Is America Broken?

And what would it take to fix it?

[Image by cbies / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope you have a nice holiday, ideally spent with family and close friends. My next post will appear on Monday, after the long weekend.

---

My original plan for this final post before Thanksgiving was to write a rumination on the meaning of the holiday, especially for the work we do around here, trying to understand and thoughtfully criticize the right. But then a tweet from Bari Weiss led me to read an essay by Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet, and it really grabbed me.

The piece is a follow-up to one she published in January 2021, the week after the January 6 insurrection, titled “Everything Is Broken.” I remember being moved by reading it at the time—and then promptly getting distracted by the next shiny thing and forgetting about it. But now Newhouse has revived the argument and updated it. It’s the kind of essay that can reshape how you think about nearly everything.

Status Quoists v. Brokenists

The quickest way to grasp Newhouse’s argument is to see it as a modification of what’s often called the “horseshoe theory” of politics—the idea that the extreme left and right have more in common with each other than either does with the broad liberal center. Hence the idea of using a horseshoe instead of a linear spectrum to describe ideologies.

Newhouse’s proposal is that the most salient ideological cleavage in American politics at the present moment isn’t between left/center-left (Democrats) and right/center-right (Republicans), but between those on either side who think we have problems but that they can be addressed through piecemeal reform while maintaining the institutional status quo—and those who think our politics, society, economy, and culture are more fundamentally broken and require more radical efforts at change.

To give you a concrete sense of where Newhouse is coming from, this is how she divides up various figures from our moment:

[B]oth brokenists and status-quoists are attracting people from what was formerly known as the left and the right. That’s how you get left-wing guests on Tucker Carlson, and lifelong members of right-wing royalty making frictionless transitions into mainstream darlings. Marxist thinker Adolph Reed is a brokenist; Cass Sunstein is a status-quoist. Resistance Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney—these people are status-quoists. Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are brokenists, as are the famously leftist Glenn Greenwald and the famously capitalist Marc Andreessen.

I’ll resist the urge to reduce this to horseshoe theory by calling it a battle between centrists and the extremes on either side—because I really do find it clarifying to use Newhouse’s terms instead. I usually describe myself as a centrist, for example, but I also sometimes write about various ways in which I’m some kind of conservative—namely, a conservative liberal. (Andrew Sullivan and I talked in these terms about our respective views during my visit to the Dishcast a few weeks ago.)

But Newhouse’s schema gives me an alternative to this somewhat tortured terminology. By her lights, I am a status quoist—and in a way that descriptor feels quite fitting to me. What I sometimes describe as my temperamental conservatism really amounts to little more than a preference for working within the system as it exists to address our problems and a strong aversion to those who aim their fire at the system as a whole on the grounds that it is hopelessly broken and must be razed to the ground so that something wholly new can be constructed in its place.

Yet I also get where at least some of the brokenists are coming from. When I read this paragraph from Newhouse’s essay describing the way the country looks to them, I feel a stirring inside—a stirring rooted in recognition.

[Brokenists are] people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets….

I often feel this way myself—disgusted by Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto con game, laundered by nonsense theories of “ethics,” and his myriad ties to the country’s academic, journalistic, and political elite; appalled by the failings of the nation’s public-health and educational officials throughout the COVID-19 pandemic; angered by the rank incompetence that leads numerous states to take the better part of a month to count election ballots when most countries in the world do it far faster; infuriated by our seeming incapacity to stop the deadly violence that regularly erupts in our public spaces; and on and on and on.

Searching for Causes

As I said, I often feel this way, too. But is the feeling reasonable? I wonder about that a lot.

For one thing, as I noted in my inaugural post, these kinds of feelings aren’t limited to people in the United States. There are “brokenists,” and populist politicians seeking office by both heightening and responding to their concerns, in countries across the globe. That points to a source much broader than the American-centered ones Newhouse highlights in the paragraph quoted above.  

One possible source was suggested by author Ivan Krastev in his 2014 book Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest, which examines the wave of popular protests that swept across the world in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. (Full disclosure: I had a hand in publishing Krastev’s book at Penn Press.) Krastev suggests that these protests grew out of a widespread distrust of democratic institutions prompted by media coverage of economic and political scandals and failures that then got disseminated within countries and across borders via social media. The result was broad-based unrest that eventually petered out, in part because those protesting had no coherent program of reform to offer, just rage against those in charge of the market and the state.

This free-floating anger eventually ended up feeding into the rise of right-wing populism around the globe. But why? How could it be that the “obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country” that Newhouse associates with the American elite are also a valid source of popular anger in countries from South America to Europe and South Asia? Yes, social media makes “demonstration effects” (news of protests in one place inspiring protests elsewhere) more powerful. But what is it about our moment that has citizens in so many different places responding so similarly to those effects? Did elites the world over simultaneously succumb to corruption and incompetence?

On his excellent Substack, Brink Lindsey (a colleague of mine at the Niskanen Center) suggests a deeper, civilizational explanation: We may be experiencing turbulence following from the rise of affluent, post-materialist societies around the world. In such societies, where material scarcity and genuine economic precarity have largely receded from the lives of most people, citizens devote ever-larger portions of their lives to pursuing (and often failing to achieve) a kind of spiritual fulfillment. That leads to widespread anomie, anger, depression, and a generalized discontent that self-help gurus and political troublemakers can prey on for their own benefit.

Beware Indeterminate Negation

And that bring me back to Alana Newhouse’s essay.