The secret of culture war is that it is often a good and necessary thing.
.. But in the sweep of American history, it’s the battles over cultural norms and so-called social issues — over race and religion, intoxicants and sex, speech and censorship, immigration and assimilation — that for better or worse have often made us who we are.
.. A bad culture war is one in which attitudinizing, tribalism and worst-case fearmongering float around unmoored from any specific legal question
.. a master, too, of taking social and cultural debates that could be important and necessary and making them stupider and emptier and all about himself.
.. he is unique as well in that unlike most culture warriors — who are usually initially idealists, however corrupted they may ultimately become — he has never cared about anything higher or nobler than himself, and so he’s never happier than when the entire country seems to be having a culture war about, well, Donald Trump.
.. Trump has made it much, much worse, by multiplying the reasons one might reasonably kneel — for solidarity with teammates, as a protest against the president’s behavior, as a gesture in favor of free speech, as an act of racial pride — and then encouraging his own partisans to interpret the kneeling as a broad affront to their own patriotism and politics.
.. So now we’re “arguing” (I use the term loosely) about everything from the free-speech rights of pro athletes to whether the national anthem is right-wing political correctness to LeBron James’s punditry on the miseducation of Trump voters … and the specific issue that Kaepernick intended to raise, police misconduct, is buried seven layers of controversy deep.
.. First, can we have the greater accountability for cops that activists reasonably demand, in which juries convict more trigger-happy officers and police departments establish a less adversarial relationship to the communities they police
.. Second, can we continue the move toward de-incarceration — supported, not that long ago, by Republicans as well as Democrats — without reversing the gains that have made many of our cities safe?
.. we need a social and cultural debate focused on the substance that Colin Kaepernick’s choice of protest unfortunately obscured, and Donald Trump’s flagsploitation has deliberately buried. Not an end to culture war, but a better culture war — in which victory and defeat can be defined, and peace becomes a possibility.
The Death of Idealism
This presidential election is a contest between the oldest of the baby boomers. Yet Donald Trump, 70, and Hillary Clinton, 68, represent two very different decades in the formation of that generation. Donald Trump became famous as a classic 1980s type, while Hillary Clinton first attained public notice as a classic 1960s type.
.. During the Reagan years, writers celebrated capitalism not only as a wealth-generating engine but also as a moral system, a way to arouse hard work, creativity and trust.
.. A friend of mine came up to me at one of those parties and summarized the atmosphere: “Not indicted, not invited.”
.. As we saw on Monday night, Trump now represents capitalism degraded to pure selfishness. He treats other people like objects and lies with abandon. Proud to be paying no taxes while others foot the bill, proud to have profited off the housing bust that caused so much suffering, he lacks even the barest conception of civic life and his responsibilities to it.
.. When asked why she wants to be president or for any positive vision, she devolves into a list of programs. And it is never enough just to list three programs in an answer; she has to pile in an arid hodgepodge of eight or nine. This is pure interest-group liberalism — buying votes with federal money — not an inspiring image of the common good.
.. The twin revolutions of the 1960s and the 1980s liberated the individual — first socially and then economically — and weakened the community. More surprising, this boomer-versus-boomer campaign has decimated idealism.
.. Ironically, one of the tasks for those who succeed the baby boomers is to restore idealism. The great challenge of our moment is the crisis of isolation and fragmentation, the need to rebind the fabric of a society that has been torn by selfishness, cynicism, distrust and autonomy.
.. At some point there will have to be a new vocabulary and a restored anthropology, emphasizing love, friendship, faithfulness, solidarity and neighborliness that pushes people toward connection rather than distrust. Millennials, I think, want to be active in this rebinding. But inspiration certainly isn’t coming from the aging boomers now onstage.
The End of American Idealism
Sometimes it’s hard to shake the uneasy feeling that we are witnessing the dissolution of an idea that was once America.
.. (Around two-thirds of Americans don’t trust either party’s front-runner.)
The Movement Mentality
Today universities teach “critical thinking” — to be detached, skeptical and analytic. Movements are marked by emotion — division and solidarity, victory and defeat.
.. Of course there is often rigidity and groupthink, but people can also be smarter when thinking in groups. For example, movements pool imagination. It’s very hard to come up with a vision so compelling that it can provide a unifying purpose to your life. But such visions emerge in a movement collectively, and then get crystallized by a leader like Martin Luther King.