You’ve probably already heard the reasons our country is falling apart: Social media amplifies our differences and fuels extremism. Rising inequality and urbanization create anger and resentment. The gradual de-whitening of society threatens the old social order.
These are compelling but not entirely satisfactory: We saw transformative technology, mass immigration, and oppressive plutocracy in the 20th century, and somehow got through it without destroying our political system.
That is not to say that there was no bitter violence or terrible turmoil — the 1960s are still remembered for both — but even then, we did not allow our tribal instincts to overwhelm our shared belief in democratic norms. Court orders were obeyed, if reluctantly, and laws were enacted. In the end, we did not divide.
To really understand where we are today, perhaps we need to look back at what happened in the 1990s and the great vacuum in our national psyche that we have never been able to fill.
Americans, for better or worse, have always been defined by the struggle of existence. Since our founding, we have been bound together not by a common race or religion but by a radical idea of human freedom and self-governance, by the idea that our nation is more than a place to live; it is a living force for human progress.
It must be admitted that this self-image demanded no small amount of denial: we committed genocide across the Americas, waged wars to enslave other human beings, oppressed women, and remained an apartheid state over large swaths of the country until the late twentieth century. All of this is true. But the idea of what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion” — a nation united by faith in law and liberty, not just in our own but in the world as a whole — remained in the minds of our people.
It’s no exaggeration to say that other nations find this puzzling. For most nations, after thousands of years of empires and invasions, being safe, prosperous, and proud of our common heritage is enough. But for us, there was always a higher purpose, if not in the form of political fervor. Simply by founding our towns, developing our cities, and sending our children to school in the morning, Americans believed we were striking a blow for freedom.
And, in a true sense, we were. The 20th century was marked by a clash with tyrannies that cast a shadow over every aspect of American life: first fascism, then communism. While much of the world saw us as the latest in a long history of imperialism, Americans saw themselves as a bulwark against humanity’s darkest forces. Our internal differences — the Red Scare and the fight for civil rights spring to mind — but what we shared was a common enemy, and the ever-present threat of annihilation.
Then came the end of the Cold War, which social theorist Francis Fukuyama optimistically called “the end of history.” What Fukuyama meant was that all forms of absolutism — monarchy, fascism, communism — had finally run out of steam, to be permanently replaced by liberal democracy made in our image. We would, in effect, be living through the final battles of a broader American revolution.
Fukuyama was wrong, of course: freedom has not won a final victory over tyranny in this world, and there was no great honeymoon, but he was right in the sense that the clash of civilizations that had dominated our political debate for so long suddenly disappeared.
Our first instinct was to fill the void with distractions and trivialities. (I wrote a book and a film about this political moment when politicians suddenly became celebrities, in part because we could afford to treat them like celebrities.) By the late 1990s, we lived in a country where the president’s sex life completely eclipsed foreign policy.
After the 2001 terrorist attacks, there was a brief moment when our political leaders positioned Islamic extremism as a new Soviet empire, a global threat that might fill the gaping hole in America’s self-image. But it didn’t take long for us to realize how remote that threat actually was and how harmful our response was. Conditioned to find meaning in existential conflicts, we took out the howitzers to fight the hornets.
But the need for an existential struggle remained, and we seemed to find it in the clash of cultures in our own cities and towns: the widening gulf between, on the one hand, urban, well-educated leftists who denounce white privilege, theocracy, and gun culture, and, on the other, rural Trump supporters who see themselves as being invaded by modernism and multiculturalism.
The further we move from the Cold War consensus, the more likely we are to see our political opponents as forces hell-bent on destroying us. We now find national purpose in online communities whose common thread is a dichotomy: either your side wins or you quickly disappear. (Even a culture warrior as influential as Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said as much in a recent, secretly recorded conversation.)
I am not saying that we need another world war to unite us. There is enough romanticizing about the extremely bloody wars of the last century and the sacrifices they made. Nor am I saying that all our current political anxieties are illusory. Would former President Donald Trump’s election to a second term seriously jeopardize the rule of law that holds us together as a society? I think so. Trumpism is a direct result of our tendency toward political Armageddon.
What I’m saying is that we’ve fallen into civil unrest due to a long-standing lack of leadership, and while Biden may be the closest thing to the American statesman we know today, to hear him urge the country to back off messianic political rhetoric sounds like an admission of a generational failure.
All of these political leaders, shaped by the Cold War consensus, had the opportunity, or obligation, to redirect their national passions toward new, larger missions: protecting the planet from annihilation, dominating the digital economy, and rebuilding neglected and devastated factory towns.
They said all these things, of course, but most of them were poll-tested platitudes. They avoided the complex truths. They asked for nothing in sacrifice. They promised the popular stuff: endless, reckless tax cuts to the right, ever-expanding government to the left. And they demonized anyone who got in their way.
Biden is right (and Trump is right, to the extent that he truly believes this after his near-death experience) — it’s past time to step back from the debate that seems to be leading us to a second civil war. But as I wrote last week in proposing Biden’s new campaign strategy, it’s also time to retire the generation of leaders who got us here — the generation of leaders who allowed our cultural, religious, and racial differences to fill the void where our common struggles have always united us.
After all, America’s aging leaders didn’t preside over the end of history; they simply couldn’t figure out where history should go next.
