Has America Gotten Mean?
Last week I mentioned that I would be commenting upon a recent David Brooks’ essay. Given the nature of the essay and the significance of the issue — particularly since so many Americans express concern about the related substance — I thought I’d cover it in two parts, this week and next. Brooks’ essay recently appeared in The Atlantic and was entitled “How America Got Mean.” The idea that we were once not mean but now are probably resonates with many readers, inclined as we are to feel as if our politics has devolved into an extraordinarily mean-spirited enterprise. If we need evidence that we have become “mean” — at least in one meaning of that term — we probably don’t have to look far. No doubt, Brooks refers to the word’s most immediate sense of unkindness or cruelty, but it’s worth recalling that the word can also mean “average” or “lowly.” In contemporary colloquial language it can also mean “excellent,” but for our purposes we will generally hew to Brooks’ usage of it as “cruel,” although I will later tie that in to its signification as “average” or “lowly.”
Brooks takes it on faith that our country has become more mean or unkind. He offers an increase in hate crimes as evidence that we are getting meaner, but anyone who has studied the issue carefully is properly skeptical of such claims, both because of the squishiness of the concept and because the numbers are easily gamed by changing the criteria for what counts as a hate crime. His other main piece of evidence is that fewer Americans are giving to charity. In my judgment, this is probably due more to changes in the tax code than to changes in our character.
He ignores any contrary evidence. For example: It seems to me that authorities in schools are more sensitive to bullying than they were when I was a schoolboy. Americans talk much more about inclusivity and respecting difference than they once did, such talk indicating a generosity of spirit previously missing. It may be the case — and I’m not saying it is — that we are concerned about the state of our politics only because our politics have become less civil while we as a people have become more so.
But that’s probably too clever by half. Brooks is less interested in demonstrating that we have become meaner than in arguing why we have. From a pure social science standpoint, this is placing the cart a good three furlongs in front of the horse, for it’s not obvious to me that “meanness” can be measured at all, and to the degree that it could be I’m not confident the measurements would indicate an increase. My own best guess is that general human levels of meanness are fairly constant but they get channeled in different ways, and the mechanisms of such channeling (or repression) are vital in maintaining a peaceful society. Perhaps our politics seem meaner to us because we are sublimating all our meanness into politics, and this means other areas of our life are less mean. In that sense, human depravity might well be a zero-sum game.
This strikes me as at least plausible, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean any of those areas of life are healthier as a result. As Nick Lowe once sang: you gotta be cruel to be kind. Sometimes an absence of meanness can represent a kind of “niceness” that refuses to engage in the sorts of discriminating judgments required to maintain the integrity of social institutions or the proper flourishing of individuals given what we know about sparing rods and spoiling children. To give a concrete example: any healthy community or institution will have to think carefully about who to include and also on the criteria they use to determine inclusion. Colleges might like to celebrate their inclusivity, but only after they’ve excluded certain persons from attending (via GPAs and test scores, or ability to pay) and from working there (via evidence of an advanced degree). A college that didn’t engage in such exclusions would be little more than a high-priced social club. It would no longer be an academic enterprise. Indeed, colleges actively celebrate their exclusive status in admissions standards, but few seem to think this is evidence of meanness.
The issue becomes especially complicated when we turn our attention to politics because both its principles and means of operation are different than any other social institution. Families are based on love and schools on educating and churches on grace and economic enterprises on work and profit, but politics is essentially about force, and its typical means is violence. As a result, a certain amount of cruelty is baked into the enterprise in a way that isn’t true of other social institutions, and we need those institutions working in order to counter-balance politics’ excesses. As those institutions weaken, their ability to operate as makeweights to the inherent viciousness of politics (where all are trying to get their way) diminishes an important restraint and balance. In other words, if it is indeed true that America has gotten meaner, that’s probably because we’ve allowed politics to creep outside its proper bounds and infect, if not overwhelm, our other institutions and modes of life. People who spend too much of their time and energy engaged in politics are almost certain to be worse persons as a result. For one thing, they are more likely to indulge the most fundamental distinction of political life — that between friend and enemy — and apply it to all areas of life. Brooks writes:
If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear. Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness, and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you’ve left the moral vacuum—but you’ve landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war.Government has a unique set of functions to perform, and among its most important functions is the representative one. For this reason, when our politics get meaner (to beg the question) we might take this as an accurate reflection of who we are. After all, we’re the ones electing the bums. Nonetheless, the representative function might be thought of differently: that is, rather than a reflection of prevailing opinion, representative systems take all the repressed violence of social life and sublimates it into debate and argumentation. If that’s true, then the inability of political debate to reach any resolution — our representative’s stubborn unwillingness to cooperate, negotiate, or compromise with opponents — may reflect divisions of such depth that the likelihood of people resorting to violence to solve problems increases. In that case, it’s not so much that we’ve gotten meaner but rather either our disagreements have become more intractable or our modes of channeling anger have become less effective. Or both.
Our politics get meaner as repression intensifies, and that intensification may have many causes, including the media environment, but the most likely is that we are increasingly laying bare the depths of our disagreements (for example: what is the compromise position between “sex is a biological trait” and “gender is a social construct”?). But note well: when our representative institutions are captured by a particular set of interests — be they economic or ideological — they will fail in their ability to channel properly our repressed rage and violent impulses, and these will, in turn, now begin to percolate with increasing frequency and intensity in other areas of life. Since Congress is the most representative of our governing institutions, its unwillingness to do its job properly cannot help but produce negative effects in other parts of the social body.
I’d be remiss here if I didn’t note that probably an even bigger part of the problem is our knee-jerk tendency to see politics itself as what happens in Washington, and to see what happens in Washington mainly in terms of electoral politics, which is a zero-sum game. It exacerbates the tendency of politics to result always in the separation into winners and losers. Directing our attention away from state and local politics has made our institutions less representative, not more so, and one result has been a populace that feels more helpless and powerless in the face of this distant and non-responsive bureaucratic monstrosity. The resulting frustration will certainly end in anger.
This lengthy diversion from Brooks’ essay should not be taken to discredit much of what he argues. Brooks’ intellectual gift has long been his ability to sense that something is amiss and to come very close to asking the right questions about why it is so. He can approach these questions and give them a sense of profundity that is also generally accessible. His weakness has long been his fear of saying anything that might offend anyone. By constantly pulling his punches he seldom lands any. When he does they are not without effect, but they are never the haymakers required to knock sense into anyone.
The essay in question is a clinical study of Brooks’ ability to sense that something is amiss and to draw our attention to factors well worth considering, while at the same time being so concerned about the sensitivities of the day that he’s never fully willing to follow through on his own thinking. As a result — and I’ve thought this true in all the years I’ve read and even admired his work — I found the essay muddled. The poor man is divided against himself, and I suspect satisfying his employer has a great deal to do with that.
But I wouldn’t be too hard on him, for I think he captures something important about liberal democracy, and that is that it works best precisely when we don’t have too much clarity about what we believe and why we believe it. Unfortunately, when our principles and beliefs unreflectively devolve into policy, and the policy presents itself as an either/or proposition, we have no choice but to become lucid about those principles and straightforward in our defense of them. When that happens, we realize that either we don’t fully understand or can’t defend our own principles or we reject those of our opponents now that they are clear to us. A turning up of the heat is the natural consequence.
Next week: more specifics about Brooks’ essay, and a look at prescriptions for moving forward.
Discussion Questions:
Do you agree with Brooks that America has gotten more “mean”? If so, what makes you think that?
Do Americans pay too much attention to politics?
Has the nationalization of our politics and especially the focus on national elections made us edgier?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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