14
THINGS FALL APART
The American Experiment at Risk
For many Americans, including most liberals but also a good number of conservatives, libertarians, and others, Donald Trump’s sudden emergence as a political force raised the question: Where did this monster come from?
Of course, that’s not entirely fair to Trump and many of his supporters. For many voters, Donald Trump was not the monster but the savior, the heroic—albeit flawed—champion called forth by the times. He was the Shin Godzilla of our moment, rising up to destroy the establishment and awaken the true spirit of the American nation. For others, he was simply the preferable option between two bad choices. Ample polling during the campaign showed that more Trump voters thought of their vote as against Clinton than for Trump.1 And if, for example, as a conservative, your overriding concern is the future of the Supreme Court, Trump was the right choice at the time.
Whichever perspective you subscribe to, the real point is that Trump was not a creature out of the blue. Both his election and his presidency were symptoms of trends long in the making. Any exhaustive attempt to explain how Donald Trump succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Republican Party would require a whole book—at least. So I will simply focus on what I believe are the most important factors and the ones that most directly touch on the themes of this book.
As I have labored to illustrate, human nature holds constant. The world changed over the last three hundred years, not because we evolved into more enlightened beings, but because we stumbled into a new way of talking and thinking about how society should be organized. That changed way of thinking was the revolutionary event, but the revolution was sustained and secured by a host of institutions, both in terms of rules but also in the more concrete sense of actual associations and organizations. Those associations and organizations are commonly lumped into the term “civil society.” It comprises everything from churches and schools to bowling leagues and 4-H clubs. The old form of civil society is not dead, but it is everywhere retreating, like a once great reef bleached by acidic waters.
That simile is intentional. I’ve always thought of civil society to be like a great reef in the ocean. The coral provides a rich ecosystem in which a vast variety of life resides, which is why they are sometimes called “the rain forests of the sea.” They constitute less than 0.1 percent of the worldwide ocean surface but account for a staggering 25 percent of all marine species.2
For most of human prehistory, there was really only one institution: the tribe or band. It may have been subdivided into some smaller units: the family, the hunters versus the gatherers, etc. But they were all subsumed into the tribe itself.
After the agricultural revolution, the division of labor created space for more institutions, some of which could even be in conflict with one another. There was “space” outside the state. And in that space, institutions grew over time, at coral pace. This ecosystem changed little, and when it did, it did so very slowly, allowing humans to adapt. The reef was made up of only a few distinct colonies of coral: the family, the local community, the church, a relative handful of occupations, usually supervised by guilds of one sort or another, and, of course, the state, including the military. Then, for reasons discussed at length earlier, there was the miraculous explosion of institutions. And with that explosion came a staggering burst of human prosperity and creative genius, which only expanded and extended the whole process.
Creating a nurturing environment for mediating institutions is a form of social engineering, arguably the greatest feat of social engineering in human history, but not in the way we normally define the term. It is social engineering of the sort I described when discussing the differences between English gardens and French ones. English gardens create a zone of liberty where people and institutions are free to prosper. Humans serve as pollinators, moving from one institution to another, gaining sustenance and providing it at the same time. It is social engineering without any intended goal other than the flourishing of the garden itself.
If you can forgive the whiplash of going back and forth between metaphors, civil society in the modern era is akin to creating artificial reefs. Drop a pile of concrete or sink an oil rig to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and wait. Soon coral, algae, barnacles, oysters, and other creatures attach themselves to it. As they accumulate, fish take up residence in the new shelter. (Oil rigs in Southern California host up to twenty-seven times more fish than natural rocky reefs in the same area.)3 I hate the expression “If you build it, they will come,” but in this case it’s apt. And when they do come, they flourish.
The hitch to this metaphor is that the state cannot build the reefs; it can only protect them. If you’ve ever been scuba diving or snorkeling, you probably know that swimmers aren’t supposed to touch the coral with their bare hands. We have oils in our skin that disrupt the membranes of coral and can even kill a whole colony. The state is a greasy-handed tourist in civil society. Except when it is extremely careful—which it usually is not—when it intervenes in institutions, it harms them and often kills them.
Civil society has a different currency from the market economy and the state. Voluntary associations operate on the economy of love and community, charity and reciprocity. The Salvation Army, the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts, garden clubs, and Civil War reenactment societies operate based on shared values and different principles from a welfare agency or jobs program. When the state stomps its way in and tells these groups how they must operate, it is usually harmful. When the state takes over the functions being performed by civil society, it is toxic.
