Having made our way through a complex Introduction in two parts, The Raspberry Patch now continues with Chapter 1 of The Age of Spectacle. Chapter 1 will also be dished out in parts, probably three. (Substack limits the length of given individual posts for technical emailing reasons.) Today’s post covers the first two of seven categories of intellectual status quo explanations for American dysfunction.
I have decided, too, to reprint my table of contents at the end of each of our Age of Spectacle posts I’ll use bold italics, like this, to identify the chapter being aired from week to week in case some readers miss posts from time to time and lose track of where we are. I hope this helps.
A final note before we get down to it: I may occasionally intersperse other posts into The Raspberry Patch having nothing to do with Age of Spectacle material. Indeed, I was tempted to do that only a few days ago, but resisted. However, I may not always be resolute enough to prevent myself from going “sideways coconuts,” as my daughter likes to put it. You are hereby put on notice to expect the unexpected.
Chapter 1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
It helps to get out of Dodge sometimes. “What the hell is going on in the United States?” is a question I have heard many times in recent years as I travelled and lived in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. I heard it, for example, in Germany a few weeks before the November 2016 election when Donald Trump had not yet won the presidency. I later heard it in both the UAE and Israel without a touch of irony in places whose own politics were hardly untroubled, though differently so. I heard it while living in Singapore when the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the planet, and the U.S. response was the least effective and the most bizarre in the economically and technologically advanced parts of the world.
So I was probably prepared better than most Americans when I heard the same question asked here, again and louder after January 6, 2021, and yet again after the November 2022 midterm elections led to the bizarre spectacle of a Republican-majority House of Representatives turning the usually simple matter of electing a Speaker into mass bed-wetting orgy. And again after the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi in early November 2022, and again and again ad nauseam after whatever happens to be the latest spasm of disheartening spectacle in our politics. In my experience, each time the tone of the question becomes more insistent and, among many friends and well-wishers of the United States abroad as well as at home, suggestive of panic.
Despite the insistent repetition of the “what the hell?” question, each time we ask it we seem still surprised that we need to be asking it again. A kind of rubber-band effect seems to be at work, for each time we are surprised we still somehow expect in future to no longer be surprised. We expect things to spring back to normal, for the fever to break, as some have put it. But it keeps not happening that way, leading us to the dark speculation that we now live amid a new abnormal normal whose future trajectory is anything but stable or fully predictable. Recent case in point: When a Supreme Court Justice asks a lawyer whether a new definition of presidential immunity might include a President’s right to order the assassination of a rival, and the lawyer answers “It depends,” and the Justice barely blinks….. See what I mean? It means “we’re not in Kansas” anymore.
As already suggested, a thick emotional patina accompanies the process of perceiving the deterioration of norms most of us thought were deeply entrenched in U.S. political culture. The emotional timbre of the topic should sound a warning: “Fear gives bad advice,” once said Elena Bonner, so we are fortunate that a goodly number of scholars and other observers have managed to steady themselves for objective analysis. Indeed, plenty of theories as to what is wrong lately with the United States have been on offer, some of them more widely including the cultural West. We limit ourselves here mainly to a focus on the United States, but the fact that similar disquiet crosses the Atlantic tells us something important: Whatever it is that ails us is not incidental, accidental, or superficial, but something deeper in the broader cultural and even in the philosophical milieu that defines these polities’ present circumstances in contradistinction from those of their origins.
The seven sets of theories briefly summed below form an analytically interdependent muddle. That means, first, that each theory is valuable but none is as distinct or conclusive as its advocates usually claim; it is as though a group of talented thinkers climbed their chosen hill but thought they had thereby explored the entire mountain range. Second, muddle means that most of the analyses keep leading into, pointing toward, or bumping up against each other.[1]
For a running example, a focus on the American meritocracy, sometimes called the “overclass,” run amok inevitably leads to arguments bedecked with details as to how that overclass has run amok—say, by blithely and greedily financializing the economy when selected members have not been busy offshoring well-paid unionized manufacturing jobs. That connection, once made, has to lead to a consideration of consequences, among them a burgeoned inequality spread defined not so much by distentions of income or wealth below the tenth percentile but by a massive distention above the fifth percentile; the rise of blue-collar populism, which soon brings itself to focus on a main political manifestation: polarization.
