Michael Foley’s 2010 book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy, Susan Jacoby’s 2008 book The Age of American Unreason, and George Lakoff’s 2002 book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservative Think None of these will provide THE answer. All will provide different perspectives, and perhaps some part of the answer
* See, for example, Colin Woodards 2021 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Cultures in North America
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