That is not the intent, of course. The government is usually “here to help.” The government does many good and important things. But what it cannot do is love you.
Politicians delight in likening the country to a family. This is a dangerous analogy. Welfare programs—including numerous middle-class entitlements—are justified on the grounds that we all belong to the same American family, families take care of their own, and in the family there is no shame in asking for help. The problem here is twofold. Anyone who has asked a family member—particularly the wrong family member—for money knows that shame often plays a big role in the experience, particularly if you ask more than once. Family generosity has its limits, and it comes with strings attached. This is because generosity is different from entitlement, and familial assistance brings with it complex forms of reciprocity, guilt, expectations, etc.
My brother, Josh, was plagued by addiction. My parents aided him many times before he died. All of their help—financial, emotional, and every other kind imaginable—came with conditions, lectures, hugs, tears, guilt, encouragement, and ultimatums. The government cannot play that role. None of these psychological factors is at work with a government check. Can a bureaucrat call you at ten o’clock at night, like your uncle Irving, and hock you about the money you owe him?
Former Texas senator Phil Gramm tells a story about talking to a group of voters. He was asked what his policy on children was. He said something like “My policy derives from the fact that no one can love my children as much my wife and I do.”
A woman in the audience interrupted him and said, “No, that’s not true: I love your children as much as you do.”
Graham shot back his answer: “Oh, really? What are their names?”
The second problem is that welfare is not received as charity; it is seen as an entitlement. When you tell people—particularly strangers—they are entitled to something they did not earn or work for, you are teaching a profound—and often profoundly pernicious—lesson about how life itself works. For instance, when societies assume that the government is there to provide all of the wants and needs for the poor, not only do the poor become less motivated to help themselves, but the affluent also become less motivated to help them. European countries, the imagined better models for social organization, have seen their civil soc
ieties atrophy. The churches are subsidized, but the pews are empty. The prevailing attitude is that the state is there to help those in need, so why should people give any more? “That’s what I pay taxes for.” Meanwhile, in America, the most charitable developed country in the world, religion is privatized and the source of immeasurable social generosity.
“Studies of charitable giving in the United States show that people in the least religious fifth of the population give just 1.5 percent of their money to charity,” writes Jonathan Haidt. “People in the most religious fifth (based on church attendance, not belief) give a whopping 7 percent of their income to charity, and the majority of that giving is to religious organizations.” Haidt adds that “it’s the same story for volunteer work: religious people do far more than secular folk, and the bulk of that work is done for, or at least through, their religious organizations.”4 Civil society encourages people to be other-directed, to help not for a check but for the psychic or spiritual reward of being needed. That kind of participation is a source of values and virtues that sustain democracy and capitalism.
Mediating institutions also provide a sense of meaning, community, and even identity that gives people a sense of belonging and fulfillment.
Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute (where I am a Fellow), has written extensively on the importance of “earned success.” Earning success is not synonymous with making money or becoming famous. The essence of earned success, which Brooks says is the very essence of American exceptionalism, is the sense of personal satisfaction that comes from hard work and achievement. It can take the form of money, but money isn’t what purchases a sense of earned success. People who are simply given money—from the lottery or an inheritance—get a brief psychological sugar high from the windfall, but that wears off rapidly. What generates lasting happiness is the conviction that your labors are valued, that you have made a meaningful contribution, that you are needed. A stay-at-home mother who raises happy, healthy children can have high levels of earned success, while a wealthy stockbroker can have low earned success. Priests, schoolteachers, artists, writers—no matter their financial status—can have high levels of earned success if they feel like they made a difference in the world.
The reason the American experiment is so bound up in earned success is that our system was designed to let people choose their own path to earned success. This is what the “individual pursuit of happiness” means. And the more mediating institutions we have, the more paths to earned success there are.
Brooks contrasts earned success with “learned helplessness,” a term coined by the eminent University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E. P. Seligman. Learned helplessness has clinical definitions related to the study of depression, but in this context it is what you get when the incentives for work and rewards for merit get out of whack. When people feel their fate is out of their hands, when they are not captains of themselves, they respond accordingly.5 Marx thought alienation was endemic to capitalism, but anyone who has lived in or even visited a communist society knows that alienation is even more prevalent in state-run economies. One can feel like a cog in the machine in a free-market society, but the free-market society by definition allows for the right to exit systems, jobs, careers, etc., that do not serve the interests of the individual. Statist systems do not recognize the right to exit.
