Four Americas

You find yourself trying to communicate with a stranger whose english is a second language. You know what you want to get across. You speak. Stranger's mute response is a look of complete bewilderment. But you know what to do. You just speak louder. 

Our focus piece is the story of a splintered America locked in shared incomprehension (Four Americas). Each of the four Americas comes with its own history, its own narrative, its own language of sorts. The magic of this long yet very approachable article lies in the description of each constituent tribe along with the interplay among this dog's breakfast of life perspectives.

We've discussed these respective Americas before and, at the risk of vastly oversimplifying the comprehensive descriptions served up in focus article, they are:

Freedom America: this post-WWII notion of freedom in the Jeffersonian sense played out as rugged individualism in the sense of the Marlboro Man tinged with a kind of libertarianism we'd addressed in MM 5/27/17 Capitalism: Atlas Shrugged; it further morphed within the conservative movement and set the terms of its politics through the Reagan revolution as later distorted in the Gingrich era;

Smart America: in short, the kids went to college and created a new class of Americans within the emerging knowledge economy; this cosmopolitan class embraced a different sort of freedom as it operated in the global rather than the purely domestic arena and applied its own brand of capitalism and meritocracy; engineering talent, once directed at making things, reorientated itself within the financial world and, among other things, strip mined America's balance sheet and ended up driving the vast wealth inequality we see today;

Real America: the authenticity and patriotism of those left in the small-town domestic front -- you know, those "you betcha" real people, with their guns and religion -- were answered with the offer of crumbs to the dwindling middle class; never mind, went the pitchfork brigade, we all know real leadership comes from the ranks of the ordinary people and not from you fancy-pants pseudo-intellectual digital types doing who-knows-what behind your computer screens;  

Just America: critical theory says forget alI that talk about so-called progress which was born of racism and imperialism and just another name for oppression; in fact, screw your entire Enlightenment value system and your application of reason for that is just another form of your presumed power structure; I am offended, therefore I am.

This model of the Four Americas transcends seeing America in terms of traditional party politics and other so-called interest groups. The make-up of the Democratic Party, for instance, has morphed from the party of the working man to now embrace the ideals of the libertarian globalist. The Republican Party, for that matter, has become home for the populist insurgent.

We shall explore the dynamics underlying America's new world order so long as it doesn't make us all seasick.