I probably would be better off not writing this, but it is past time for a pre-autopsy on American moral and political culture. The Trump and, to a much lesser degree, Clinton presidential candidacies are both merely symptoms—the difference between them akin to double pneumonia vs. a low-grade flu.
Conservative moralists (if there are any left who haven’t given up on fighting “the culture wars”) may have been wrong about many things—including gay marriage—but they were right about one thing. Since the 1960s, American culture has been in gradual but inexorable moral decline. The reasons may be debatable—globalization-related working-class economic stagnation, declining religiosity and church attendance, the decline of marriage and father-present families, the fraying of communal ties—but the results are pretty clear.
To extend Robert Putnam’s metaphor about an increasing atomized and polarized society where “bowling alone” has become the norm: it’s not much of a step to the next stage, where in a perceived crisis, isolated desperadoes and crazies practice shooting and bombing alone (or in small groups). The Internet gives them a sense of virtual community when the larger society is losing any sense of real community.
All this has political—and racial consequences—that are usually spun in a one-sided way by ideological competing factions. Today, we have both an anti-Semitic, virulently nationalist, and white supremacist “alt.right”—fellow traveling the Trump campaign and sometimes infiltrating it (most recently by insinuating a notorious six-point star/money grubber ad in an anti-Hillary tweet)—and an “alt.left”: often George Soros-funded and with agendas laced with rhetoric designed to appeal to anti-globalization anarchists and Identity-fixated Black Nationalists.
The recent post-Dallas front page of the Drudge Report reads almost like a cheer leading manual for whites wanting to counterattack against an alleged and perceived black-declared race war. Rush Limbaugh calls Black Lives Matters a “terrorist organization”—not true, in my view. Yet BLM rhetoric—including occasional chants to kill white “pigs”—is incendiary and nihilistic enough to make BLM a worthy successor, not of the Sixties civil rights movement, but of irresponsible late Sixties Black Nationalist extremism.
Worse than BLM is the New Black Panthers, given a pass a few years ago by the Obama Justice Department for ostensibly attempting to intimidate whites from voting in Philadelphia. We now know that the Dallas shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, had participated in a “kill the cops” march by the Houston NBP. By the way, New Black Panther founder Malik “Zulu” Shabazz has a history of virulent anti-Semitism.
What’s more dangerous: the alt.right who are kissing buddies of Trump or the alt.left whom Democrats are loathe to criticize? Time will tell.
This much we know: both are example of extremes invading the Internet Age mainstream. It is not clear that, in the event of another economic meltdown like 2008 or worse, the political center will hold.
The historian Peter Brown called the late classical period “very late.” By this he meant to emphasize the rapid disintegration of Roman pagan civilization proceeding apace with Christianity’s rise as a state religion with universalist pretensions. Brown also saw the change heralded by what he called “interiorization” or a spiritual turn reflected in funeral paintings showing the deceased with new large deep eyes suggesting inward soulful self-reflection.
It might be said that our post-modern, post-Christian culture is also “very post.” The moral underpinnings of the old order are already pretty much gone, except now there is no evidence of a spiritual renewal like that represented by Christianity in the late Roman Empire. Instead, we have the emerging dominance of a videogame-and-selfie-culture embodying a dead-end narcissism.
Will there be some sort of secular moral renewal? I would like to think so, but doubt it very much. I also wouldn’t bet on another American Christian Awakening, of which there have been several since the 1700s. I might place a small bet on an Americanized Islam becoming a dominant player in the late twenty-first century.
The long-term prospects don’t look too promising for American Jews. Maybe we might as well practice “carpe diem” as long as we can.
Lastly as a long-time historian of African American-Jewish relations, I strongly dissent against anyone, Jewish or otherwise, who scapegoats the black community for this sad turn of events. African Americans were beneficiaries of a WWII and post-WWII northern migration that allowed them to join the industrial unionized working class at the same time as it provided the launching pad for a vastly expanding “new black middle class.” The civil rights movement nationalized this movement, creating a moral epiphany in which American Jews in the movement deserve to be given kudos for their collaborative leadership.
Since the 1960s, the underpinnings of African American life have been transformed by the emergence of a welfare state economy with many middle-class blacks employed as social service providers and most lower-class blacks benefiting as social welfare recipients. Conservatives who decry this trend as encouraging a corrosive and debilitating welfare dependency victimizing the African American, especially male, underclass may have a point. Yet the racialized welfare state economy, whatever its defects, keeps the economically precarious black underclass afloat in a sea of troubles. What do GOP conservatives have to offer as an alternative except Horatio Alger lectures about pulling yourselves up by your bootstraps? African Americans with inner resources to succeed in twenty-first century America don’t need such moralistic lectures, and have a right to resent them.
What we see now acted out on American streets is a tragedy involving underclass African American males, many lacking the fundamentals what the Evangelical preacher Rick Warren calls “the purpose-driven life,” and lower-middle class police (not all white) whose training hardly equips them for dealing with the challenges of policing a society which such a combustible population mix. The African middle class, especially males, are also caught up in the dragnet of the “driving while black culture” that the police have erected, ostensibly to protect themselves and the rest of us including African Americans desiring to be protected from “black on black” crime. No wonder that even black conservatives like South Carolina Republican Senator Tom Scott or so exasperated if not angered by the contradictions.
I would like to hope that things will get better, but—again—I see little basis for optimism. Technological, automation-driven unemployment is likely to make things worse particularly for the black working class and lower middle class. We have had a respite over the past twenty years in violent crime rates. This has been partly because of the demographic decline in the young male bulge of the population, and partly because of draconian incarceration policies that have swept off the streets many under-class criminals—serious felons included but also lower-level drug offenders. Calls for “criminal justice reform” appeal to both right and left for different reasons. Yet one has to wonder about what happens if the lid is taken off the current incarceration pressure cooker at the same time as porous borders continue to prevail and the population’s turbulent male youth cohort begins to grow.
A hundred and fifty years ago, middle-class Protestant intellectuals like Charles Loring Brace obsessed over what they called the rise of “the dangerous classes.” They had in mind primarily, not newly freed Southern blacks, but newly arrived Irish immigrants and their children. Brace proved wrong, partly because his class ultimately supported out of enlightened self-interest social reforms like Jane Addams, Lillian Wald-style social settlement houses to help immigrants.
I think fears like those like those of Brace are in the process of reemerging—and may give Trump’s new “Make America Safe Campaign” a potent if underground resonance. We can only hope against hope that such fear-mongering—which it is not my purpose here to contribute—will once again fail, and the American dream of equal opportunity under law will somehow muddle through.