The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism by Yuval Levin

Author:Yuval Levin [Levin, Yuval]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw
ISBN: 9780465098606
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-05-23T12:00:00+00:00

6

SUBCULTURE WARS

THE ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF OUR age of fracture have been intense and challenging. But the cultural transformations have run much deeper. The postwar diffusion of American life began in the culture and has proceeded furthest there, and the accompanying economic and political changes have in many cases been responses to vast changes in mores, norms, beliefs, social expectations, and mental habits.

In the culture, as in the economy, these changes have frequently involved a kind of greater specialization, or rather lesser generalization. In the first half of the twentieth century, America’s culture drew the nation together as the rise of mass media and mass public and private institutions, along with a series of national mobilizations, homogenized the public’s experiences and drove Americans to prioritize solidarity and unity. But over the past half-century and more, our culture has been moved by an increasingly individualistic ideal, and so by a drive for greater distinction, more customization, and the elevation of personal choice and identity.

Capitalism has always been characterized by patterns of specialization, so the diffusion of our economic life represents an intensification, but not a fundamental transformation, of the character of the US economy. But in the culture, the nation has witnessed an extraordinary turn from self-effacing solidarity to self-acclaiming individualism—a dramatic transformation that has remade the character of our common life in a great many ways, both for good and for ill.

The ethic of our age has been aptly called expressive individualism. That term suggests not only a desire to pursue one’s own path but also a yearning for fulfillment through the definition and articulation of one’s own identity. It is a drive both to be more like whatever you already are and also to live in society by fully asserting who you are. The capacity of individuals to define the terms of their own existence by defining their personal identities is increasingly equated with liberty and with the meaning of some of our basic rights, and it is given pride of place in our self-understanding.1

The reigning spirit of this era of expressive individualism has been a spirit of liberation—a breaking of constraints, enabling people who might previously have felt compelled to repress some feature of their character or facet of their cultural, personal, or sexual identity to now openly express it without fear of condemnation or social sanction. This spirit has made our society more welcoming, accepting, and accommodating, and so in many ways has made it vastly better. Much of the power of the social transformation we have experienced has been drawn from the moral appeal of this kind of liberation—a softening of our society’s hard edges and a warming of its cold places.

That appeal also motivates some of our nostalgia for midcentury, since Americans in that period could revel in the unquestionable satisfactions of the same kind of liberation without yet really having to endure, or even acknowledge, its costs. Those costs have emerged slowly as the logic of liberation has driven further and further toward the core of our culture.

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