What Happened to America?

It began with post-mortems for the Biden-produced debacle in Afghanistan. The ongoing critique of American policy has now, almost magically, morphed into a deep analysis of what is wrong with America. The only real problem with these studies is that we will not soon run out of material.

Much is wrong with America. A country led by a Scarecrow, backed up by a band of fools, is not about to reassert world leadership. As Miss Giggles herself, Vice President Kamala Harris, hops around Southeast Asia claiming that America is a reliable ally, the prime minister of Singapore managed to challenge her assertion-- to her face.

When Asian leaders fail to respect your face, it means that they no longer respect you. They are treating you like a clown because you have been acting like a clown. It was a strange moment indeed.

So, among the analyses of America’s current failed state, we have this from one Peter Savodnik. Normally, he writes for Vanity Fair. This time, his essay has appeared on the Bari Weiss Substack. Again, hats off to Weiss for landing on her feet after unceremoniously ditching the New York Times. 

Many people are talking about the Savodnik essay, so here are a few excerpts, with comments. After sharing some domestic scenes-- why do writers feel they have to share such personal details?-- he opens with his theme-- failure.

It is tonic:

Then, we failed. We failed over and over and over. In Iraq. In Afghanistan. But also — and this was harder at first to see — at home.

We kept electing commanders-in-chief who had never served, who had credentials but had never built anything, whose success resided atop the more substantive success of more serious people. The post-Cold-War president could make you feel all kinds of things, but he was always a little out of his depth because he had very little to begin with. He made promises he did not really understand. We won’t just pummel Afghanistan into glass. We’ll turn it into a Jeffersonian republic. We’ll make these people into a people they have never been, even though no one — the Brits, the Soviets, the Persians — has ever attempted as much, let alone achieved it. We will do it because we’re Americans.

It wasn’t just our presidents. It was that the whole machinery of American government seemed less capable of doing big things: mopping up New Orleans; quashing the subprime meltdown; making sure Big Pharma didn’t kill us with painkillers.

One might rejoin that Donald Trump did actually build things, but he had a devilishly difficult time getting the government to do much of anything. When he did, the results were often positive, but Savodnik’s larger point resonates.

Like most of our recent presidents, the people who have been running the country did not rise up through the ranks. They did not earn their way by ascending the ladder of political service. They were most often amateurs, propelled to the top by a combination of good looks and charisma.

Evidently, Savodnik is referring to one George W. Bush, a man who was largely in over his head-- as was his predecessor and as was his successor-- but who managed to glom on to the notion that we would build a democracy in Afghanistan. It was, dare we say, a fool’s errand, and certainly was a major contributing factor in our two decades long Afghanistan adventure. We might also ask who was advising Bush, but no one seems much to care.

People got seriously torqued when Tom Friedman suggested that as long as America could not complete a high-speed rail line it was not a serious country. And yet, from Tim Cook to Elon Musk to Marc Andreeson, people in the tech world have bemoaned the fact that American workers lack initiative and skills. A few days ago I reported an essay by a trio of serious mathematicians, to the effect that we were falling seriously behind the nations of the Far East because we had chosen to teach critical race theory, but not advanced math.

At this point, Savodnik makes a telling point. Our great tech companies do not create as much as they connect people. If you ask who is building the networks of 5G infrastructure throughout the world, the answer will not be America.

Worse yet, high tech companies have mostly served to produce spurious connections between people. One might say that the connections established over social media are more virtual than real. After all, Facebook serves no useful function in society. Its efforts to render itself useful by joining with Twitter in censoring voices it does not like has exposed it for the waste that it is.

The fastest-growing technology companies didn’t create so much as connect. They connected us with friends and drivers and places to eat and to stay. Uber was great, but no one was pitching apps to tackle joblessness, cancer, alienation.

The more we communicate online the less we communicate in person. We do not converse with other people any more. And thus, the social fabric is fraying, if not being shredded:

We talked with more people than ever. The number of acronyms and emojis we vomited out — voicelessly, by way of thumb — exploded. But the things we said were more trite, thinner. Which made everything faster, smoother, “smarter,” and exponentially lonelier.

We were stuck in the middle of this strange contradiction — the more and the less blended together. Which left everything feeling flat. Even those interactions that still took place IRL, which were always being interrupted by a ping or a vibration or someone glancing at a screen, wondering whether more interesting things were happening in this other invisible, parallel universe.

Social media seemed to make relationships with human beings obsolescent. They are, as a movie whose name I forgot showed clearly, addictive substances. Heck, even the president of China pronounced them to be like opium. Those who know Chinese history understand that that nation has very little tolerance for opiates sent into the country from the Anglosphere. Remember the Opium Wars?

Of course, once Xi Jinping started denouncing social media companies for their negative impact on children and even adults, good Americans rose up to defend social media and to denounce the authoritarian Chinese. It wasn't a sign of competent thinking.

