America, from exceptionalism to nihilism

“The world is going America’s way,” Fareed Zakaria wrote in 2008. “Countries are becoming more open, market friendly and democratic.” Since the fall of communism, American leaders in politics, business and journalism have repeatedly broadcast the conceit that we live, or will soon live, in the best of all possible worlds. Barack Obama declared last year that “if you had to choose any time in the course of history to be alive, you’d choose this one. Right here in America, right now.” It took the rise of Donald Trump to shatter the belief that, as critic Philip Rahv wrote in the early 1950s, the US “is in its very nature immune to tragic social conflicts and collisions.” Today, an America led by a Twitter troll, who now governs with the help of fake news, manifests not only similar pathologies, but also an onslaught against the very notion of truth.

Extravagant promises by ruling elites, and their unexamined assumptions, are partly to blame for this moral breakdown in America. In 2011, for instance, Obama had claimed, “We are poised to make the 21st century again the American century.” But such narratives seemed to mock the suffering and despair exposed by Black Lives Matter or the white Rust-Belt proletariat. Obama, who recently accepted a lucrative speaking engagement on Wall Street, now looks like just one of the fortunate members of historically depressed minorities who mistake their own upward mobility for collective advance.

Generalising on the basis of personal success can be politically disastrous, especially when loss, decay and fear sum up the experiences of many others. We will have learned nothing from Trump’s victory if we don’t examine how and why American elites came to indulge in ressentiment-generating boosterism just as economic and cultural inequality was becoming intolerable to so many, and how their loss of intellectual credibility and moral authority brought about the post-truth era.

Critics Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Dwight McDonald and Richard Hofstadter grappled with the possibility that the individual, disoriented by radical change, detached from ethical constraints, was prone to manipulation by the machineries of propaganda and entertainment. The titles of some of the decade’s bestsellers — “The Hidden Persuaders,” “The Power Elite,” “The Lonely Crowd,” “The Organisation Man,” “One-Dimensional Man,” “Irrational Man” — underlined the new threats that a hyper-rationalist society devoted to profit and consumption posed to freedom. “Our gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of international insecurity does not offer us even the happiness of which the former century dreamed,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr.

In 1960, Life magazine asked if America was “great in the right way,” Adlai Stevenson — a presidential candidate — worried that, “self-deceit has slackened our grip on reality.” However, the is contradiction that, as James Baldwin put it, Americans were “afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.”

Sociologist C Wright Mills described how an elite with Ivy League education and overlapping interests could steal the choicest fruits of American progress. Walter Lippmann worried that the promise of wealth-creation was a weak moral basis for a national community. For many thinkers, nihilism, a catastrophic breakdown of faith in national ideology and institutions that had occurred in Europe, was a possibility in America.

The 1960s and 1970s revealed a country divided along generational, racial, religious, gender and political lines. White and black, gay and straight, men and women, religious and secular, anti-war protesters and hard-hatted patriots all faced off. For a time, the founding principles of American society — the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — seemed like they would be unable to adjudicate between the often clashing interests.
But the American creed, formulated by 18th-century slave-owners and upheld by white males across the ideological spectrum, still managed to command loyalty — because no alternative seemed as effective at advancing personal freedoms. Progress, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the war on poverty and the gains of feminism, maintained faith in the American Dream — the most seductive ideology and substitute religion of the modern world.

By the 1980s, Reagan or Reaganites would brush aside any suggestion that there was a “national malaise.” The collapse of communism vindicated the American model. The disappearance of an antagonist that had defined America’s self-image unleashed the solipsistic idealism that Niebuhr had warned against. Post-communist Russia received an army of American economists, technocrats and journalists determined to usher the country into American-style democracy and free markets. It has been forgotten that the calamitous failure of these “market Bolsheviks,” as economist Joseph Stiglitz called them, helped spawn the first major demagogue of our time: Vladimir V Putin. Putin came to power on the back of his promise to sort things out after the country’s experiment in privatisation led to a systemic collapse. This American-assisted debacle in Russia preceded the unravelling of Iraq and the great unwinding in America itself.

Enormous arrogance
It revealed how a networked elite, consisting of neoliberal globalisers, liberal internationalists and neoconservative intellectuals, had amassed unaccountable influence while becoming a service class for politicians. Subsequent fiascos — the rise of Al Qaeda and then Islamic State, the crisis of unregulated capitalism followed by the bailout of culpable bankers — confirmed that this elite was too entrenched to be displaced by its failures and too arrogant to learn from them.

Putin’s success in stoking a bitter Russian nationalism had signaled early an age of anger, one in which demagogues would be best placed to exploit the rage of those scorned by global regimes of privatisation. And yet this record is barely discussed, even as centrist and liberal intellectuals accuse Putin of trying to influence political outcomes in America. In another self-protective move, these intellectuals have taken to blaming identity politics for Trump’s support among white male voters. The acclaim with which both liberal internationalists like Zakaria and neocons like Bill Kristol greeted the Trump administration’s recent missile strikes in Syria revealed an unimpaired fantasy of righteous omnipotence.

Such an ostrich-like retreat into the sands of American exceptionalism postpones a necessary reckoning with the issues that Lippmann confronted in the 1950s. Trump’s war on America’s institutions is part of a global assault on a vital connection between politics and truth, and its effects will outlast him.

Obama insisted in his farewell address that America “has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.” Arguably, this widely believed American creed of continuous and irreversible progress is what saved a diverse society from tragic social conflicts, and from mass manipulators who have periodically ruined other countries with their quack solutions.

Today, however, more people seem to have seen through the constructed nature of this quasi-religious faith: It’s credible only if you believe in it. They feel deceived by a class of politicians, experts, technocrats and journalists which had claimed to be truthful and offered propositions that turned out to be wrong: the rising tide of globalisation will lift all boats, shock therapy would bring capitalism to Russia, shock-and-awe therapy would deliver democracy to Iraq. The aggrieved now see the elites, who offered to expedite progress while expanding their own power and wealth, as self-serving charlatans.

Everywhere the disaffected are succumbing to alternative facts — a fragmentation of truth quickened by technology. It is in this sense, unanticipated by Obama, that the 21st century is proving to be the American Century. The world’s oldest modern democracy leads the free world in its helplessness before the dissolution of its most cherished beliefs and values. Now under an obsessive liar, America has accelerated its most insidious tendency: nihilism.