It is certainly possible to hope that the inauguration of Donald J. Trump will be greeted by a resurgence of the American spirit, from new inventions to a revival of entrepreneurial drive and the renewal of American industry and crafts. Trump may well be right that the mere threat of tariffs may reverse the flow of blue-collar jobs abroad while helping ensure the safety and integrity of vital supply chains that are essential to 21st-century industrial production.
He is certainly right that restoring competitive balance between America and its trade partners abroad, and between monopolistic corporations and small producers at home, is essential to growing and maintaining healthy communities where Americans can work and raise children, who in turn might better their communities. It is hard to argue with the idea that reforming the country’s disastrous attempts at trade and industrial policy while getting poisons out of its food, water and air are necessary steps towards a better American future.
Whether tariffs and better trade deals will heal the deeper fractures in the American spirit seems much harder to predict, though. Having grown used to self-determining with bureaucratically defined “identity groups” whose purpose is to legitimise unequal treatment under the law, it is no surprise that Americans have also grown suspicious of each other and of institutions that have schooled them in a vision of the country, its history, and its laws as all being varying shades of deplorable. Without a usable common past, or shared values, it is hard to imagine a shared future – which is why the rise of “woke” thought in schools and workplaces was accompanied by a sudden and startling decline in the American birthrate. Why have kids, if the country you live in is evil, and the future is bleak?
It is also no surprise that the number of watchable films and television shows created by incredibly wealthy techno-monopolies such as Amazon, Netflix and Apple over the past decade can be counted on the fingers of one hand. American publishers, meanwhile, print thousands of books that no one in the world reads, while routinely losing money on over 95% of their titles. Here, the villain isn’t necessarily wokeness: it’s the monopolistic, profit-free structure of the culture industries, which made paint-by-numbers ideology an easy substitute for appealing voices, characters and plots. In a moment where no one could agree on what Americans shared in common, it was also no wonder that an ever-expanding class of DEI bureaucrats, sensitivity readers, and the like appeared to be in danger of replacing actual writers and scholars and editors at movie studios and universities and publishing houses.
“Wokeness” was ultimately a symptom of the ills of America’s culture industries rather than its cause. The cause was the monopolistic structure of the culture business. By using tech cash to take-over the culture business, which they repurposed as a way of providing free content to keep users penned inside their gated monopolies, where they could drop more cash, Amazon, Netflix and Apple cut the connection between cultural products and the marketplace — substituting in its place the taste of layers of cubicle-dwellers with fancy resumes from Ivy League schools. In doing so, they are responsible for perhaps the single most vacant decade in American cultural history.
Name an American band, or an American director, or an American novelist, who has authentically captured the imaginations of even a small number of dedicated fans over the past decade. Instead, content producers of all races and genders, working under the censorious eyes of Ivy League race-class-and-gender twits, turned out indistinguishable widgets for zombie-like viewers who unsurprisingly seemed to have little idea of what they were watching or why they should care about it.
The cratering of American accomplishment in the popular arts, like music, movies and cartoons — with the exception of rap music, whose markets remained stubbornly local, and therefore immune to bureaucratic intervention from above — arguably poses more of a threat to the American future than the fact that low-cost washing machines are being assembled in Mexico. To turn that around, America needs a cultural renaissance of the type it enjoyed during the 1850s, the 1890s and Twenties and the Fifties. That, in turn, requires a shared vision of the country and its future that inspires or at least infuriates large numbers of people.
