The Four Americas

I think it was one of my favorite humorists, Robert Benchley, who said that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds and those who don’t. In a recent piece in The Atlantic George Packer divides Americans into four different camps:

• Free America
• Smart America
• Real America
• Just America

Here’s his conclusion:

all four of the narratives I’ve described emerged from America’s failure to sustain and enlarge the middle-class democracy of the postwar years. They all respond to real problems. Each offers a value that the others need and lacks ones that the others have. Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.

All four narratives are also driven by a competition for status that generates fierce anxiety and resentment. They all anoint winners and losers. In Free America, the winners are the makers, and the losers are the takers who want to drag the rest down in perpetual dependency on a smothering government. In Smart America, the winners are the credentialed meritocrats, and the losers are the poorly educated who want to resist inevitable progress. In Real America, the winners are the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland, and the losers are treacherous elites and contaminating others who want to destroy the country. In Just America, the winners are the marginalized groups, and the losers are the dominant groups that want to go on dominating.

I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.

It’s common these days to hear people talk about sick America, dying America, the end of America. The same kinds of things were said in 1861, in 1893, in 1933, and in 1968. The sickness, the death, is always a moral condition. Maybe this comes from our Puritan heritage. If we are dying, it can’t be from natural causes. It must be a prolonged act of suicide, which is a form of murder.

I don’t think we are dying. We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away. Our passion for equality, the individualism it produces, the hustle for money, the love of novelty, the attachment to democracy, the distrust of authority and intellect—these won’t disappear. A way forward that tries to evade or crush them on the road to some free, smart, real, or just utopia will never arrive and instead will run into a strong reaction. But a way forward that tries to make us Equal Americans, all with the same rights and opportunities—the only basis for shared citizenship and self-government—is a road that connects our past and our future.

Meanwhile, we remain trapped in two countries. Each one is split by two narratives—Smart and Just on one side, Free and Real on the other. Neither separation nor conquest is a tenable future. The tensions within each country will persist even as the cold civil war between them rages on.

I found his taxonomy more brittle, more solipsistic, and less factually based than a previous deconstruction of the United States into four groups, Walter Russell Mead’s Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, Wilsonians, and Hamiltonians, on which I’ve written extensively. There’s at least some empirical and historical basis for Mead’s groups. I found Mead’s views more insightful. For example:

Oddly, the most influential libertarians were Europeans, especially the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, whose polemic against collectivism, The Road to Serfdom, was a publishing sensation in America in 1944, during the most dramatic mobilization of economic resources by state power in history.

There’s a reason that was the case. The thinker with the most influence on “Free America” wasn’t Hayek but (Russian) Ayn Rand cf. Paul Ryan, Alan Greenspan, Ron and Rand Paul. There’s more of objectivism to it than Reaganism. I suspect the numbers of people who subscribe to “Free America” or “Just America” are actually quite small.

What confuses things is that there’s bit of resonance between Mr. Packer’s taxonomy and Mead’s: “Free America” and Jeffersonians, “Smart America” and Wilsonians, “Real America” and Jacksonians, but not “Just America”. It’s actually rather new and I believe it’s just another term for Marxism substituting race or gender for class. There can be black, white, or Hispanic Jacksonians but there can only be white “Real Americans”. As someone who presumably considers himself part of “Smart America” his description of “Real America” is a lampoon while he cuts “Smart America” altogether too much slack. Note, too, that Mr. Packer is uncomfortable with his “Just America” appellation:

But Just America has a dissonant sound, for in its narrative, justice and America never rhyme. A more accurate name would be Unjust America, in a spirit of attack rather than aspiration.

which makes Mr. Packer’s analysis more comprehensive than it is. And I think his conclusion is entirely too rosy:

We have no choice but to live together—we’re quarantined as fellow citizens. Knowing who we are lets us see what kinds of change are possible. Countries are not social-science experiments. They have organic qualities, some positive, some destructive, that can’t be wished away.

That is factually untrue. The list of countries that no longer exist is enormous. Austro-Hungary, Prussia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia. Multi-ethnic, multi-confessional states must maintain a fragile balance. Most nation-states are united by ties of blood. The United States was nearly unique in being, as Chesterton put it a century ago, “a country founded on a creed”. One of Mr. Packer’s factions, “Just America”, rejects that creed as a cruel hoax. Without it I don’t believe there’s anything to keep the United States united.

One word of advice: don’t arouse the Jacksonians. I say this as someone who is not one of them but has lived among them all his life. They are fearsome enemies, merciless, and play by no rules other than victory.