The nation faces serious problems, but its existing political tradition has plenty of strength to fix them.
The nation faces serious problems, but its existing political tradition has plenty of strength to fix them.
A pocalyptic anxiety has simmered in American politics for centuries, and in recent years, that sense of dread revelation has come to a boil. The Washington Post warns that “democracy dies in darkness.” The postliberal political theorist Patrick Deneen famously argues that liberalism has “failed.” Standing against a blood-red backdrop in September, President Biden invoked a “battle for the soul of this nation.” And on January 6, 2021, Donald Trump told the crowd assembled at the Ellipse: “We’re gathered together in the heart of our nation’s capital for one very, very basic and simple reason: To save our democracy.” Adding to these tensions is a host of negative trends: skyrocketing overdose deaths, spiking crime, collapsing credibility among many institutions, and growing conflict abroad.
In early 2021, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse surveyed the American landscape and declared that “everything is broken.” Just before Thanksgiving this year, she returned to this theme as a way of articulating American political conflict.
Newhouse argues that the real political divide in contemporary America is not left vs. right but “status-quoist” vs. “brokenist.” Status-quoists are
invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. . . . What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead.
If status-quoists believe in the fundamental soundness of the political compact, brokenism “revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay.” For brokenists (Newhouse continues), “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.” The spike in homeschooling and proliferation of alternative media outlets are among the signs of a broader constituency of brokenists, people desperate to opt out of what they see as failing systems.
Status-quoism and brokenism do not fit neatly into conventional ideological camps, and, in fact, those divisions have helped encourage a political re-sorting: “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.”
Newhouse’s dichotomy does touch on one of the central dynamics of contemporary American life. The rise of Donald Trump in 2015 prompted many intellectuals and political activists to believe that the perimeters of American politics had radically expanded. Socialism, a renewed nationalism, and postliberalism of various stripes could now strive for the scepter — the “woke” and the “based” could shred a tattered status quo. If a reality-TV and tabloid star can become president, who’s to say that fundamental regime change is impossible?
However, many in the existing power elite have also responded with concern, if not hostility, to this radical disruption. Anxieties have been particularly keen on the political right, which still remains conflicted over populism; some see it as a break from Reaganite orthodoxies, while others perceive it as a necessary corrective to those orthodoxies. Writing for UnHerd, Sohrab Ahmari laid out a somewhat similar contrast in saying that the political future will in part be divided between “restorationists,” who would like to turn the clock on cultural issues back to 2013, and “radicals,” who instead want a more significant change. The fact that Ahmari’s new project, Compact, calls itself a “radical American journal” probably indicates which side he’s on — and also reveals his “brokenist” bona fides.
Newhouse’s “status-quoist”/“brokenist” framing returns us to questions of scale. People might argue about the gravity of contemporary challenges, but there’s also a dispute over how fundamental they are — do they result from the failures of a more limited set of institutions or a policy paradigm, or are they the product of a much more fundamental existential wrong turn? Looking at those fundamentals might reveal both serious problems and some opportunities for hope. Perhaps it’s not too extravagant to say that shoring up the American regime might demand taking seriously those challenges to American institutions and recognizing the broader resources of the American tradition and modern liberty more generally.
I don’t think you need to be a hard-core brokenist to believe that there may be major challenges facing many American institutions. The year 2020 was understandably radicalizing and alienating for many people. It’s hard to believe that all is well in a time of sweeping lockdowns, apologism for street violence in mainstream publications, and the immolation of credibility across government agencies and the institutional citadels of civil society.
Yet 2020 and its aftermath have also highlighted the resilience of the American political order more broadly considered. Democratic political action so far has helped block a permanent biomedical panopticon (with vaccine passports, the Zoomification of social life, and endless waves of “temporary” Covid-related restrictions). The risk of seeing an education system hollowed out by rabid ideology has prompted widespread parental engagement and the development of new institutions. The midterm elections suggested that fringe conspiracy theories about challenging democratic elections do in fact inflict a significant political price; interest might prompt politicians to rediscover the wisdom of many norms important for securing a democracy. Political interest may also prompt politicians to confront the failures of the post-2001 Beltway consensus.
And a further irony presents itself. As Newhouse knows, those who hold the commanding heights are themselves so often the foremost champions of brokenist rhetoric. The idea that America is fundamentally broken — stained with trauma, soaked in bigotry, stamped by countless modes of exploitation — is one of the central tropes of the “reckoning.” Delegitimizing the status quo provides a pretext for a comprehensive reconstruction of American life — and for giving managerial mandarins a free hand. The need to “do the work” of this “reckoning” serves as a legitimating myth for the power elite. The will to power can wear a mask of grief as well as a mask of triumph.
So brokenism about American life overall can in fact be a vehicle for entrenching a certain status quo. Conversely, a belief in the fundamental soundness (or at least potential) of the American republic could actually bolster efforts to hold current elites accountable for their failures. Newhouse says that, while she is a brokenist about many American institutions, she does not think America itself is broken. In her discussion of “brokenism,” she is quick to point out that the aim is not despair but encouragement: that there is still some hope for renewal.
The United States is not just commercialism and atomism. Profound traditions of community, duty, and solidarity have always threaded through it — whether in the Puritans, various labor movements, or the incessant impulse to found schools and religious outposts. In his 1790 letter to Newport’s Congregation Jeshuat Israel, George Washington defended “liberty of conscience” and religious devotion; freedom involved not the idolization of vanity but instead the forging of communities of faith. Strong connections persist in the United States, as does the possibility for rejuvenation.
And, despite the claims of edgelords and some defenders of the neoliberal status quo, many of the policy measures proposed to confront current challenges are well within the traditions of American democracy. Subsidies for families, restoring supply chains, anti-monopoly efforts, reforms to public education or government bureaucracies — whatever the merits of particular policy choices, these all have a long lineage in American life. One can support industrial policy without becoming a monarchist, and there are many sources within the American tradition (and not only the American tradition) to help address the shortcomings of the neoliberal paradigm.
Renewal is never guaranteed, but some inheritances are richer than we know. Sometimes, what is broken is not a political order but a too-rigid vision of it.