McCain, whose campaign theme is that campaign finance reform could be the root of all blessings, puts part of the blame for what he considers the poisonous social “environment” on the political class. “When we stand on a soapbox and denounce Jerry Springer, and then go to the floor of Congress and behave like guests on his show…”
Please. Any viewer of C-Span knows that the most characteristic behavior of McCain’s Senate colleagues is a cloying courtesy, grounded in the senators’ sense of their own grandness. Furthermore, it is a delusion of grandeur for the political class to think that the social environment is shaped by the public’s close observation of that class. Anyway, although political debate has recently been skewed by attempts to tickle political advantage from acts of mass murder (in Oklahoma City and Littleton, Colo.), America has never been less divided by bitterness about differences.
Today’s Jeremiahs should consider that during the American Revolution, those who were loyal to the British “were five times more likely to flee than were aristocrats in revolutionary France–which is to say that the United States was born in the midst of a severe dose of political cleansing, very often directed at the wealthy.” A century later, industrialization brought extraordinary labor strife: “Between 1872 and 1914, seven, sixteen and perhaps thirty-five workers died violently in Britain, Germany and France, respectively; in contrast, between five and eight hundred violent deaths of workers occurred in the United States.” And less than two generations ago, two consecutive presidents sent troops into the South.
Those facts are from a slender (154 pages) new book, “Is America Breaking Apart?” by John A. Hall of McGill University and Charles Lindholm of Boston University. Their book is a timely appreciation of “the cohesive power of the American experiment.”
In spite of “endless talk of difference,” American society is an amazing machine for homogenizing people. There is “the democratizing uniformity of dress and discourse, and the casualness and absence of deference” characteristic of popular culture. People are absorbed into “a culture of consumption” launched by the 19th-century department stores that offered “vast arrays of goods in a palatial atmosphere. Instead of intimate shops catering to a knowledgeable elite” these were stores “anyone could enter, regardless of class or background. This turned shopping into a communal and democratic act.” The mass media, advertising and mass spectator sports are other forces for homogenization.
Surely there is a connection between America’s commercial culture and today’s “moral minimalism.” Hall and Lindholm say that “one of Americans’ strongest moral values is a reluctance to impose moral values.” Today, says Alan Wolfe of Boston University (in his 1998 book “One Nation, After All”), the Eleventh Commandment is “Thou shalt not judge.” (So, George W. Bush, relax.) Hall and Lindholm say such a spirit suited an open, egalitarian frontier society, and today “correlates with the roomy and solipsistic world of the suburb.”
Immigrants are quickly fitting into this common culture, which may not be altogether elevating but is hardly poisonous. Writing for the National Immigration Forum, Gregory Rodriguez reports that today’s immigration is neither at unprecedented levels nor resistant to assimilation. In 1998 immigrants were 9.8 percent of the population; in 1900, 13.6 percent. In the 10 years prior to 1990, 3.1 immigrants arrived for every 1,000 residents; in the 10 years prior to 1890, 9.2 for every 1,000. Now, consider three indices of assimilation–language, home ownership and intermarriage.
The 1990 Census revealed that “a majority of immigrants from each of the fifteen most common countries of origin spoke English ‘well’ or ‘very well’ after ten years of residence.” The children of immigrants tend to be bilingual and proficient in English. “By the third generation, the original language is lost in the majority of immigrant families.” Hence the description of America as a “graveyard” for languages. By 1996 foreign-born immigrants who had arrived before 1970 had a home ownership rate of 75.6 percent, higher than the 69.8 percent rate among native-born Americans.
Foreign-born Asians and Hispanics “have higher rates of intermarriage than do U.S.-born whites and blacks.” By the third generation, one third of Hispanic women are married to non-Hispanics, and 41 percent of Asian-American women are married to non-Asians. Rodriguez notes that children in remote villages around the world are fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Garth Brooks, yet “some Americans fear that immigrants living within the United States remain somehow immune to the nation’s assimilative power.”
Are there divisive issues and pockets of seething anger in America? Indeed. It is big enough to have a bit of everything. But particularly when viewed against America’s turbulent past, today’s social indices hardly suggest a dark and deteriorating social environment.
Time was, the political left disdained America as fragile–capitalism had mortal “contradictions,” racial and ethnic divisions were unhealable, etc. Recently, the political right has been the great finder of faults: American capitalism is a frail flower (the 1993 tax increase was supposedly going to wreck it), Americans are corrupt (because they opposed removing President Clinton from office), immigration is creating the Balkans within America’s borders. And there is “an environment of disaffection, contempt and hate that poisons our land.” That is an odd way to woo the nation. And it is wrong.
