There was a time last year that I believed it was possible that America was on the cusp of positive change, even during a surging pandemic and while Donald Trump was still President of the United States.
After the Democratic National Convention, I wrote about what the selection of Kamala Harris as VP could mean for America.
“[T]his new America struggling to be born is the context for Joe Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee for VPOTUS. Kamala Harris’ resume’ makes her the best VP choice; it’s her biography that makes her the right VP choice. It’s that biography that makes Harris more than a representative of that emerging America, she is that emerging America.”
But I wrote that about Harris before 75 million people voted to re-elect Trump and the complete collapse of the presidential transition process. It’s clear that something is fundamentally broken in America that’s beyond the ability of the existing American leadership class to address. The American elites that founded a country, doubled its size in a generation, won a civil war to preserve it and managed through the Great Depression and WWII to maintain it, are no longer relevant.
We’re arguably witnessing the beginning of the collapse of American society. For most Americans, that statement is incomprehensible. But it certainly is plausible.
Last November, in the chaotic aftermath of the presidential election and COVID-19 deaths exceeded 250,000, I wrote “Is America a Failing State?”
“If America feels broke to you, that’s because it is broke. It would not be unreasonable for a rational objective observer to conclude that America is a what political science calls a failing state, if not a failed state. The first responsibility of any society or its government is the health and safety of the citizens or members of that society. The inability or unwillingness to fulfill this responsibility represents an existential failure.”
I’m not a devotee of American presidents or the American ruling elites, but American culture has produced men of exceptional ability who have had multi-generational impact on American history. The four that come to mind are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. All but Lincoln were scions of the American ruling class, and all, including Lincoln, were products of America’s high culture. Which raises the question: how does a culture that produces these men, produce Donald Trump?
It doesn’t! Trump is a product of a different America, an America without a high culture. Sociologists define high culture as the exemplary art, the intellectual works of philosophy, history and literature that a society considers representative of who they are, think of it as the aspirational norms that a society uses to define itself, to itself and the world. It’s the responsibility of the privileged elites, the ruling class, to maintain and uphold these cultural norms.
There is a word that describes American culture today and explains Donald Trump. It’s philistinism. Philistinism is a derogatory term of the 18th and 19th centuries with its origin in Germany. It refers to a person or people whose attitudes, habits and character are predisposed to undervalue or depreciate notions of art and beauty, spirituality and intelligence. Philistinism and philistines are hostile to aesthetics, culture and the life of the mind.
The 19th century German polymath Johann von Goethe describes the Philistine this way, “. . . the Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own, but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his.”
I cannot think of a more applicable description of Trump and white MAGA America.
In his 2005 book, “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive”, Jared Diamond defined societal collapse as, “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity (my emphasis), over a considerable area, for an extended time.”
Throughout human history, civilizations, societies and empires have come and gone.
Let’s take a quick look at America’s favorite empire, Rome, to see how quickly the bottom can fall out for great powers.
From the time Augustus became Rome’s first official emperor in 27 BC to the Visigoths torching the place in 410 AD was a mere 383 years. And leadership fails even faster. Only 119 years separated Julius Caesar from Nero.
I would argue that whatever the ultimate environmental cause of their demise, be it severe climate or population changes, political dysfunction, economic stagnation or military defeats, a major common mitigating factor was cultural collapse. It’s the inability of a society to mobilize itself to address existential environmental threats that ensure its demise.
At this moment, America appears to be a country that lacks the cultural cohesion and leadership necessary to deal with its major environmental and structural challenges. America is at the precipice, staring into the abyss of history, abandoned by weak, ineffectual and self-absorbed elites that have abandoned the country to the mob.
But if this is the end, be mindful of Mark Anthony’s eulogy of Julius Caesar.
“The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft entered with their bones.”
Whether this end will be brutally quick or agonizingly long, understand that MAGA America will not go quietly into that good night.