But a focus on polarization quickly generates likely causes that are not about an isolated or corrupt overclass alone, but rather concern as well media business models changed by technological innovations and the pangs of institutional aging. Once the inquisitive mind hits upon technology, connections to the social trust hemorrhage we have been experiencing for decades come to mind, and the social trust bucket in turn has plenty to say about polarization, and about the evident urban/rural divide exacerbated by economic globalization, and so on around and around. That’s a muddle befitting a complex reality, something in practice like trying to keep track of an overexcited octopus’ eight flailing tentacles in real time.
Thanks in part to groupthink phenomena stemming mainly from academics not reading as broadly as they do deeply, connections among insights from different disciplines frequently remain unmade or under-studied. So the muddle is not given its full and demanding due. That doesn’t bother commercial publishers these days, for complex arguments seeking to connect many dots are judged too many for most readers to follow, even if the dots merit connecting. Complexity is not in high demand, especially at a time of epidemic impatience. So most academics remain ensconced within their disciplinary lanes and intellectuals who dare be more ambitious have little promise of a wide audience.
Indeed, the big-think public intellectuals of the postwar era have nearly disappeared, save for some mind-roving journalists too often limited by op-ed length strictures. Thanks to Substack and other new outlets, some of these voices are reappearing or are trying to. We will strive to overcome these limitations by regrouping the seven theory sets described in this chapter into our heretofore specified three major underturtle causal streams leading to the Age of Spectacle. Explaining how we will do that, however, must wait: We need first to review the extant state of play, showing how even the best current thinking falls short of the synoptic explanation the variance deserves.
The best thinking falls into these seven categories: meritocracy awry; populism; polarization; institutional decay; social trust depletion; plutocracy’s industrial folklore; and what I have labeled technovelty. This last category is a bridge to the rest of the argument, as you may have discerned from the Introduction, but it is worth including if only to show that awareness of it is neither scarce nor superficial.
1. Meritocracy Awry: The United States, it is often and rightly observed, is plagued by a meritocracy gone rogue, an increasingly insulated plutocratic overclass that cares about its own interests and either does not recognize or does not care about what average Americans think and how they live. The meritocracy, through its lawyers, bankers, accountants, consultants, corporate executives, and associated public-relations and rented think-tank apologists, has become hopelessly venal and transactionalist, warping laws and institutions to serve their interests at everyone else’s expense. This is an accusation leveled at the overclass and its enabling tenured political class not just on the Trumpist Right, but also on the Sanders/Warren Left. It is where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street both found their core energies in the wake of “the big short,” and those energies have not so much abated over the past decade and a half as been transformed into pockets of polarized and seething determination inside the halls of Congress and without.
America’s political economy resembles in some ways an informal social Ponzi scheme, sometimes derisively called “trickle down,” which worked all right as long as the middle and mid-bottom layers evinced some upward social mobility and rising living standards. Some scholars site the basic arrangement as that of a Lockean state in which, by contract, nobles extracted firm rights to property and status from the state in return for their loyalty within legal constraints, but that over time ran into friction on account of the spread of egalitarian norms and so had to deal with strata of the population neither royal nor noble nor always conveniently well behaved. That describes the socio-political trajectory of 19th-century America fairly well.