Many Americans know that children are being serious damaged by their addictions to social media, but when the president of China decides that he is going to try to do something about it, we defend social media. Or better, we complain. It beats doing something to rein in the totalitarians who run Facebook and Twitter.

Savodnik seems to think that we should all be having difficult conversations. I would be happier to see people exchanging greetings politely. Difficult conversations tend to be divisive:

But we forgot that it was also impossible to get by without other human beings. We were relieved we no longer had to have difficult conversations — one could simply ghost or delete or block — but we started to think this might not be healthy. Difficult conversations, after all, were important and good, and they instilled character. They made us more real. We yearned for the days before high-speed and we talked endlessly about the importance of authenticity. The truth is, we just missed it.

Serious adults decided that they needed to learn how to use Tik-Tok-- whatever that is?-- but that they need not provide moral guidance to the young. It has been a major moral failing:

The people in charge stopped being adults, which meant they stopped upholding the values and standards of those who came before and they rationalized this abandonment by telling themselves that the Tik-Tokification of American discourse was harmless or forward-looking or a good way to “engage” Gen Z. They forgot that it was their job not to engage with the young but to teach them.

So, we have gotten confused. We are not concerned about getting things done, about building things, about leading adult lives. We think that it’s all about therapy and that if we rejigger our mindset then naturally all will be will. 

They were confused, and, in their confusion, they failed to distinguish between influencers — otherwise known as popular people with short shelf lives — and leaders, who were willing to harness and even sacrifice their popularity in the service of something bigger than themselves. Everyone in the land of this new, horizontal, non-elite elite, was a brand now, and they spoke the same stupid, happy lingo of the H.R. Department — relentlessly upbeat, irony-averse, disingenuous, parochial. They thought the worst thing in the world was to offend. They said amazing a lot.

Savodnik identifies someone called Benny Drama, an idiot influencer who appeared at the White House in order to encourage people to get vaccinated. So, the Biden administration was wallowing in stupidity while Afghanistan was burning:

They were disconnected from the gravity of the moment, because, like all adolescents, they hadn’t yet come into possession of themselves. They were silly and trite and self-important. They were conduits for social-media personalities. They thought bubble-gum phenoms like Benny Drama were clever.

It’s worth noting that the White House released that Benny Drama video — which was meant to encourage all of us to get our vaccinations — weeks after the State Department warned that Kabul was on the brink of falling to the Taliban and exactly one week before all those Afghans crammed themselves into the wheel well and climbed onto the wing of that C-17, hoping that, somehow, when they opened their eyes, they would be in America.

We are drowning in an ocean of inanity. A nice phrase.... We have failed to educate children and we want to cover up our failures by telling them that their mental drool makes them surpassingly intelligent. Just ask Benny Drama.

Our elites’ dereliction of duty, their forgetting — about who they were supposed to be and, just as important, what America was supposed to be — is mostly to blame for the ocean of inanity that has engulfed us. The multiplying stupidities. The mythologies we promulgate online unironically or strategically. The preeners. The pronoun displayers. The opportunists. Michael Moore with his mindless Instagram post about everyone having their own Taliban.

A genuine elite would know enough, be strong enough, to say: enough. To say: no. To say: that is nonsense.

A genuine elite would care little about how many followers it had. It would be steeped in its many responsibilities — to those who had come before and those who were yet to be born — and that sense of responsibility would be reflected in its nourishing and cultivation of the institutions of American life. It would ensure that those institutions remained tethered to their heritage while open to new voices. An ever-expanding, renewing worldview. Like America itself.

Savodnik explains that we are governed by weaklings. Take the blithering fool running the State Department, coupled with the woke crowd at the Pentagon-- we do not have to go very far to find evidence for his view:

Instead, we are governed by weaklings whose weakness has enabled all species of moral relativism. The identitarian left can no longer distinguish between its political foes and those who are truly evil. It cannot see that the “toxic masculinity” it decries extended the lifespans of Afghan women and shielded them from their would-be rapists and enabled their daughters to go to school. The identitarian right wonders aloud why America should absorb the Afghan interpreters who helped us prosecute a 20-year-war in their country. It cannot see that admitting these refugees is a matter not of immigration policy, but of honor and integrity and preserving these values that, it claims, are central to the American character. Both camps have been permanently alienated from their home. Both are incapable of charting a way forward, because they have forgotten, among all the many other things, where we are going. Our ignominious departure from Hamid Karzai International was presaged years ago by their ignorance and cravenness.

What now?

We have arrived at the second bookend: the Afghans falling from the sky.

Of course, it wasn’t really a bookend. “Bookend” implies symmetry. This wasn’t symmetrical. The first fall was horrifying, but it was the first. It signaled the start of something, and it signaled the hope that, soon, everything would be different.

Now we know that nothing will be different. That we have been returned to September 11, 2001, but that it is worse this time, because no one fears us and everyone knows we’re never going back. That nothing can be done. About Afghanistan and, really, America. There is a sense of inevitable decline.

He is not very optimistic about America. Then again, neither am I.