What Trump’s election shows is not that we have arrived at such a moment, but that we are ripe for one. What it will look like remains a mystery, though. The alt-culture of the Right is every bit as polluted and stupid — and every bit as anti-American — as the repetitive conformity-culture of the woke Left. If you doubt that, take a look at the fearful idiocy of the New Christian Right, led by Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens; their ignorance of basic Christian theology, resentful hatred of Jews and Israel, and cosplay affinity for eastern orthodox churches is matched only by their desire to replace the common history of the West with bizarre revisionist nonsense, such as the idea that Winston Churchill was the great villain of the Second World War ; or that Bashar al-Assad was the Middle East’s great protector of Christians and a steely foe of Barack Obama, who sought to overthrow him; or that the nuke that the US dropped on Nagasaki targeting poor Japanese Christians praying in church. J.D. Vance’s celebration of the loserdom of poor whites — on whose behalf he opposes automation of loading docks at ports, and protests non-existent “massacres” of Christians in Syria — is in fact the mirror-image of the resentment-based identity politics he claims to oppose, in which Hillary Clinton’s white “deplorables” are substituted for the Left’s “people of colour” as objects of sectarian pity. The idea that a usable American culture can be extracted from such dregs is clearly a non-starter, since at its root it seeks to replace America and its founding exceptionalist doctrines with something else. So where might a true American Renaissance come from?
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As social animals, individuals are reflections of the cultures that produced them. Whether they grew up rich or poor, or light-skinned or dark, or gay or straight, matters much less than where they grew up, and how they understood and reacted to the choices presented by the world around them. Michelangelo could not have been Dutch, any more than Rembrandt could have been an Italian, or Steve Jobs could have been a Frenchman, or Adam Smith could have been Russian, or Freud could have been a Catholic priest. The fact that human cultures are often not contiguous with national borders doesn’t make them any less powerful in determining how people imagine themselves and their place in the world — which in turn determines how they do business, raise children, pray, think, write and paint.
Starting in the Sixties, however, culture became a dirty word — a back-door for racism to re-enter academic disciplines that were eager to free themselves from the taint of past national colonial enterprises, which were now understood as the height of wrongdoing. Anthropology, which had been a fruitful meeting place for open-minded students of history, philosophy, linguistics and other disciplines including Claude Levi-Strauss, Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Clifford and Hilda Geertz, many of whom were also terrific writers, now re-defined as the handmaiden of colonialism, became a dead field of study, overtaken by narcissistic first-person meditations on the observer-position and other forms of post-colonial apologetics.
The reluctance to see culture as the governing force in human behaviour did more than deaden what was once one of the more rewarding sections of any university course catalogue. It is also the cause of some of the most obvious large-scale social failures of the past century, whether spearheaded by utopian Maoist revolutionaries, Islamist political actors, or liberal welfare state bureaucrats. Look at American inner cities, whose ills remain all but untouched by multi-billion dollar social welfare campaigns that began over a half century ago, or the continuing disaster of large-scale immigration from Muslim countries to Europe. This is the human price of ignoring the determining influence of culture in favour of universalist fantasies of whatever colour or stripe.
Conversely, the ability to see through the governing frames of deterministic materialism and other faddish universalisms to the case-specific strengths and weaknesses of underlying cultures turns out to be a pretty reliable way of picking winners and building wealth — whether by investing in culturally advantaged, though resource-poor territories such as Singapore, Israel and Taiwan, or by betting on Silicon Valley upstarts like Microsoft, Apple and Google over the once-dominant IBM and Bell Labs.
Even before its emergence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as an independent political force, America had emerged as an independent global cultural vector that sought to lead the world through the force of its unique example. The 1,000 or so Puritan colonists who traveled from England to North America in 1630 under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company imagined themselves as the founders of “a city on a hill”, in the phrase of the Puritan John Winthrop; the Puritans hoped their example would inspire 17th-century Europeans to end their destructive religious wars and live peacefully together.
In reality, neither the Protestant nor the Catholic side of Europe’s religious wars gave a hoot about 1,000 English Puritans who had taken up subsistence farming in the North American wilderness. As a result of this failure of the European imagination, the attention of the Puritans and their progeny turned inward, seeking to discover the glaring faults that had led God to abandon them and their mission — thereby inculcating the still-recognisable American traits of communal self-obsession and soul-searching narcissism, according to the great Harvard scholar Perry Miller. Yet nearly four centuries later, it can still plausibly be argued that the global impact of American culture has been more significant than America’s direct attempts at conquest and colonial rule, which by traditional European (or Arab, or Chinese, or Mongol) standards have been relatively few and far-between.
