mericans are in retrograde.
January tends to be a month when millions of Americans dive headfirst into self-improvement marathons. We buy all kinds of books and exercise toys. We subscribe to podcasts. We announce goals. Then February rolls around, and we crash back to reality.
Most of us are skipping that ritual this year. Battered by political unrest and pandemic fatigue, we’re just not up for it. Maybe instead of reading books about how to become smarter or thinner or more productive, we could educate ourselves about our country.
These 5 books don’t just offer a critique. They hold the keys to our future. We might realize that America isn’t something that can be made great , because the project remains incomplete.
Democracy isn’t done yet. Lately, we’ve been in retrograde. We’ve been moving backward instead of forward.
That could change this year. …
Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, by Kurt Anderson
You’ve probably noticed how immature Americans have been acting the last couple of years. Everyone insists on living in their own dream world where wealth lies just beyond reach. Half the country doesn’t give a single thought to how their actions affect other people. They’re constantly on the lookout for the next asset bubble to ride.
Currently, it’s Bitcoin.
Kurt Anderson makes a compelling point that everything that ails are society is actually baked-in. Our present culture has two parents: On the one hand, we’re descended from the Virginia settlers who spent decades scouring America for gold, driven on by myths and legends of secret cities full of hidden riches. On the other hand, we’re descended from a band of Christian puritans who left Europe in the 1600s because nobody could stand us. Over the next few centuries, these ideologies merged with pseudo-science and magical thinking to produce the uniquely insane American consciousness we see pretty much everywhere today.
The typical American now lives inside their own fantasy reality, which is reinforced by fairy tales about entrepreneurs who work hard and accrue extraordinary wealth. God loves them.
In America, you can pretend to be anything you want. It’s your God-given right. It’s been that way for hundreds of years. Meanwhile our obsession with easy riches and selfish, magical thinking keeps us from approaching our problems with a practical, realistic mindset.
It’s getting worse.
The solution is to take a step back from our wild Bitcoin dreams and think about what kind of society we want to live in. Maybe it should be one where you don’t need to make millions. Maybe it should be one where we’re not looking for the fountain of youth in a jar of goop.
How The South Won The Civil War, by Heather Cox Richardson
You might’ve come across Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter on Substack. It’s been getting a lot of attention lately, as she chronicles the ruptures in our democracy and puts Donald Trump’s antics into historical context. If you really want to understand what’s been going on with our politics, this is a must read that can open your eyes.
The title isn’t a gimmick. As Richardson shows with ample detail, southern antebellum ideologies survived after 1865. Aristocrats moved west and rebranded themselves as cowboys.
Racism remained alive and well, as did the worldview that democracy itself depended on governance by rich white men.
This isn’t just an oversight or a blind spot in our political structure. In America, elitist white men with money have always thought they know what’s best for everyone else. They think women are intellectually inferior. They think everyone else is weak and lazy, and needs their superior moral reasoning in order to live better lives.
Our political leaders inscribe this idea over and over. Things get better for a little while, then someone like Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan comes along and manages to pit poor white people against other marginalized groups, then mobilize them. Poor white classes keep falling for it, and commit extreme violence in the name of sacred patriotism.
Donald Trump is just the latest example.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson
If you ever wondered if Donald Trump was just a symptom of America’s deeper problems, then you’ll appreciate this book.
The next time you run into a friend or relative who wants to dismiss Trump as a sad anomaly in our otherwise glorious history, you can tell them to go read Wilkerson. Her work reveals just how eerily similar we are to Nazi Germany, in cultural and political terms.
Turns out, narcissism isn’t just the personality flaw of sick individuals. Entire societies can suffer from “group narcissism,” and that’s what causes people to sacrifice themselves and their well-being for the perceived greater good of their group. It’s an unfortunate trait that American political leaders have been exploiting for generations now.
Here’s my favorite paragraph:
The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.
Sound like anyone in the news lately?
