The people of the USA have no common goals and values and no common history

George Packer, a well-known American journalist and author, published an article in The Atlantic magazine called How America Fractured Into Four Parts

“The people of the United States have no common goals and values, not even a common history or national idea,” Packer writes, distinguishing four types of Americans and four Americas:

1) “Free America” (Free America). These are Americans who believe in conservative ideals.

2) Smart America, or liberal educated environment.

3) Real America. This is, according to Packer, the ‘salt of the earth’, where the global world order is sceptical.

4) Just America is the Millennial generation, concerned about racial and social inequalities.

 

Just America “appoints winners and losers”. In Free America, the winners are the creators and the losers are those who want to drag the rest of us into permanent dependence on the government. In “Smart America”, the winners are the meritocrats and the losers are the poorly educated. In “Real America”, the winners are hard-working white Christians, and the losers are the traitorous elite who infect the people with a desire to destroy the country.

This division has developed, according to Packer, over the course of years of competition between Republicans and Democrats. Until the late 1960s, according to the author, the two parties were clearly divided. The Republicans favoured individual enterprise and the Democrats favoured social solidarity. The 1970s put an end to post-war bipartisan America and with it two relatively constant narratives: a steady advance (Republicans) and a moderate shake-up of the foundations (but not a shake-up) in the name of justice (Democrats). In their place, Packer writes, have emerged “four competing narratives” and a new schism “on both sides of the chasm that has split the country in two”.

“Free America has been the most influential politically for the last half-century. It is based on libertarian ideas. Libertarian freedom is negative freedom based on the principle of “don’t tread on me”. An iconic libertarian book is Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged”, which celebrates “the American myth of the self-made man, the lone pioneer on the plains”.

Under Ronald Reagan, committed to “Free America”, unions were destroyed and social programmes closed down, the era of the monopolies Walmart, Citigroup, Google, Amazon, JP Morgan, Standard Oil came into being. Charles and David Koch, these libertarian billionaires, invested in Free America’s political campaigns, acting as representatives of corporate power. The reasons for the collapse of this America, says Packer, were its underlying crony capitalism and the declining quality of its leaders.

And when “the new knowledge economy created a new class of Americans: college-educated men and women skilled in handling symbols and numbers”, “Smart America” declared itself in full voice; these needed the support of the government to give everyone an equal chance of advancement. Politically, Smart America became associated with the Democratic Party, but this led to its disengagement from the people. “If the Democratic Party had refused to recognise the factory closures of the 1970s and 1980s as a natural disaster, if it had become the voice of the millions of workers affected by deindustrialisation in a growing service economy, it could have remained the multi-ethnic working class party that had existed since the 1930s. However, this did not happen and “the white South left the Democratic Party” and “Smart America”.

Smart Americans believe in institutions and support American leadership in military alliances and international organisations, but they don’t like patriotism. To them it is, Packer writes, “an unpleasant relic of more primitive times, like cigarette smoke or dog racing.”

“The real America” is “a provincial village where everyone knows their business, no one has more money than anyone else.” In the fall of 2008, Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice-president, declared that “the best things in America are in these small towns, which I call the real America.” Palin’s political career has failed, but the banner of “Real America” that fell from her hands has been picked up by Trump.

The most anti-systemic force is Just America, in which a generation of millennials and BLM activists have joined. They are united in their protest against “the all-encompassing hell of white supremacy … against America as a single malignant force greater than any other evil on Earth.”

With the four Americas lacking common goals and values, George Packer sees no way out of the social stalemate in which the country finds itself. Nor does he have an explanation for how such a socio-culturally divided nation came to be. Nor is there a recipe for overcoming the fragmentation of the population.

American historian Peter Turchin explained the phenomenon of America’s social divide by the “overproduction of the elite”, the self-isolation of the upper classes from the rest of society.

“The situation is becoming so extreme that social norms are being undermined and institutions are disintegrating.” The deepening political tensions in the military are also a worrying sign for the US.

The American political scientist Dmitri Simes, an immigrant from the USSR, believes that Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections will aggravate the split in society, because the Democrats’ entire policy is aimed at dividing society into categories on racial, class, moral and ideological grounds. And what is good for some groups is considered unacceptable for others.
Trump returning to politics will not overcome the divide. A Republican return to the White House would mean a loss for Smart and Just America, but they will not give up their position without a fight that could escalate into a full-blown civil war.

Vladimir Prokhvatilov, FSK

The people of the USA have no common goals and values and no common history