But no matter the origins, the arrangement has failed its minimum test because the neo-aristocratic pretensions of the overclass, the new nobles, have now produced financialized kleptocratic habits and related rentier structures linked to a globalized elite. We are indeed living, at least in the United States, at a time of rentier capitalism that bears little resemblance to the shopkeeper capitalism of Adam Smith’s time. Connection to these global structures is out of reach for most Americans, and those few who are plugged in cannot be readily controlled through conventional political means. The entire set-up is thus, to no small degree, beyond democratic accountability. The neo-aristocratic meritocracy has become so entrenched that the non-symbol manipulators beneath them—at least 75 percent of the population—cannot help but feel the squeeze they are in, particularly the grasp of the coldblooded, short-termist IBGYBG (“I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone”) mentality of most contemporary mega-corporate managers, all duly sanctified and institutionalized by the nation’s top graduate business schools in the post-Reagan era.
Alas, the argument goes, we are now in a situation where short-term profits for a minority of perhaps, at most, a quarter of the population, but more likely just five percent of it, increasingly produce long-term loses for a majority whose expectations of social mobility have cruelly shrunken at the same time. That is different from the standard of post-World War II America, where short-term profits for some produced lesser but still positive long-term profits for others. It is certainly very different from the 1870-1900 period when real non-farm wages increased on average around 50 percent. We may now even be approaching something like Marx’s notion of proletariat immiseration, but via means Marx could never have imagined. Marx could never have wrapped his head around a volume of international trade, mobility of labor, and reciprocally shifting Gini coefficients on an international level of the sort that exist today. Nor could he have imagined the proletariat that matters coming not from a recently urbanized peasantry, but rather from legions of déclassé middle-class folk.
Most this is true, by the way. Also true is the fact that GDP per capita in the United States dropped 21 percent in the 2008-21 period off the average level of growth during the 1990-2007 period.[2] The material pain has been real for many, both absolutely for some and set relatively against expectations for many more. But this is not the be-all and end-all in explaining the variance of “what the hell has gone wrong.” A text-book example of the error of thinking otherwise may be found, by accident I suspect, in Angus Deaton’s October 27, 2022 Project Syndicate essay “Who Broke American Democracy?”
Deaton’s essay is unusual in the sense that while every sentence is arguably correct, the overall impression it gives is incorrect despite the fact that in other writings Deaton has demonstrated a wider and more sophisticated grasp of the causal factors. Likely, errors committed by omission here probably result from editors’ and publishers’ still-growing impulse to publish too short pieces that too often do damage to good sense. How so?
Of course plutocracy, or rentier capitalism as some call it, is one of the ills that pisses off the poorly educated, by whatever terms they understand it; it certainly pisses off some well educated Americans, too. A special 2011 issue of The American Interest was devoted to this subject in which I, then the editor, wrote the lead essay. In that essay I noted in passing, as Deaton does not in the 2022 essay here under scrutiny, that plutocratic skewing was even worse in the decades after the Civil War, before the Progressive era reforms and the rise of the labor movement; but norms were different then and extra-parliamentary protest took different forms, as well. From this truncated version of his work one might think that Deaton is almost a dozen years late in recognizing the issue. Certainly there is a materialist basis for the disaffection at the core of the populist revolt; everyone knows that and has known it for years—at least since 2008-09. Still, it is a stretch to directly link the decline in marriage and out-of-wedlock births to this factor, as Deaton does without explaining—or being allowed because of length restrictions to explain—how he does it. It is not that bashed self-esteem doesn’t affect this data set, but that other factors likely affect it more.
Deaton has probably been edited here so that he says nothing at all about the non-material factors that have stoked the alienation of the populist core, and hence put liberal democratic norms at risk. He does not mention the culture war issues at play in the populist surge: the bucket of frenzied, emotional sex/gender/homosexual marriage disagreements, or the eliding religious/atheist divide between typical folk and elites that sets the basis for the abortion issue, the propriety of religious expression in public spaces, the “school choice” position, and more. He does not mention fears, often exaggerated but not invented out of whole cloth, concerning both legal and especially illegal immigration; the words xenophobia and racism do not appear. He does not mention the contribution of a changed media technology and associated business models on how affinity groups bundle the hatching and spread of conspiracy theories, including ones about supposedly corrupt, “crooked” elites. Things are bad enough without media outlets spreading if not sometimes inventing false tales of greed and avarice. Deaton does not mention the impact of cyber-propelled affluence in creating decadence and undermining standards and disciplines of all kinds, which likely has more to do with the drop-off in church attendance he cites than self-esteem factors. He does not mention the decay of deep reading and written-word comprehension well short of that, or the impact of so many people marinating their brains in graphic fantasy spectacle that erodes their facility for distinguishing what is real from what is not.
