nearly a third (32 percent) of Americans say they get a “strong sense of community” from their American identity, compared to only 17 percent who feel the same about their race or ethnicity. Even amidst a slight drop in intense patriotism in 2020 amidst a pandemic and racial unrest, YouGov poll results showed robust levels of patriotism among a majority of Americans and even a slight uptick among young adults, Democrats, and Black Americans. You wouldn’t know this from the prevailing media narrative.
He offers other optimistic indicators.
In “Identity”, Francis Fukuyama concludes that humans are irrevocably tribal, and seeking tribal identity in nation is by far the least harmful.
The sky is not falling if the sky already fell. The spin on the headlines of some of those family stats is … kind of brazen.
“Unmarried share of childbearing has fallen from historic highs!” – but look at the chart. It was 5% in 1960, rose steady to 33% in 1993, then has a four year long slight dip and pause, then resumed growing to 41% in 2006, where it has mostly stayed since (it was still 40% in 2019). Hooray, “there is a great deal of sky in a nation”.
“Absolute number of births to unmarried moms is falling!” Heh, that’s one way to put it. The absolute number of births from married American women has been declining for *60 years*, down 40% from 4 million to 2.4 million, where it plateaued around 2008. Unmarried births exploded seven-fold from 250K to 1,750K in the same time period, and by 2019 it is ‘only’ 1,500K because overall births are flat-lining or in decline. Whew, some sky left after all.
What about the track record of those apocalyptic doomsayers? Well, Moynihan was warning about the unmarried rate of births for blacks in 1965 where it was 25%, but in 2019 it was 70%, around where it had been for the last 30 years. Well, that sure shows Moynihan! See, still 30% of sky left after all!
I’d also venture to guess that the prophets of doom from prior generations would have considered their prophecies more or less fulfilled in our age.
A rigorous, object-level discussion of who was right or wrong about which gloomy predictions, and whether those matters were ‘important’ enough or just ‘distractions’ (or whether we can define some forms of degeneration or despair down because we’re just resigned to them now in a new, lower social equilibrium) would indeed be interesting.
Maybe it’s reasonable to be presumptively suspicious of a “We Are Doomed!” tone, because it’s overused as a rhetorical device by low-quality authors.
But plenty of high-quality doomsayers proved to be correct – and not in a “broken clock twice a day” way – if not about the whole sky, then at least their little portion of it. So while it’s not good to be too swayed by exploitative alarmists, it is equally not good advice to simply dismiss these claims all out of hand, and one should be open-minded when looking over the arguments.
If 100 boys are all crying wolf and 99 are lying or BS’ing but one is being perfectly honest about the wolves coming right at your own kids, what should you do?
For instance, for all the people complaining about how trust in institutions has collapsed because those institutions deserve it by being increasing incompetent and untrustworthy, well, there’s a whole literature of smart folks – some of them even Libertarians! – who said that sky would fall if we didn’t do anything, and we didn’t do anything, so yeah, it fell. Bye bye, these pieces of sky. You were nice while you lasted.
However, without going Full Hanson on this, it seems to me that the object-level discussion is not what a lot of these “See, there’s still some exciting technical progress!” efforts are really about. (Combined with a little “not quite as terrible as it theoretically could have been” inadvertent damning-with-faint-praise discussion about those family stats.)
Notice the proponents are usually pro-market, pro-business institutions like AEI, CATO, Liberty Fund, etc.,
Among other things, it seems to me they want to:
1. Reduce the public salience of alarmist political rhetoric – especially of the ‘tribalist’ variety of fearmongering about the enormous stakes involved in the prospect of the other side gaining power – in part by providing an ideologically inoculating stream of “good news!” talking points which people can use or just hold in their minds as ‘rebuttals’, which – I suppose the advocates hope – would temper the impulse to become emotionally heated in a way that serves the ends of bad politicians but not the public interest, and
2. Demonstrate that the few things that are progressing fast and improving lives and making us better off are a consequence of the engines of prosperity and innovation that rely absolutely on healthy institutions of market exchange and epistemic inquiry, which ought not be demonized, or captured and corrupted to promote ideological ends over their traditional purposes.
Well, ok so far as that goes.
The trouble, however, is that if all of your good news is only coming from just one little part of the sky that is still healthy-ish, the unintended but still perfectly rational inference by implication is actually terrifyingly alarming and ultra-doomy!
“Oh, oh my God, that means, for all the other parts of the sky … look out! Institutions go boom! And also, if we lose this one last bit of good sky too, then … Oh No!”
In that case, maybe we should be absolutely fearmongering about a potential civilization-existential catastrophe that is coming right for us if we can’t somehow get those broken parts of sky back up, and the wrong people with the wrong ideas get a hold of that goose which lays the golden eggs and – thinking there is no limit to its bounty – squeeze it so hard for more that it plops over and dies.
