For observers—American or otherwise—concerned about the United States today and not simply in the grip of partisan passion, this should be a time for assessing the overall national mood and considering some form of redress for a clearly dysfunctional climate. Of course it's both tempting and easy to poke at the other side: for globalists to ponder the ignorance and amoralism of the Trumpers; for Trumpers to blast the condescension and corruption of the tenured elites. But there may be at least one malady affecting both sides of the partisan divide and driving them even further apart: heightened levels of emotionality. As Mark Twain suggested in the passage quoted above, the problem is not new—but there is strong evidence that it has been getting worse.
We already know a good bit about our current dilemma. For example, the decline of trust in American society, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating steadily to the present day, has been well documented, and has eroded confidence in all three branches of government, the media, and in the scientific establishment. Digging a bit deeper, the spate of national character studies that emerged in the final decades of the 20th century generally agreed in finding that there have been fundamental changes to the nature of American individualism, which was turning increasingly into a penchant for self-expression and self-presentation—or, as Christopher Lasch dourly put it, a shallow narcissism. (As one interviewee rather grandly put it, “I am my own work of art.”) Individualism, furthermore, was less often moderated by membership in active associations or neighborhood groups. What had once been a nation of joiners was becoming more isolated, potentially making individualism of any stripe a more destructive force because it was increasingly less socially contained. These findings have more recently been enhanced by additional data on the decline of memberships. A recent follow-up study showing that the relative balance between “I” and “we” in national discourse has been shifting steadily toward the former over the past three decades confirms this important shift in how many Americans perceive their world.
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