Adam Gopnik of "The New Yorker" paints an illuminating portrait of basic differences in what different Americans want

Adam Gopnik's New Yorker website bio begins: "Adam Gopnik has been writing for The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction and humor pieces, book reviews, Profiles, reporting pieces, and more than a hundred stories for The Talk of the Town and Comment."

"The reason we don't have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it's that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised."

-- Adam Gopnik, in "Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat,"
in the September 12 New Yorker (abstract available here)

by Ken

For various reasons, including my inherent 9/11 resistance and the fact that last week's Monday holiday delayed the appearance of the September 12 New Yorker in my mailbox (though there was no holiday yesterday and this week's issue wasn't in my mailbox yesterday either), it's taken me awhile to begin digesting the issue, which is actually quite rich and stimulating.

Among its contents are big-picture-type pieces by two of the magazine's leading writers: Adam Gopnik's "Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat" (unfortunately, only an abstract is available free online), blurbed on the contents page as "Rethinking why nations go wrong" and on the piece itself as "Is America going down?," a look at the genre of historical writing he calls "declinism" (more about this in a moment); and George Packer's "Coming Apart" (again, only an abstract is available free online), blurbed on the contents page as "A decade of missed opportunities" and on the piece itself as "After 9/11 transfixed America, the country's problems were left to rot."

Pleasurable as it is to encounter two serious writers thinking seriously about serious matters, I'm not going to try to represent their cases here. I was just so struck by a portion of Adam Gopnik's piece that I had to pass it on.

I wish there were a way of making this shorter, and I tried abridging and paraphrasing, but as often happens, it's a mucky business trying to tell a good writer's story in a way other than the one he's chosen for telling it. And this is only a fairly small chunk of a thought-provoking essay on a category of writers he calls "declinists," who at least chronicle but usually also seek to explain why cultures that once rode high went to hell and why the same thing's abound to happen to their own, unless -- and Gopnik argues that the "unless" is generally crucial to the genre -- a particular path outlined by the uniquely perspicacious writer is, against all odds, followed.

As I often feel with Gopnik, who is obviously an excellent writer, and equally obviously exceedingly bright and broadly informed, I'm left feeling a bit grumbly, feeling that the overall picture isn't quite focused, that important elements have been left out or misperceived. Still, I found this chunk utterly fascinating as a description of the mindset of large numbers of Americans who don't agree with any aspect of the "progressive" vision, no matter what version of that vision we're talking about.

We're picking up deep into the piece, after Gopnik has discussed a primarily European chain of declinists tracing back to "the great summit of declinism -- the peak from which all subsequent declinism has declined," the publication in 1918 of "the book that gave decline its good name in publishing: the German historian Oswald Spengler's best-selling, thousand-page work 'The Decline of the West.'"

While British historians savor big-wheel explanations of why everybody is going to hell in a handbasket, American historians and journalists tend to work within a smaller historical compass. A case in point is "That Used to Be Us" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $28) -- the title comes from a remark of Barack Obama's about the disappearance of American innovation -- which promises to be the small-scle Spenglerian volume of the season. A joint effort by the Times columnist Thomas Friedman and the Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum, and written in a cozy, confidential style (there are frequent references to what "Michael" has written elsewhere and what "Tom" has seen in India and China), it accepts that the post-9/11 obsession with the Islamic threat and the War on Terror was a catastrophic national distraction. "Twenty-five years from now the war we undertook against al-Qaeda won't seem nearly as important as the wars we waged against physics and math," the authors declare, and then they catalogue all the ways in which America has, in the interim, slipped behind the rest of the rich world. There's our creaking infrastructure (compare the Shanghai and New York airpots, or the rail connections that get you there); our paralyzed educational system, where that war against science was fought; and our generally inverted values, which leave us with too many bankers betting on each other's bets and too many lawyers deposing other lawyers.

Who can argue with all this? Yet Friedman and Mandelbaum's book is marked by a kind of tactical disingenuousness. Not only do they propose, as a way to arrest the decline, a third party, with no clear policies, programs, popular constituency, or potential leaders; they also present every problem as one confronted by a uniform "we." The idea is that we all, left and right, wrinkle our brows and wring our hands and share the same goals, and are just so frustrated about our inability to achieve them. ("Senator Lindsey Graham leaned back in his chair in his Senate office, trying to imagine what would have happened if America's current media had been around to cover the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.") Now, there may be states and circumstances in which everyone wants something and the system prevents anyone from getting it. Perhaps all Italians want to save Venice from sinking, yet the dysfunction of Italian politics prevents them from doing so. But that's not the case here. Friedman and Mandelbaum want their countrymen to face the future without first facing the facts about their countryment: this is the country that a lot of "us" want.

Despite their title, the authors seem, for instance, determined to avoid the obvious point that one American who shares their outlook and ambitions in almost every detail -- who hates partisan wrangling, doubts the wisdom of big foreign wars, proposes a faith in a brisk mixture of private enterprise and public guarantees, accepts the priority of rebuilding our infrastructure -- is the President of the United States. If he's been frustrated, it's not because of some "systemic" political paralysis. it's because, as he has been startled to discover -- and as Friedman and Mandelbaum will also be startled to discover, if they ever that third party up and running -- there is another side, inexorably opposed to these apparently good things. The reason we don't have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it's that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. Friedman and Mandelbaum wring their hands at "our" unwillingness to sacrifice our comforts on behalf of our principles, but Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don't have a better infrastructure or decent elementary schools because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our great cities, or better-informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible.

The reasons for these feelings are, of course, complex, with a noble reason descending from the Revolutionary War, and its insistence on liberty at all costs, and an ignoble one descending from the Civil War and its creation of a permanent class of white men convinced that they are besieged by an underclass they regard as subsidized wards of the federal government. (Thus the curious belief that a worldwide real-estate crisis that hit the north of Spain and the east of Ireland as hard as the coast of Florida was the fault of money loaned by Washington to black people.) But the crucial point is that this is the result of active choice, not passive indifference: people who don't want high-speed rail are not just indifferent to fast trains. They are offended by fast trains, as the New York Post is offended by bike lanes and open-air plazas: these things give too much pleasure to those they hate. They would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for. As a recent study in the social sciences shows, if energy use in a household is monitored so that you can watch yourself saving money every month by using less, self-identified conservatives will actually use and spend more, apparently as a way of showing their scorn for liberal pieties. (Presumably, you could construct a similar experiment running toward the left, with the goods at play carbon footprints or local produce or the like.) The kind of outlook that Friedman and Mandelbaum assume is somehow natural to mankind and has been thrwarted here recently -- a broad-minded view of maximizing future utility -- has, from a historical perspective, a constituency so small as to be essentially nonexistent. In the long story of civilization, the moments when improving your lot beats out annoying your neighbor are vanishingly rare.

I have all sorts of quarrels to pick with Gopnik here and elsewhere in the piece (note, for example, that he starts by accusing Friedman and Mandelbaum of "a kind of tactical disingenuousness" but winds up arguing that they are just plain wrong in their perception of what Americans want, hardly a "tactical" issue), but I haven't encountered a description of our ideological divide which, overly reductive though it may be, makes the stakes ring truer for me.

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