Tucker On Why America Is Failing

I came across a 10 minute outtake from Tucker’s episode #155 this morning. It struck me that Tucker’s comments on “Why America Is Failing” fit in rather well with our post of yesterday: Perspectives On The Coming Election Year. In that post we spoke of the deep social unrest and discontent in America as we head into an election year. Tucker addresses that same concern about the state of our union, whether it could withstand a major shock—especially a shock that he believes is sure to come: an economic shock. Tucker offers no solutions but, reading between the lines, he does suggest to me that philosophical issues lie at the heart of our current unrest. Tucker does refer to practical problems that we should be thinking about, but it remains that without consensus—a shared “civic religion” is necessary for a country in which the people are reasonably at peace with one another.

“Civic theology” is a concept that was and is very familiar to societies other than liberal democratic ones—”civilizational” societies like China, India, Iran, and—yes--Russia. The formulation itself comes from Roman thinking, but the concept is widespread. In post-Christian liberal democratic thinking this concept has been replaced by the idea of a “social contract,” which tends to set one citizen against the others. The very notion of a “civic religion” pretty much gives Americans the Willies, or Heebie Jeebies, so it’s interesting that Tucker raises this—for most Americans—arcane matter. This characteristic of secular liberal democracy also leads to misunderstanding and conflict with “civilizational” societies which value their “civic religions.” (For an enlightening discussion of this issue, cf. Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics)

What I’ve done is to present an edited transcript/summary which are a short version of the ten minute outtake.

Why America is Failing!

Q: I would love your perspective on the state of American society. Less on the political spectrum of Republican versus Democrat. What do you see in American society? Where are we as a society? What has happened? What is happening?

I just had my college roommate staying at my house. We were talking about how obviously America is not a democracy. It's not even a sort of decent facsimile of a democracy. But it's even worse than that. Our politics--and not just our politics but our public conversation--reflects the very specific and parochial concerns of a tiny, tiny group of people, which is: middle-aged, affluent women who tend to be very angry--mostly with their husbands, but probably for other reasons, too-- and exercise this wildly disproportionate power over what we can talk about and think about and the rules that the rest of us live by.

What’s Tucker talking about here? Obviously, he’s painting with a broad brush. I think he’s referring to what I would call a certain feminization of our public life and culture. A common—not universal—trait of feminine culture is conflict avoidance. True, there’s also the “mean girl” phenomenon, but conflict avoidance tends to be regarded as a feminine value. The problem is that conflict avoidance can lead to a suppression of necessary discussions that might otherwise lead to solid social consensus. And so Tucker goes on to point out that our public discussions avoid basic and important questions.

What it is, again, is the disproportionate influence of a class of people and their neuroses--I wouldn't even say policy concerns--and their weird personal ticks. My friend was saying, the good news is this can't last, cuz it's just too stupid. At some point very soon the country is going to revert to the place that all countries begin with, in a conversation about things that matter, like who comprises the population, do we have enough water, where are we on energy, exactly how are we going to manage these complex relationships with other countries? The basic questions that should dominate the consciousness of any of any country and should dominate our public conversation. It's like our public obsessions are getting increasingly irrelevant.

I care about what's happening between Israel and Hamas. But it's a little weird for your entire country to be so preoccupied with that conflict that they miss big history changing events happening in their own country. We care more about foreign wars and trans lives than the obvious things that hold our society together.

Tucker used to write for Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard. He knows exactly what’s up here. Neocons, who control our foreign policy, are precisely focused on other countries and with settling scores from the past in other countries, rather than events in America—except as those events affect their real obsessions.

From my perspective America needs to put its energy on its national cohesion--what does the majority of the country have in common with one another. Let's think through our civic religion: what ties us together.

[If something like the Great Depression happened now] when there is no broad agreement on what it means to be an American, no agreement at all on what we all have in common, I don't think we can withstand it [as we arguably withstood the shock of the Great Depression as a nation]. Actually, I'm not even convinced it matters so much what that civic religion is as it does that we have one. If we don't have anything that ties us together, when that day comes--and you know what I mean, when the economic crisis comes, cuz it's coming--what's that going to look like? It's going to be very scary. So that's what I'm most worried about by far.

One other thing. We overestimate people's ability to metabolize change. Over time people adapt to their environment but the world didn't change that much from the sacking of Rome until the Renaissance. But the Industrial Revolution to now has been such a massive change that it's driving people insane. People can't handle relentless change, but technologists love relentless change.

Relentless change of the sort Tucker is describing tends to set people adrift, leave them to rely on their personal resources without the support of societal institutions that “civic religion” nurtures. This, I believe, is at the root of our current crisis in our culture. I wish I could be as optimistic as Tucker’s friend, but America is now a deeply divided country with a ruling class that is relentlessly hostile to what remains of our civic religion. It doesn’t bode well. I wonder what Trump makes of Tucker’s concerns? Is that part of MAGA? I think, in his own way, less articulate than Tucker’s, Trump shares those concerns about America’s failure, its lack of a civic religion that unites.