Any materialist-only approach to this subject, accidental or not, is really very quaint, almost 19th-century positivist in character. It captures a chunk of the variance, but not the only or the largest chunk. Inequality of dignity in a post-scarcity age is at least as consequential politically as inequality of the pocketbook. The materialist arguments is accurate as far as it goes, but it goes insufficiently far and so makes it seem as though the author is afflicted by a form of social scientist autism. As Abraham Maslow famously put it, if all you have is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail; mutatis mutandis, if what you have a treasured data base on a narrow but important set of parameters, everything begins to look like it must be interpretable according to that data base. The afflicted social scientist cannot see past his own methodological hobbyhorse, so that flaws or mere limitations in his interpretation never interrupt his argument.
Thus the clincher: If Deaton’s explanation as likely mis-presented here were accurate and sufficient, then African-Americans would be at the forefront of the populist Right, since they have been harmed more grievously than any American group by the factors Deaton limns. Logic dictates that they therefore would have been among those storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to keep their blue-collar savior in power, again, if Deaton’s account were both true and sufficient. Guess what? They weren’t: Q.E.D.
In any event, the American political elite has indeed become a hollow elite, as Charles Murray called it some years ago in Coming Apart and as Christopher Lasch saw coming much earlier in his far superior 1985 book Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. One of its characteristics, as both Murray and Lasch would agree, was well described by Eric Hoffer many years ago, especially among those pseudo-intellectuals, more to the Left than to the Right, who imagine themselves masters of understanding: “Scratch an intellectual and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound, and the smell of common folk.”[3]
That, in a nutshell, furnishes the deeper backdrop of Hillary Clinton’s disastrous “deplorables” utterance that arguably lost her the presidency in November 2016—because it was clear that she really meant it. As Russell Kirk once observed, “There is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you are going to remake him in your image for his own good.” And it is what made J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy so useful as illumination for many, before Vance misplaced either his mind or his virtue—it’s still not exactly clear which—and headed for the U.S. Senate.
The “deplorables” remark was just a continuation of the “consciousness raising” condescension Mrs. Clinton learned at school in the Sixties, and it never sunk into her head just how off-putting such elitist cant can be when aimed at typical but hardly evil people. The truth, that ever has a hard time sinking in to the left-of-center shard of the American elite, is that no one can force people to be more of a cosmopolitan liberal than their educations and experiences enable them to be. That sheeple liberal elite acts invariably like Pauline Kael did in 1972, wondering how Richard Nixon could possibly have won re-election since no one she knew living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan Island had voted for him. To lump all those who have supported Donald Trump politically into a single “deplorables” category is to withhold any sense of compassion for others with whom one differs on political issues, exactly the benefit of a doubt one would otherwise expect of those with liberal meliorist sensibilities. These days no group of Americans holds a monopoly on mean-spiritedness.
2. Populism: Hollow elites living in mentally gated bubbles give rise to populist rage as naturally as legitimated injustice gives rise to protest. Partly in reaction to the American meritocracy gone rogue and venal, political mobilization, mainly on the Right but also on the Left, has obviously increased. In November 2016 it shockingly tipped the scales of prior normalcy, electing to the Presidency a man uniquely unqualified for office, a man capable of making even John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, and Franklin Pierce look good by comparison. Populism tends to mobilize new-to-politics people who know little about policy issues and who are less well educated than elites. The less well-educated tend to resent experts and expertise they do not understand, and they especially resent being patronized for not sharing chic salon social views and being called “deplorables” on account of it.
