Squinting Down at America

a brief theory of the cultural moment

Way back in the near-Pleistocene of 2022, I argued that America is “sick from the top down and healthy from the bottom up.” I think the theme that’s been emerging here over the last few weeks is a variation on that argument. To take just the two most recent examples, what can we make of a high-status former official sitting on a stage in Europe and warning that the First Amendment is a huge problem that impedes government because it keeps them from “hammering” voices that disrupt the mandarins in their exercise of authority, or of high-status idiots in national media announcing proudly that Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff are healing the horribleness of traditional American manhood? And I think it’s this:

America is still America, but American institutions are no longer culturally American.

The people who occupy their higher ranks, or even their middle ranks, don’t have American habits, desires, or preferences. They don’t speak in an American vernacular, and don’t appear to know how. They try to portray an American voice, like a badly programmed animatronic figure: I LIKE DORITOS HA HA HA. They’re acting, badly, on the foundation of a lazy and hazy guess about the thing they’re trying to simulate, which is being American and liking the place. Ordinary Americans, uh…what, Doritos or something? Junk food? Something like that? Hillary always keeps a bottle of hot sauce in her purse, by the way.

A bunch of threads have been severed. They don’t know the country, they don’t like what little they know of it, they don’t wish to be of it or in it. They view it as a thing “out there” that needs to be wrestled out of its dark backwardness and brought into the light. John Kerry is obviously more comfortably at home in Davos than he could ever be in any place between Manhattan and Santa Monica, other than maybe a paired gimme for Vail and Jackson Hole. He spent decades trying to govern a country he’d never been to, despite having performatively traipsed through it. And so, with exceptions, there’s an uncanny valley sensation that comes with watching high-status American political figures. “Hello, human, I am one of you, I enjoy eating the foods of you people. This program will restart in ten seconds.” It’s quite telling to watch them try to tag JD Vance, to my ear the most normal-sounding politician of the decade, as weird.

“I’m gonna get me a beer.”

I assume most people here have seen or read Matt Taibbi’s “Rescue the Republic” speech, but his big finish was by, for, and of the country he was speaking to:

To all those Snoops and Nosey Parkers sitting in their Homeland Security-funded “Centers of Excellence,” telling us day after day we must think as they say and vote as they say or else we’re traitorous Putin-loving fascists and enablers of “dangerous” disinformation:

Motherfucker, I’m an American. That shit does not work on us. And how can you impugn my patriotism when you’re sitting in Klaus Schwab’s lap, apologizing for the First Amendment to a crowd of Europeans? Look in the mirror.

He was an American speaking in that last part to John Kerry, to someone with an increasingly tenuous connection to a nation he finds distasteful and strange after several decades in its government.

When Harry Truman left the presidency, he and Bess jumped in a car and drove back to Missouri. They ate in diners, and stayed in roadside motels. They just…drove around. People stopping for lunch at the Howard Johnson found themselves sitting one booth down from President Truman. “Hey, Harry,” they said.

Gone. Replaced by simulations, but gone.

There’s a kind of death energy to the increasingly disconnected and forced performance. A house divided. We’ll see.