Starting my summer reading with Robert Bellah has so utterly broken my brain that every time I think about it I look like the conspiracy board meme but I'm just staring into space
Bellah argued also, however, that the expressive individualism that gave rise to 60s era civil disobedience and the summer of peace and love is merely the other side of the greed is good individualism that then comes in to steal the show, and which evolves again into the best-life, best-me therapy-and-meds individualism that then pops up to assuage the upper middle class hurting in a gutted society.
What might turn into my actual supervillain origin story, and for now has me just staring, slack-jawed, is the realization that what gives rise to 60s expressive individualism is the space allowed by a much more robust welfare state and public benefit agenda than anything we've had since.
Like... we HAD nice things.
And then we wanted more of them. Civil rights expansion and codification is definitely nice things.
But people feared that the country was being set on fire to get them.
We lost public benefit, left governance, higher education as a commons, and well-funded institutional democracy because the SPACIOUSNESS that those things provided to thinking people within the American individualist context was terrifying to those who thought not only, as now, that they personally would lose the social control they had, but also to MANY who thought as centrists that the literal country and its union and future and social contract were in profound danger.
MY TERROR: were those people maybe right in that, given the spaciousness and possibility and mobility and real choice for the vast majority that a robust social democracy can provide, American individualism as self-focused, collective-refusing culture WOULD IN FACT INEVITABLY set itself on fire?
This is the (largely silent) argument made against letting a progressive agenda set the terms ever again and I'm not 100% positive it's wrong and it's not bc of progressivism but bc of americanism
because progressivism, both the orientation and also the agenda behind it, what it provides is greater freedom. Great freedom in the absolute.
And without a collectivist soul, which America may or may not have (Bellah thought perhaps but that we were in the process of discarding its last vestiges), great freedom without precarity and compulsion inherently comes to mean fire, fire everywhere because no one has muscular practice toward the compromises of shared and sustainable life
Update, I now think the best argument against this entire line of thinking is how incredibly many people in the US are deeply grateful for the guidance and reassurance of collective repression. The 'individualist' streak simply means that Americans require the repression that will hit them, too, be first and nominally directed at the neighbor they don't like.
@jordinn I don't know anything about Bellah, but I'm suspicious of any arguments about souls of countries or general spirits of the population. It seems essentialist and a way of avoiding analysis rather than furthering it.
If it's 'individualism' that's changed USA then why was so much capital exerted to dismantle the New Deal, Great Society and the labour unions? The historical record just shows me there was a class war which the plutocrats won.
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