Now resentment, if strong and widespread enough, can result in bite-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face behavior. Trump’s personal case, getting elected President despite not expecting to win, has proven the point. It took 96 years, but it made H.L. Mencken dead-on correct back in July 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron.”[4]
Because larger percentages of less well-educated people do not evince deep literacy habits (i.e., read books or essays), they respond better to simplified story narratives than to explanations—even though everyone likes a good story, or else the typical anecdote-laden fare in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Vanity Fair would not read as it does in these days of slouched professional journalism. As a result, populists tend to go long on emotion evoked by images and slogans and short on analysis enabled by written words and actual coherent arguments. The psychology of bloodsport typically displaces efforts to understand substantively what needs to be fixed; issued get framed in biographized “us” versus “them” tones. The division is invariably two-valued; no third option or side is imaginable, and in that form it unerringly resembles ideological as opposed to analytical thinking (much more on that below).
Like all ideological thinking, too, it emits strong odors of confirmation bias and overweening ego-investment, the stronger the less based on actual analytic effort and the less interested in anything akin to problem-solving it is. Ideological thinking cares more about generating problems than solving them, for that is how polarization produces mobilization—and mobilization is what ideological entrepreneurs do. “In general, it is a very good rule to ignore anyone who says there is no middle way on a contentious issue,” once wrote Andrew Sullivan, adding shrewdly: “If their first instinct is to reject complexity, they’re not actually interested in humanity as it is.”[5]
It’s not that many enthusiasts of today’s populist moment lack legitimate gripes, or understand at some level how they are being screwed and who is screwing them. But that has always been true to some extent. What characterizes current populist surges, and not just in the United States, is the clear role of new communications technologies in spreading the memes. An unprecedented combination of hyper-connectivity and disintermediation is hard at work, the main instruments of the combination being the internet and the smartphone. But shifts in communications technology always spark characteristic effects; as Harold Innis put it back in 1951, at the very portal of the television era, it is very nearly a law of social dynamics that “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances.”[6] Even the movement from scroll to codex some twenty centuries ago supplies an example. More pertinent to our time, however, is the impact of radio during the interwar period, an impact captured brilliantly in José Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 classic The Revolt of the Masses. Reading that book today sends shivers rising up the back of the neck.
A little bit of historical knowledge also teaches about a pre-Great War American example of a populist surge, as well, this one enabled by rapidly expanded literacy on account of the spread of elementary schooling, the blossoming of newspapers and, in time, the telegraph. The capital-P Populists of the 1880s and 1890s took over the listless Democratic Party from the increasingly conservative Grover Cleveland in 1896 and nearly made William Jennings Bryan President of the United States. Don’t be misled by names: That Democratic Party was in the main isolationist when it wasn’t imperialistically aimed toward Central and Latin America, racist, anti-female suffrage, anti-Semitic, and anti-science as well as anti-Federal elitist.
Back then, first populism and then Populism were Democratic Party identity markers that only over time congealed by no straight path into a pulse of Progressive reform led by an internationalist-oriented and, relative to those times, a more tolerant and liberal-minded Republican Party. When Theodore Roosevelt referred to “the malefactors of great wealth” he was transcribing a Populist-become-Democratic Party meme into a Progressive Republican script. TR restated the influential aphorism of Louis D. Brandeis, also a Republican Party supporter who became a Supreme Court justice in 1916: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Brandeis influenced both Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and hence, in effect, framed the critical election of 1912.[7] If a shift of that kind happens again, if today’s populists somehow tee up a pulse of effective progressive reform in the other major party, then history will once against rhyme, only with the names and roles of the two major parties reversed. It could happen.