America was the world’s first successful post-colonial state, separating itself from its European progenitors — who included not only Great Britain, the largest sponsor of colonies in North America, but also Holland, France and Spain. It was also the first state born of Enlightenment principles and aspirations, which were reflected in its democratic and anti-monarchical state structure, making it a uniquely welcoming home for immigrants of all cultural and religious — and eventually, racial — backgrounds. Because America was founded according to 18th-century Enlightenment principles, and not in 19th century romantic ideas of being rooted in the soil or in particular bloodlines, American nationalism has always been different from European-style nationalism. This is much to the displeasure of America’s home-grown blood-and-soil types, who look in vain to the national compact for invocations of native folk traditions or the privileging of English or European bloodlines or racial preferences or mandates for particular forms of worship. Unfortunately for them, these things don’t exist – because America was never that type of nation. Yes, America declared themselves to be one nation under God. Yet Jesus Christ, let alone the guidance or sovereignty of any particular Church established in his name, was notably absent from the country’s founding deliberations and documents.
America has also maintained a unique and particular affinity for the Jews. This affinity, which began with the Puritan colonists, who modeled their endeavor on the Old Testament Israelites, proclaimed themselves to have joined in a new covenant with the Israelite God, and taught their children to read and write Hebrew, was hardly just a passing metaphor. Absent the reality of God’s covenant with Israel, the Puritan mission to the American wilderness was meaningless. The American affinity for Jews, and with the Jewish relationship with the God of Israel, also extended itself to living Jewish refugees from European persecution, who arrived in the colonies in the mid 17th century, shortly after the Puritans, though they were strictly forbidden from settling in England; When the American nation was born, Jews were formally welcomed as citizens by George Washington, with open arms and none of the national soul-searching that accompanied the granting of citizenship to Jews in England or in revolutionary France, where it took the National Assembly three months of debate to finally decide the issue.
The New Israel founded by the Puritans, to which the Founding Fathers gave life through the Enlightenment forms of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, quite deliberately separated itself from the European kingdoms and empires that came before it, and the nation-states that came after it, in that it was never defined by race, religion, or by the soil. American culture remains rooted precisely in the covenants and affinities of its founders, who made a determined break with Old Europe and its divisions and hatreds and form a new covenant, that might serve as an example to all of mankind.
Whether Americans choose to accept or reject the covenant made by their forebears is a question that every generation of Americans until now has always answered in the affirmative. That’s where American art and culture come from. Walt Whitman set out walking to discover America and his fellow Americans. Herman Melville sent Ishmael — if that was his name — to sea on a whaling ship. Mark Twain sent Huck Finn down the Mississippi River, with the success of his journey resting on his ability to escape from his father. Gatsby’s failure to banish the past may have been fated, but it meant his death — just as William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson’s attachment to his family past means his death. Augie March seizes his own life in his hands by leaving Chicago. Not even the most casual student of American culture can understand the future as anything other than the idol of every American, and the past as anything other than a trap.
Americans are free to reject the idea of a national covenant with God as nonsense and become more like the rest of the world, by hating Jews, celebrating strange Churches, embracing manufactured sectarian divisions on the basis of skin colour, religion, race and sexual preferences, and clinging to other ancient or post-colonial hatreds, whether in the name of the Left or the Right. But what both the anti-American factions of the American Left and Right should bear in mind is that you can’t have America without the covenant: the decision to reject the covenant, which gave birth to the idea of American exceptionalism, whether understood in its Puritan or Enlightenment forms, means the end of the American story.
It is indeed the adherence to and championing of the uniqueness of the American covenant that separates Donald Trump from both his ostensible allies such as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance on the Right, and his anti-exceptionalist opponents and critics such as Barack Obama and his progressive allies on the Left. If a renewal of American culture is indeed in the offing, it is likely to come from neither side in the present-day culture wars. Hilariously enough, it will come from the man at the top, leading by example.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/