Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
Page 54
50. Tyler Cowen, “Move On—This Isn’t True Here,” Marginal Revolution, July 26, 2008. http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/07/xxxxxxx.html
51. Amy Chozick, “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P. Pounces,” New York Times, September 10, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-basket-of-deplorables.html
52. Quoted in “Happiness,” in Tyron Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors, Both Ancient and Modern (Detroit: F. B. Dickerson Company, 1908), p. 215.
53. Allahpundit, “Confirmed: Republicans Like Democratic Ideas Better When They’re Trump’s,” Hot Air, September 2, 2015. http://hotair.com/archives/2015/09/02/confirmed-republicans-like-democratic-ideas-better-when-they-think-theyre-trumps/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Gfile09042015&utm_term=GFile
54. Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing the 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” Washington Post, August 10, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/10/in-a-new-poll-half-of-republicans-say-they-would-support-postponing-the-2020-election-if-trump-proposed-it/?utm_term=.b31482067e85
55. Gabby Morrongiello, “Conway Jokes CPAC Could Become ‘TPAC’ in Honor of Trump,” Washington Examiner, February 23, 2017. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/conway-jokes-cpac-could-become-tpac-in-honor-of-trump/article/2615550
56. “Celebs Pledge Allegiance to Obama,” Fox News, September 20, 2012. http://video.foxnews.com/v/1852139055001/?#sp=show-clips. See also Francis Romero, “Celebs Pledge Allegiance,” Time, January 20, 2009. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1872644,00.html
57. Mark Morford, “Is Obama an Enlightened Being? Spiritual Wise Ones Say: This Sure Ain’t No Ordinary Politician. You Buying It?,” San Francisco Gate, June 6, 2008. http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/morford/article/Is-Obama-an-enlightened-being-Spiritual-wise-2544395.php
58. Deepak Chopra, “Obama and the Call: ‘I Am America,’ ” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/deepak-chopra/obama-and-the-call-i-am-a_b_80016.html
59. Eve Konstantine, “The Obama Vibe,” Huffington Post, February 5, 2008. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-konstantine/the-obama-vibe_b_85143.html
60. Washington Free Beacon Staff, “Barbara Walters: We Thought Obama Was Going to Be ‘The Next Messiah,’ ” Washington Free Beacon, December 18, 2013. http://freebeacon.com/culture/barbara-walters-we-thought-obama-was-going-to-be-the-next-messiah/
61. Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, April 7, 1993,” Liz Carpenter Lecture Series. https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/generalspeeches/1993/19930407.html
CONCLUSION
1. Charles Krauthammer, “Decline Is a Choice,” Weekly Standard, October 19, 2009. http://www.weeklystandard.com/decline-is-a-choice/article/270813
2. I am indebted to Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2014) for this discussion.
3. Linda C. Reader, “Augustine and the Case for Limited Government,” Humanitas 16, no. 2, (2003), pp. 97-98.
4. Ibid., p. 98.
5. According to the American G. K. Chesterton Society, this is a good summation of his thinking, but he never said it so explicitly. See “When Man Ceases to Worship God,” American Chesterton Society. https://www.chesterton.org/ceases-to-worship/
6. The year 2006 marked a watershed: According to the U.S. Census, that was the year when, for the first time in the history of the Republic, Americans preferred water to beer. As political scientist Susan McWilliams notes, beer is a socially oriented beverage and water is a privately oriented one. “There’s a reason that beer commercials tend to include lots of people hanging out in a room together,” she writes, “and bottled water commercials tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise—even though they are not being chased.” Susan McWilliams, “Beer and Civic Life,” Front Porch Republic, March 20, 2009. http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/03/beer-and-civic-life/
7. This line comes from the TV series American Gods. Based on the Neil Gaiman novel of the same name, the show posits that we’ve turned TV, technology, etc., into the new gods of our age. “You are what you worship,” explains Vulcan, the ancient volcano god turned god of guns. “The screen is the altar. I’m the one they sacrifice to,” Media, the new god of TV, explains. “Then till now. Golden Age to Golden Age. They sit side by side, ignore each other, and give it up to me. Now they hold a smaller screen on their lap or in the palm of their hand so they don’t get bored watching the big one. Time and attention, better than lamb’s blood. Huh?”