Meanwhile, not all Trump supporters were in 2016 and remain today mental midgets. But their mode of political representation, these days at least in a relative vacuum of civic education, is toxic to a liberal, procedural-based political system that sees itself as a level playing field for adjudicating conflicts of interest. It is certainly toxic to a normative political order that formally values the very traits populists disdain: humility, tolerance, calm and reasoned open debate, and hence above all the natural acceptance that the opposition is loyal within an agreed and, to some extent, a sacralized constitutional framework. Polls show pretty clearly that Trump supporters, most believing existential issues to be at stake, care more about taking and keeping power by any means necessary than they do about democratic niceties or the Constitution which, very likely, few have ever read (and that certainly includes Donald Trump himself).
Contemporary left-of-center American populism exists, too, but it usually manifests in less boisterous in-your-face ways, at least when its energies are not concentrated in street and campus protests. Even in typical ideologized form it usually looks only a very little bit like Ortega y Gasset’s “reason of unreason” and it rarely if ever touches off episodes even close to resembling the iconic expulsion and death of Miguel de Unamuno at the University of Salamanca in 1936. Yes, what used to be called “revolutionary intolerance” in the Sixties is still alive and well among self-styled woke progressives—a March 2023 incident at Stanford involving Judge Kyle Duncan supplies an excellent illustration— but Duncan did survive the ordeal, after all. Less spectacular—word used advisedly and carefully—aspects of populism and its origins may be more important than political mannerisms.
As more Americans from the sub-aristocracy got barely educated in the 20th-century, notably that century’s second half, a kind of flattened intellectual egalitarianism grew up. Ever more people came to have a confidence in their own mastery of esoteric subjects that they did not really earn or deserve. Armed with a rudimentary facility with symbolic language and abstractions, many confident egos were launched beyond the reach of any actual competence or understanding. The standard mode of thinking for people with intellectual delusions of adequacy is ideological thinking, not analytical thinking. What is true in spades on the populist Right is true in a slightly more refined manner on the populist Left. We could call this a fake-it-til-you-make-it sort of thing, except that those doing it usually don’t know they’re faking it.
Finally on this point, one has to wonder whether, for some at least, unselfconscious religious attitudes held over from a previous century may matter. The unacknowledged arrogance often found in the company of affluence may testify to a wraith-like Calvinist aura, to wit: I’m well off and high status measured by educational level, so I must then possess what amounts to a secular form of grace. It could well be. For many Americans not similarly privileged this kind of presumption is unbearably pompous. All of which is to say that populism, whether latent or headlong in posture, is tethered to the American social sphere by threads of many colors and thicknesses—and pretty much always has been.
The Age of Spectacle: How a Mash-up of Affluence, Aspirational Amnesia, and Entertainment Technovelty Have Wrecked American Culture and Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
2. Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
3. Underturtle II: The End of Modernity, or the Origin Stories We Have Misplaced
4. Underturtle III: The Regression from Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality
5. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
7. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
8. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
9. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the Future of American Politics
EPILOGUE
10. What Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Index
[1] I here deliberately omit specific citations amid what has become a voluminous literature. Indeed, it has become impossible to read everything on this subject, or set of subjects, published over the past two decades. As a thought-magazine editor for most of this period I was in the enviable position of having been exposed to much of the best of it. But I still can’t claim to have read all of it; no one can and be believed. As we review the seven categories, then, readers will note that some sections are shorter than others and that, in some cases, I have interpolated or expanded the extant literature to some degree to suit my reading and intuition. We all just do the best we can when comprehensiveness becomes humanly impossible.
[2] See the graph in Martin Wolf, “In Defense of Democratic Capitalism,” Financial Times, January 20, 2023.
[3] From First Things, Last Things (1970).
[4] Baltimore Evening Star, July 25, 1920.
[5] Sullivan, “The Eradication of an ‘ism’,” Weekly Dish, March 10, 2023.
[6] Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951), p. 13. Innis was a mentor to the better known but perhaps less wise Marshall McLuhan.
[7] Brandeis later elaborated his argument that concentrations of private economic power were inimical to democracy in his once-famous 1934 book The Curse of Bigness. Thanks to so-called hipster antitrust efforts today Brandeis and his arguments are making a comeback as part of the backlash against de facto pro-big business market fundamentalism. Not a moment too soon.