Dictators bond people by race or class, and then pit those groups against each other. They elevate one caste above all the rest and tell them they’re special, even while taking advantage of them. Members of that group will do the craziest things, like storm capitol buildings.
They’ll call themselves patriots, when the truth is they’re really defending their own exclusive status.
The most important takeaway from Wilkerson isn’t that fascism poses a threat to America. It’s that fascism has been a part of our culture since the beginning. We’ve been fighting it for generations.
It’s now resurgent.
Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, by Anne Helen Petersen
The last few years have exposed the plight of the millennial generation. We’re not just overworked. We’re beyond tired. We were raised with great expectations, only to come of age in a world wracked by disaster and decline. The safety nets our parents enjoyed have vanished. Even worse, so has their support and understanding.
Boomers are fond of calling millennials entitled and irresponsible. As Anne Helen Petersen shows, it’s just a convenient excuse they use for electing leaders that systematically stripped away every possible means of social mobility over the last three decades.
The problem isn’t that millennials are lazy and immature. In the collective sense, our parents mortgaged our future in order to protect their own socioeconomic interests at our expense. The rage older generations heap on their progeny is nothing short of displaced guilt. As she puts it, they climbed a ladder and then pulled it up behind them.
Now they want to say it’s our fault.
It’s not that prior generations didn’t work hard. It’s that their work and ingenuity actually got them somewhere. They put down payments on affordable houses. They could rely on public education and labor unions. They could stretch a dollar.
Millennials don’t enjoy these same basic benefits. Making fifty or sixty thousand dollars a year now barely qualifies us as middle-income. The minimum wage jobs most teens are qualified for don’t even come close to paying for a college education, and degrees have become so watered-down they don’t mean anything anymore.
We need to rebalance the scales. If we don’t, these inequalities will only get worse for the next generation.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing The World, by Anand Giridharadas
We tend to think super-billionaires like Mark Zuckerburg and Jeff Bezos are being generous when they devote a tiny bit of their wealth to social causes that get a lot of media attention.
We’re wrong.
Giridharadas demonstrates how the charitable acts of billionaires and their nonprofits are a smokescreen.
Some call it Big Philanthropy.
This kind of philanthropy is designed to blunt public anger over obscene wealth and the unethical means these entrepreneurs employed to create it. More than that, they use their charities to dominate public policy and discourse. They drown out dissenting voices and exile competing worldviews. They impose their own capitalistic, entrepreneurial logic on problems that need other viewpoints.
Even worse, they often set up organizations that are immune to regulation and oversight, which means they have a free hand to do whatever they think is “best,” without consulting anyone else or giving any real thought to long term consequences. The biggest irony is how these charities are often seeking to fix problems their sponsors played a role in creating.
Basically, billionaires don’t solve much of anything by throwing their money around. They actually make things worse by silencing real experts and specialists who could do something.
The people in charge of these nonprofits often ignore local circumstances and historical contexts. They come up with solutions that often look great on paper and play well with the public. The solutions don’t actually work, though. That’s kind of the point. They pretend to bring about change, while protecting the status quo.
Rarely does Big Philanthropy accomplish anything aside from branding a crisis and turning it into a public relations spectacle. We would truly be better off if they’d just shut up and pay their taxes.
Letting billionaires be in charge of saving the world…
What could go wrong?
These Books Will Change The Way You Think
These five books will force you to take a hard look at American culture and history. Read them with an open mind, and you’ll come away with a richer understanding of our problems — and why we seem to keep fighting the same battles over and over again.
The point of reading them isn’t to shame yourself, or to feel less patriotic. If anything, you’ll understand your place in history better. You’ll understand that America is still growing up. We need to start acting more mature — not just as individuals, but collectively.
Otherwise, we’re doomed.
If you’re not American, but you wonder what the hell’s been going on with us lately, they’ll help with that too.
The problems Americans are dealing with aren’t new. They’re old.
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