In the vein of looking for the positive, Greg Lukianoff at FIRE has set out some principles in “The Empowering of the American Mind (Beta Version): 10 Principles for Opposing Thought Reform in K-12” that seem useful beyond that context and a powerful alternative to the dominant ideology: https://www.thefire.org
And I am pleased to see F.H. Buckley’s excellent new book extolling the virtue of curiosity receiving numerous positive reviews.
Thank you for the pointer — I have been looking for something like this. It is excellent, but as Lukianoff says it is in beta and I think it could be improved. I think we can improve it.
Here is a direct link to the document:
https://www.thefire.org/the-empowering-of-the-american-mind-beta-version-10-principles-for-opposing-thought-reform-in-k-12/
“If the story of Galileo were retold today, Big Tech would be the Church, content moderation would be the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and the woke mob would be the religious fanatics gathered outside looking to put the next head on a spike.”
From @DavidSacks
Sheesh.
What Handle wrote above can’t be topped.
What the hell does “patriotism” mean in a country where the federal government, while claiming to be somehow “patriotic,” is telling schools to teach kids that the country’s founding was an inherently racist enterprise and that racism and injustice have been the main theme of the country’s history, and that the country at all levels is still “systematically racism” even after more than a half century of official opposition to racism and outlawing of all racial discrimination, public and private? And where all the major institutions back this crusade to have US public schools teach US history as what used to be standard Soviet anti-American propaganda?
And who puts any stock in answers people give after 2 seconds thought to vague poll questions about abstractions like “patriotism”?
There’s a lot of great theoretical stuff on the Law & Liberty website, but analysis of the current political scene (domestic or political) is not their strong suit. Nor, to be frank, is it Kling’s.
“What the hell does “patriotism” mean in a country where the federal government, while claiming to be somehow “patriotic,” is telling schools to teach kids that the country’s founding was an inherently racist enterprise …”
Right. There is incessant fighting over rival notions of ‘patriotism’, because it’s a matter of values and priorities, which is the subject matter of all ideological conflict. When rival notions coexist, polls asking people to respond to words with ambiguous meanings must be handled with extreme methodological rigor and care. I mean, unless you’re just trying to maximize a headline number for propaganda purposes, then go ahead, do whatever with your ‘study’.
Patriotism is not even that it’s a ‘Rorschach Test’ / ‘abstract art’ term, in which people would tolerate room for varying interpretations. These are instinctively social conflicts in which there can only be room for one interpretative winner, so, in a culture war, there is constant struggle for “True Scotsman deutungshoheit“, that is, for getting one’s view generally accepted of what ‘true’ patriotism *ought* to mean.
In the evolution of the political situation in In the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleonic conquests, and during the rise of European Nationalist movements, this kind of “Prevarication of Names” was openly applied to the word ‘patriotism’ itself, with proponents of the new kind of Nationalism explicitly attempting to displace the old concept of special affection and loyalty to a particular group.
There was the old – unarticulated since more natural and organic in Azar Gat’s sense – nationalism with its extremely local conceptions of ‘nationality’ related to common culture, distinct heritage and lineage, with a geographical scope that was often quite narrow, and also frequently identifying with particular royal sovereigns and their ruling aristocrats or noble families.
The radical ‘New Nationalists’ were somewhat embarrassed by such backwards parochial and provincial attitudes, and while still anti-imperial and particularist to a degree, sought to displace them with the a new ethos of imitative Grand Republics, which, while not founded on strictly universalist principles, still tended to be more ‘propositional’ and aspirational and to cast their nets of what could constitute the realistically practical ‘single polity’ of a ‘Volk‘ far broader than before.
They weren’t even ‘irredentist’ really, except perhaps in the sense of trying to recombine peoples and territories as they were imagined to have been united in classical antiquity and leverage some lingering sentiments of resurrecting the greatness of Roman history.
The point being, however, is that changing the meaning of ‘patriotism’ from the old conception to the new one was an overt part of the active efforts to make the new nation-states. It was considered indispensable to the project of sanctifying the individual’s identification with the new state governing entity, of his placing his loyalties in the abstraction of a union encompassing a wider circle of solidarity, composed of larger collection of more diverse and fissiparous peoples in a more tenuous congregation.
The radicals knew it was going to take a lot of harmonizing, homogenizing, and sanding off the rough edges, and that the success of these efforts involved an abandonment and rejection of the small, more localist forms of classical ‘patriotism’.
Another example could be taken from Soviet history and their use of the term “Great Patriotic War” to refer to WWII. What did ‘Patriotism’ mean in Soviet Communism which was, at least in the beginning, explicitly universalist and internationalist?
Well, there was a lot of inherent contradiction between doing what it took to motivate people to endure the hardships of warfare on the one hand – “Socialism In One Country”, etc. – and trying to simultaneously gradually (sometimes not so gradually) erase and de-emphasize the national and ethnic identities of peoples in the many Captive Nations.
But the point is, ‘patriotism’ meant whatever they said it meant, as whatever meaning was convenient for them for it to have, because being in power means getting to define what words mean.