Malaise or Remedy

Many troubling questions requiring hardheaded solutions have been asked about today's America. Among key issues are managing control over migration on the border with Mexico; repairing infrastructure in American cities; curbing outlandish profit-making by US corporations particularly in the oil and gas industry; reducing unparalleled socioeconomic inequalities instead of creating incentives to take them higher; halting the decline of the US middle class; making changes to the prevailing low and even zero tax rates assessed to American companies that are too big to fail; resolving persistent structural racism which is not solved merely by impact-less concessions to disadvantaged people; weakening the dominance of a glorified celebrity culture linking arms with cynical politicians; doing something about a not-free press and social media that are owned by mega-oligarchs; reducing incestuous nepotism; putting an end to absurd gerrymandering; and plus a sundry of other issues. The most serious and intractable problem of them all, climate change, is a universal problem. Many of these needed policy decisions result from predatory rather than free-market capitalism. With regard to foreign policy, the country's status as a once-enviable superpower is now under attack.

Diversity and inclusiveness sweeping across US institutions are paradoxes since most of the problem areas listed above seriously constrain inclusivity and go beyond its symbolic dimensions. For French-born journalist Raoul de Roussy de Sales writing in 1939, the answer to the question what makes an American was straightforward: “to become an American is a process which resembles a conversion. It is not so much a country one adopts as a new creed. And in all Americans can be discerned some of the traits of those who have, at one time or the other, abandoned an ancient faith for a new one.”

Staying with the notion of a distinctive creed, recent years have, by contrast, been characterized by sweeping identity politics and, at their core, the centrality of both distinctiveness and inclusiveness. Encouraged by an ideological state apparatus—in the United States there is one if we look hard enough—its main purpose is in practice to divide Americans into notional tribes of people. The goal of forging national unity is treated, then, as worthy of disdain and scorn when weighed against identity.

A large segment of American society still believes that tweaking democracy and its constitution is all that is needed to address the superpower’s difficulties.