I had hoped this election would be a moment of national renewal. I had hoped that the Democrats could decisively defeat MAGA populism and send us down a new national path.
That’s clearly not going to happen. No matter who wins this election, it will be close, and this is still going to be an evenly and bitterly divided nation.
In retrospect, I think I was expecting too much of politics. When certain sociological and cultural realities are locked in, there is not much politicians can do to redirect events. The two parties and their associated political committees have spent billions this year, and nothing has altered the race. The polls are just where they were at the start. If you had fallen asleep a year ago and woke up today, you would have missed little of consequence, except that it’s Kamala Harris leading the blue 50 percent of the country now and not Joe Biden.
It’s clearer to me now that most of the time politicians are not master navigators leading us toward a new future. They are more like surfers who ride the waves created by people further down in the core society.
Let’s look at America between 1880 and 1910. In the early years of that period, American society had been thrown into turmoil by industrialization and uncontrolled capitalism, which produced awesome economic growth and untold human misery. Waves of immigration swept across the country, transforming urban America. Political corruption was rampant in cities and political incompetence was the norm in Washington, D.C.
America faced a core civilizational challenge: How do we harness the energy of industrialization to build a humane society?
American renewal began in the hearts of the people at all layers of society. People were desperate for change. “All history is the history of longing,” Jackson Lears writes in his book about this era, “Rebirth of a Nation.” He argued that during these decades a “widespread yearning for regeneration — for rebirth that was variously spiritual, moral and physical — penetrated public life, inspiring movements and policies that formed the foundation for American society in the 20th century.”
Some of the movements that sprang from this longing were evil. Some people believed that they could impose order on an unruly society through bogus race science and white supremacy. This was the era of lynching and racial terrorism.
But other movements did indeed produce rebirth. First there was a cultural shift. The cutthroat social Darwinist philosophy was replaced by the social gospel movement, which emphasized communal solidarity and service to the poor.
After the cultural shift, there was a civic renaissance fueled by its ideals. For example, the Settlement House movement, led by women like Jane Addams of Chicago, eased the plight of poor immigrant families. The temperance movement, also led mostly by women, sought to curb drinking and spousal abuse.
Unions arose to demand fair wages and an eight-hour workday. The environmental movement spread, not only to protect the wilderness but also to nurture the kind of human vitality that comes through contact with nature. At the top of society, moguls like J.P. Morgan imposed order on the corporate world to reduce boom and bust. Philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie and John Rockefeller built libraries, museums and universities.
By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, society was heaving with change. The legislative program that we call progressivism — cleaning up local government, breaking up the monopolies, regulating clean food, water and air — grew out of the cultural and civic change that was already underway. The pattern was cultural change first, then civic revival, then political reform.
Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?
I don’t see any cultural movement akin to the social gospel movement of the 1890s. The libraries groan with books diagnosing our divisions, but where is the new social ideal? Where is the set of values that will motivate people to put down their phones and dedicate their lives to changing the world?
Some days I do think the civic revival part of the formula is coming along nicely. Through my work at Weave: The Social Fabric Project, I meet local leaders who are striving to rebuild solidarity and serve the marginalized at the neighborhood level. But so far these kinds of efforts have not been able to reverse the catastrophic decline of social trust. Our nation still lacks the sense of social and psychic safety that would allow us to have productive conversations across partisan difference. We still lack a national creed or a national narrative that would give us common ground among competing belief systems.
A few years ago, there did seem to be a social movement that could bring about fundamental change, which I guess I’ll call the New Progressivism. Groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter burst to the fore. Racial equity programs were sweeping across corporations and campuses. Politicians offered ambitious agendas — the Green New Deal, Medicare for All. Presidential candidates vowed to decriminalize border crossings.
But the New Progressivism turned out to be a dead end. D.E.I. programs are in retreat — or, as at the University of Michigan, in turmoil. Democrats don’t talk much about the radical proposals like Medicare for All that seemed à la mode in early 2020. The country is moving rightward on issues like immigration and economics, and Kamala Harris is moving with it.
This election is happening too soon. It’s happening before cultural and civic preconditions are in place that might turbocharge political and legislative reform. It’s simply unfair to ask Harris, who has been a presidential candidate for all of four months, to lay out a vision for comprehensive national renewal under these conditions. Politicians, especially when running for office, are professional opportunists, trying to please voting blocs. They are rarely visionaries.
And yet this is a nation of perennial rebirth and regeneration: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1960s and the 1980s. Even today we are enjoying a period of economic renewal that makes America, as The Economist put it, the “envy of the world.” It’s our social and political relationships that have turned poisonous, producing exhaustion.
As the Lears book suggests, the fundamental change has to happen in the hearts and minds of people, when they adopt an abundance mentality that drives risk-taking and social experiments; when they have before them a comprehensive social vision that arouses vast energies at all levels of society.
In 1902, the psychologist William James wrote a book about conversion experiences called “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Occasionally, he wrote, some belief or vision touches people at “the hot place in a man’s consciousness,” the “habitual center of his personal energy.” These visions arouse great fervor, shake loose existing assumptions and lead, often enough, to heroic action.
For a whole society to change, the people in the society have to want to change themselves. A smug, self-satisfied, “I am right” nation is going to be perennially stuck in place.
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