Much is being made of a supposed recent decline of American society. In the article “How America Got Mean” (The Atlantic, September 2023), pundit David Brooks states: “In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.”
He says people in America are not getting the moral formation that they need and are not being taught how to disagree with people cordially. Brooks’ great epiphany is: “We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.”
Brooks cites statistics of “people saying they do not have close friends going up fourfold since 1990,” and “a record high 25 percent of 40 year-olds [that have] never [been] married.” To show how mean Americans have gotten, he says: “hate crimes in 2020 have risen to their highest level in 12 years.”
In the arc of American history, hate crimes are not a newly discovered phenomena. Only someone raised in a test tube or completely ignorant could be puzzled by these statistics. Only an entitled white male like David Brooks could even conceive of such drivel as Americans only recently being so mean and sad.
What is happening right now is America being American. America from its very beginning has been a vicious, amoral, selfish, greedy, hypocritical and mean nation.
Brooks as an entitled white male has no connection to the America he is talking about. He has spent his career as a pundit, writing for the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the neo-conservative Weekly Standard, and appearing on the PBS NewsHour. He has had, by all measures, a charmed life.
Brooks lived in affluent suburbs and went to an affluent high school before attending the University of Chicago. While writing for a campus publication, he wrote a spoof on William F. Buckley, Jr., who was scheduled to make an appearance there. Buckley took the occasion to offer Brooks a job. In 1984 he actually went to work for Buckley’s conservative National Review.
Brooks has never had to endure any of the trials and tribulations that the majority of Americans endure on a daily basis. Although Brooks is my age, he has never had the truly American experience of your parents having enough money to buy a house but being refused because you were “of color.” Or having a city change its boundaries to exclude minority neighborhoods so that minority children could not go to “white” schools. He has never been bused to a school outside of your neighborhood to comply with anti-segregation laws. These are just a few of the daily American tribulations that Brooks’ privilege protected him from experiencing.
Brooks has no insight other than his elite white privilege to qualify him to write about American morality. The fact that Brooks is suddenly puzzled by what is going on with Americans today shows he doesn’t have a clue. His article is an incredible display of disconnection from the American experience and ignorance of our history.
The Pilgrims came to America because they were driven out of Europe. They were Puritan Separatists, who wanted to “purify” the Anglican church of Roman Catholic influence. The Pilgrims were well aware that America was already inhabited, and they wanted to forcibly convert indigenous people to Christianity. They justified displacing Native Americans and stealing their land by characterizing them as uncivilized.
Our Founding Fathers did not have any better character than the Pilgrims. Forty percent of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave holders. And the Founding Fathers, while talking about freedom, inserted clause in the Constitution to continue slavery. America’s presidents were no better than the Founding Fathers: twelve of the first sixteen were slave holders.
Americans enslaved Native Americans for 150 years, often selling Indians into slavery in Barbados, Jamaica and Bermuda. They followed that up by breaking every one of the over 300 treaties they made with the Native Americans and making Indian genocide a government policy. Finally, Americans confined Native Americans to reservations. But only after they completed the most horrendous animal slaughter undertaken in modern history, and went about killing nearly every buffalo. The motivation for this attempted extermination of the buffalo was an even more reprehensible goal: to take away the Native Americans’ food source and way of life.
Americans enslaved African Americans for 250 years. They followed this up with 100 years of legalized discrimination, Black Codes, and Jim Crow. Americans who supported slavery fought a 4-year war to try to preserve slavery. After this bloody Civil War, where 500,000 Americans died, they continued to terrorize African Americans with years of unpunished lynchings. They destroyed African American wealth by taking over affluent black neighborhoods and stealing black land, using false charges of black men assaulting white women or blacks committing crimes.
America is the only country to use an atomic weapon on another country.
Viciousness, meanness, cruelty and selfishness is nothing new to Americans, it is in our DNA. So the election of Donald Trump, a moronic convicted felon, sex offender and hypocrite makes absolute perfect sense.
Brooks blames the decline of American society on the rise of social media, social isolation, changing demographics which have thrown whites into a panic, and economic inequality. Finally he settles on poor home training as the cause of America’s decline.
In my opinion, the rise of social media and its use by Americans who have been the victims of America’s meanest are now making Americans sadder and meaner. They are finally being confronted with the absurdity and extent of their own hypocrisy. Social media has given people who David Brooks and his elite cadre of writers and pundits have long ignored and avoided the opportunity to fight back against the supremacist assumptions at the center of the American universe. Confronted on social media with the view other Americans have of them, white Americans are finally taking a look at themselves and they are sad about what they see. Many, instead of accepting the facts, are just made angrier and meaner by the truth. This is the reason for banning books and ending the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.
Brooks’ great epiphany is, “America, long a white-dominated nation, is becoming a much more diverse country a change that has millions of white Americans in a panic. High levels of economic inequality and insecurity have left people afraid, alienated, and pessimistic.” Oh, poor Americans are sad, mad and scared! White male Americans are beginning to face the fact that they are not the ideal, they are not the center of the universe.
Brooks writes about a generation lacking moral and spiritual formation. He goes on to quote philosophers and has the unmitigated gall to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. to stabilize his muddled argument. He cites bildung—a German word for spiritual formation—and goes on to quote a number of educators and spiritual leaders from King and W.E.B. Du Bois to theologians like Niebuhr, to try to justify his claim that the meanness of Americans is a recent development.
I have to ask why hypocrites always try to bring in black thinkers to shore up their faulty arguments. Brooks has as much in common with these men as an ant has with an eagle, and has spent most of his career working for publications that opposed their ideas. His argument that this recent generation of Americans is getting sadder and meaner is nonsense. When Brooks brings in black leaders and thinkers to bolster his ridiculous argument, the confirmation of his hypocrisy is complete.
What is happening is America being American. And no excuse-making or quoting of theologians or leaders will cover that up. Trump and his followers are showing America’s true nature and their meanest and hate is nothing new. Brooks tries to hide this fact by claiming that this is a recent phenomenon, but all you have to do is look at America’s history to know this is an absolute lie.
Some Americans do have a moral compass, but sadly it is the Americans who have been victimized by the majority who have made the rest of America follow that compass. Native Americans fought against America’s stealing of their land and the slaughter of the buffalo. Slaves, Native Americans and Americans of goodwill like John Brown fought against slavery, making the institution untenable. People of color and Americans of goodwill fought against discrimination and Jim Crow. That fight continues today. The great hope of America is these people of goodwill, and people who lead by being kind, tolerant and generous.
In 2023 David Brooks suddenly asked, when did Americans become so mean? A better question might be whether he is qualified to write anything worth reading. We need to be honest enough with ourselves to say the meanness and sadness of Americans is not a new phenomenon. Anyone who says otherwise is either in complete denial or is completely ignorant of American morality and history. Brooks and his ilk may be both.