8. Kif Leswing, “The Average iPhone Is Unlocked 80 Times per Day,” Business Insider, April 18, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-average-iphone-is-unlocked-80-times-per-day-2016-4
9. “Americans Are Poorly Informed About Basic Constitutional Provisions,” Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, September 12, 2017. https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-are-poorly-informed-about-basic-constitutional-provisions?utm_source=news-release&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017_civics_survey&utm_term=survey&utm_source=Media&utm_campaign=e5f213892a-Civics_survey_2017_2017_09_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9e3d9bcd8a-e5f213892a-425997897
10. One member of this crowd is Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. Among various proposals for causes by which millennials can derive communal meaning, he asked: “How about modernizing democracy so everyone can vote online…?” See: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement Address at Harvard,” Harvard Gazette, May 25, 2017. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/05/mark-zuckerbergs-speech-as-written-for-harvards-class-of-2017/
11. John Courtney Murray, “The Return to Tribalism,” Woodstock Theological Library at Georgetown University. http://www.library.georgetown.edu/woodstock/murray/1961d
12. “Idiocy” shares the same root word—idios—with “idiom” and “idiosyncratic.” It means private, selfish, removed from the public good, alone. An idiota in modern Spanish means moron. But idiota in Latin means a layman or ordinary person. For the Greeks, the idiot was the opposite of the citizen who has both knowledge of, and appreciation for, the larger community. “An idiot,” writes Walter C. Parker, “is one whose self-centeredness undermines his or her citizen identity, causing it to wither or never to take root in the first place. Private gain is the goal, and the community had better not get in the way. An idiot is suicidal in a certain way, definitely self-defeating, for the idiot does not know that privacy and individual autonomy are entirely dependent on the community.” I have problems with some of Parker’s characterization and his politics, but I also agree with his core complaint. Education is all about turning barbarians and idiots into citizens. Walter C. Parker, “Teaching Against Idiocy,” Phi Delta Kappan 86, no. 5 (January 2005), pp. 344-45.
13. Patrick J. Deneen, “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture,” Minding the Campus, February 2, 2016. http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/how-a-generation-lost-its-common-culture/
14. Neil Postman, Foreword to Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2005 [1985]), pp. xix-xx.
15. Irving Kristol, “On Conservatism and Capitalism,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 1975, p. 20.
16. Stan M. Haynes, President-Making in the Gilded Age: The Nominating Conventions of 1876-1900 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), p. 216.
17. Jonah Goldberg,
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change (New York: Broadway, 2009 [2007]), pp. 143-44.
18. Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2012), p. 157.
19. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, Carol Stewart, trans. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960), p. 18.
20. C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperOne, 1974 [1944]), p. 26.
21. Ibid., p. 25.
22. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989), p. 18.
23. Julian Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2017 [1927]), p. 15.
24. Rebecca Savransky, “Eric Trump: ‘Nepotism Is Kind of a Factor of Life,’ ” The Hill, April 4, 2017. http://thehill.com/homenews/news/327244-eric-trump-nepotism-is-kind-of-a-factor-of-life. He called it “a beautiful thing” separately. See: http://thehill.com/homenews/news/328201-eric-trump-nepotism-is-a-beautiful-thing
25. This is often attributed to the French labor activist and politician Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, though that attribution is apocryphal. Some sources attribute it to Gandhi, which seems even more unlikely.
26. “88. Shutting Down Media Outlets,” Economist/YouGov Poll: July 23-25, 2017—1500 US Adults, YouGov, p. 98. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/u4wgpax6ng/econTabReport.pdf
27. See “More Americans Say Personal Immorality Not Disqualifying for Elected Officials,” in “Clinton Maintains Double-Digit (51% vs. 36%) lead over Trump, PRRI/Brookings Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, October 19, 2016. https://www.prri.org/research/prri-brookings-oct-19-poll-politics-election-clinton-double-digit-lead-trump/
28. Calvin Coolidge, “Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—July 5, 1926,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=408
29. “ingratitude,” Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ingratitude
APPENDIX
1. “Margaret Thatcher on Socialism: Did Margaret Thatcher Once Say That ‘the Trouble with Socialism Is That Eventually You Run Out of Other People’s Money’?,” Snopes. http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/thatcher.asp
2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015, Kindle edition), p. 4.
3. Ibid., p. 11.
4. Eric Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006), p. 9.
5. Todd G. Buchholz, “Dark Clouds, Silver Linings,” in New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought (New York: Penguin, 2007 [1990]), p. 313.
6. Francisco Ferreira, “The International Poverty Line Has Just Been Raised to $1.90 a Day, but Global Poverty Is Basically Unchanged. How Is That Even Possible?,” World Bank, October 4, 2015. http://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/international-poverty-line-has-just-been-raised-190-day-global-poverty-basically-unchanged-how-even
7. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, p. 9.