But the right to exit is a right in name only if you have no place to exit to. Mediating institutions provide such safe havens. A man may be miserable in his work but feel rich in his life outside of work—if he is needed or valued or esteemed by his friends, family, church, or the volunteer fire department.
Every ideological flavor of statist, from the Marxist left to the monarchist right, has argued for the last three hundred years that the state must be given the power to cure the alienation of the market, bind the wounds of division, and act like a loving parent caring for its children. It does not work. But the more people believe it does, the more they turn their backs on the only thing that does: us. We build the reefs where people find an emotional or psychological home. And when the state touches them, it wounds them.
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There’s a reason why American liberals express such admiration for the European model: They tend to think like Europeans. American liberals are three times more likely than conservatives to tell pollsters they want the government to “do more” to reduce income inequality. At the same time, conservatives who believed that the government should not tackle income inequality gave four times as much money to charity as liberals. In 2002, people who said the government is “spending too much money on welfare” were more likely to help a homeless person with a gift of food or money.6 When we outsource compassion for others to the government, we free ourselves up to think only about ourselves.
To be fair, the belief that the state, and only the state, can satisfy the allegedly ever greater complexities of modern life is sincerely held and does derive from real compassion. The point isn’t that those who want the state to handle everything are evil or selfish—after all, they want to pay higher taxes to help others. The point is that they are blind to the costs of their compassion. In Barack Obama’s second inaugural, he proclaimed:
For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.7
Look closely at what he is saying here. In his vision of America, there are only two actors on the national stage: the federal government and the individual. Forget mediating institutions; even state and local governments—which, being closer to the ground, are better equipped to understand the challenges people face—don’t enter the picture. As Yuval Levin writes in his seminal Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism, “This emaciated understanding of the life of our nation is precisely why the Left is for now poorly equipped to help America adjust to twenty-first-century realities.” By reducing American life to the individual or the state, with nothing important in the middle, we sweep aside all of the nooks and crannies of life where people live and interact. The cliché that “government is just the word for the things we do together” renders invisible the vast ecosystem of civil society where people voluntarily cooperate and find meaning in their lives. This vision, Levin writes, “flattens the complex, evolved topography of social life and leaves us no way out of the corrosive feedback loop of individualism and centralization.”8
This is the vision not of the English garden but of a field yielding a single crop. Every stalk of wheat is equal in its sameness to the other and its need for nurturing by the government. Atomism, another form of alienation, is the feeling of being alone in the world, with no one to help you. Such feelings of isolation are inevitable when the state crowds out all the little nooks and crannies of civil society where people actually live. Levin notes that “collectivism and atomism are not opposite ends of the political spectrum, but rather two sides of one coin.”9
As a video played on the first day of the 2012 Democratic Convention put it, “Government’s the only thing that we all belong to.”10 That same year, Barack Obama’s campaign released a slideshow ad called “The Life of Julia.” It was about a fictional woman named Julia and all that the government will do for her over her entire lifetime. Each slide begins with the words “Under President Obama…” and then proceeds to explain some specific benefit she receives from the state, from government-provided education under Head Start as a kindergartner to support in high school as part of Obama’s Race to the Top program. In college, “under President Obama,” she g
ets a tax credit and government-supported health care. And so it goes. After graduation, she gets help from Equal Pay laws, and government subsidies defray her student loans and pay for her birth control. Later, “under President Obama: Julia decides to have a child.” When she’s old, “under President Obama,” she signs up for Medicare. And ultimately, “under President Obama,” she gets to retire and live off social security and even volunteer in a “community garden.”11
Leaving aside the weird implication that Barack Obama is sort of president for life in this formulation, the most interesting implication of the ad is what’s not there. Julia has no family, save for her one child, who vanishes from her life after he turns eighteen. But there are no parents, no husband, no loved ones whatsoever. There is no church, no voluntary association of any kind, until, of course, Julia’s golden years, when she has the time to volunteer for a community garden. The state, in other words, takes the place of family, friends, community, and religion.