8. David Landes, Prometheus Unbound: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 5; quoted in Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, p. 11.
9. Douglass C. North et al., Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 3.
10. I’m using 1700 as the year economic growth took off (and ending at the current year of 2018, so 318 years) and 365.25 days as the length of the year. By that measure, the vast majority of human progress has transpired in the last 13 hours and 56 minutes.
11. Confucius, “The Analects—13: The Analects Attributed to Confucius [Kongfuzi], 551-479 BCE, by Lao-Tse [Lao Zi] (trans. by James Legge (1815-1897),” USC U.S.-China Institute, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. http://china.usc.edu/confucius-analects-13
12. Irving Kristol, “ ‘When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness’—Some Reflections on Capitalism and ‘the Free Society,’ ” Public Interest 33, Fall 1970. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/when-virtue-loses-all-her-loveliness-some-reflections-on-capitalism-and-the-free-society
13. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 2-3.
14. Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom (New York: St. Martin’s, 2015), pp. 67-69.
15. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 1.
16. See, for example, Chelsea German and Marian L. Tupy, “No, Capitalism Will Not ‘Starve Humanity’ by 2050,” Human Progress, February 17, 2016. http://humanprogress.org/blog/no—capitalism-will-not-starve-humanity-by-2050
17. “Quantifying History: Two Thousand Years in One Chart,” Economist, June 28, 2011. http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/06/quantifying-history
18. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity, p. 1.
19. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth, p. 9.
20. Ibid., p. 49.
21. “GDP, 1990 International Dollars,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2128
22. Chelsea German, “Extreme Poverty’s End in Sight,” Human Progress, September 24, 2015. http://humanprogress.org/blog/extreme-povertys-end-sight
23. “Share of People Living in Extreme Poverty,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/static/3469
24. “Absolute Poverty Rates in East Asia and the World, Percent of Population,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/static/2636
25. “Towards the End of Poverty,” Economist, June 1, 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim
26. Sebastien Malo, “World’s ‘Extremely Poor’ to Fall Below 10 Percent of Global Population: World Bank,” Reuters, October 4, 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/04/us-global-poverty-worldbank-idUSKCN0RY0WI20151004
27. Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 15.
28. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “4—State of the Union Message to Congress—January 11, 1944,” American Presidency Project, John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=16518
29. “Employment in Agriculture (% of Total Employment),” World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
30. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, pp. 52-53.
31. See, for example, “Agricultural Sector Employment, Percent of Total Employment,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/sharable/8249
32. “Hours Worked per Worker,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/story/2246
33. “Labor Productivity per Hour Worked,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/story/2254
34. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 463.
35. “Vegetables [sic] Yields,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2156
36. “Cereal Yields,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2413
37. Recorded in all four canonical gospels, but I am referencing the version that appears in the gospel of John. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+6&version=NIV
38. The median househo
ld income in the United States in 2015 was $55,775. See Kirby G. Posey, “Household Income: 2015,” U.S. Census Bureau, September 2016, p. 2. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/acsbr15-02.pdf
39. Brian Wansink and C. S. Wansink, “The Largest Last Supper: Depictions of Food Portions and Plate Size Increased over the Millennium,” International Journal of Obesity 34 (2010), pp. 943–44, doi:10.1038/ijo.2010.37. https://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/research/largest-last-supper-depictions-portion-size-increased-over-millennium
40. “Food, Net Production, Relative to 2004-2006,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2263
41. “Meat Consumption, Developing Countries, per Person,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/static/1897
42. “Food Supply, per Person, per Day,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2126
43. “Food Consumption Shortfall Among Food-Deprived Persons,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2107
44. “Undernourished Persons,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2339
45. “Access to Electricity,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/3274
46. Ridley, The Rational Optimist, p. 236.
47. Mark J. Perry, “Each American Has the Energy-Equivalent of 600 Full-time ‘Human Energy Servants,’ ” AEIdeas (American Enterprise Institute), December 2, 2015. https://www.aei.org/publication/each-american-has-the-energy-equivalent-of-nearly-600-full-time-human-energy-servants/
48. Bailey, The End of Doom, pp. 61-62.
49. Ridley, The Rational Optimist, p. 245.
50. Bailey, The End of Doom, p. 65.
51. Ibid., p. 62.
52. “Greenhouse Gases from Agriculture,” Human Progress. http://www.humanprogress.org/f1/2176
53. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, p. 129.
54. William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993 [1992]), pp. 63-64.