Five

This chapter details how television became the first modern technology to be entirely shaped by American culture and American ambition, and to take the American way of life to its fullest development. In the beginning, the new medium was literally the product of American power, a peacetime application of wartime technology used against German submarines and the Japanese navy. Later, the connection would seem less obvious, but only at first. As the mass medium of choice during the decades when the United States conquered the planet, television quickly became synonymous with an American future of material and spiritual progress. They were a window into America, but a window displaying the American dream in all its glory, a transplant of the American life energy. Arguably, the internet, mobile technology, Netflix, and binge-watching did not change this basic fact. By liberating content from the physical restraints of the old wartime vacuum tubes, they can only increase its powers and render it, as it were, more spiritual. Ultimately, the internet can be seen as an expansion of television culture.

Four

This chapter assesses whether America deserves to be placed alongside those Asian societies which, for all their progress, remain more or less shackled by tradition. The United States has been for more than a hundred years the very image of modernity. In the postwar decades, it appealed to European intellectuals such as Sartre on account of its deracinated life. The music, the literature, the architecture of those years were an extravaganza of countercultural passion, breaking with every convention. If people now feel that Americans are after all too conventional, there is reason to suspect that something else is happening and that their love affair with religion, guns, and the death penalty is to be explained from sources other than the persistence of traditional structures. The chapter offers an alternative explanation, looking in turn at these three peculiarities of American culture. It also considers an element of contemporary American life where differences with an older European sensibility seem clear enough: political correctness. Ultimately, one can see that a distinctive mark cuts across American experience as a whole, becoming more visible in those areas where it breaks away from its European past. One may call it the marker of a new civilization.

Seven

This chapter addresses how the principle of unreality took over American foreign policy and, with it, the world. How did America get to the Iraq War? How did America get to the point where the flight from reality is solemnly made into a philosophical and practical principle? Karl Rove mentions the growth of American power, and that was no doubt a prevailing factor in the process. The powerless must adapt to the conditions and circumstances given by a recalcitrant world, while the powerful can impose their concepts and desires on reality. And, yet, power alone is not enough to explain how and why reality became an illusion. After all, power might be used to change the world, to transform it according to one's wishes, rather than to create new worlds. One needs a second principle. For someone to lose interest in reality it is first necessary that they have tried to change it without success; they have to give up on reality. Power and powerlessness: the two tempos of American fantasy.

Six

This chapter assesses the problem of liberalism. Liberal society is based on a principle of freedom: each person has a claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties. The problem was that liberalism had been so extraordinarily effective at specifying the conditions of a free society that it could produce an answer to every political question. One almost forgets the whole point of a free society was to let people decide important questions in their own lives. The new America is founded on a different principle. This can be called the principle of unreality: everyone can pursue their own happiness so long as they refrain from imposing it on others as something real—as something valid for all. One way to think about the principle is to note that a society may be richer in human possibilities if it allows for the existence of illiberal ways of life, but in that case it is the value of diversity or experimentation that is being pursued, not the values defended by those ways of life. Citizens must be at liberty to adopt and abandon different values, to enter or exit different experiments in living. The state must recognize and enforce this right to enter and leave.

Three

This chapter evaluates what the Europeans call Americanization. For many, this was more or less equivalent to the end of times or, at least, the end of everything sacred. What America was exporting to Europe was not just its manufacturing prowess. It was a whole way of life, fundamentally antithetical to European civilization because the only goals it recognized were profit and efficiency. Taste would be sacrificed because everything must be produced for the greatest number according to the maxims of the assembly line. Leisure would disappear and be replaced by the divine cult of work and productivity. Tradition must be uprooted because tradition is full of wasteful or inefficient practices. There was the accusation of Puritanism as well, but even here no European would dream of blaming America of excessive spirituality: Puritan prohibitions concerning alcohol or sex were seen as pre-emptive measures to create the most efficient workers, and reduce human beings to machines. Indeed, in America, the rationalization of work and prohibition were undoubtedly connected. The chapter then looks at the American model of production, which was an engine of standardization, and the rising anti-Americanism.

One

This chapter discusses the narrative of decline of the American Republic. Many contemporary commentators argue that American elites now regard their own country as spoils to be fought over. Currents over the past four decades express the relentless pursuit of private interest at the expense of the common good, even when that pursuit may bring about the final collapse of the system. Privatization, deregulation, the rise of finance--these are contemporary versions of the old dialectic of decline. The gulf between economic and intellectual elites and the rest of the people seems larger than ever before. In Washington, Democrats and Republicans are no longer capable of reaching compromises on important policies and often regard winning their disputes as the only thing that matters. Donald Trump is only a small part of this narrative of decline. The chapter then provides a fuller picture of all the ways American life is reaching a breaking point, at a moment when disaggregating forces are getting stronger. Ultimately, this book assesses the possibility of the development of a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilization, rooted in new feelings and thoughts.

Eight

This chapter describes how the novel coronavirus pandemic is a war against reality, one that Americans are destined to lose. In America, the virus has remained a symbol, the underlying reality evaded or ignored, and the president can be seen as leading that evasion. Donald Trump is still attempting “to impose a narrative on an epidemic which has its own narrative.” Escapism was how America responded to the virus. For the best of two months, as the epidemic raged in China and then Italy, Trump kept insisting that the disease was no worse than the seasonal flu. Ultimately, Trump evaded reality by believing there was no problem, then everyone else evaded reality by believing the problem was Trump. The chapter then identifies three distinct stages in the way America has approached the pandemic—three distinct strategies or three kinds of escapism. When America turned from the virus to protest, following the murder of George Floyd, it revealed that the fight against the pandemic was after all a story-—not a necessity—-which could be replaced by a better story.

Two

This chapter examines the meaning of America, which is present as much in the great books written about the American experiment as in the most practical elements of its politics and economic life. It considers Alexis de Tocqueville's theory of the American experiment and looks at how the image of America as a representative of European civilization was built over two centuries by thinkers and writers for whom no alternative was yet conceivable or for whom a transatlantic community offered a distinct promise of happiness. Wealth and power will not be enough to provide Americans with a new understanding of their place in the history of civilization. Only a new-—equally full and vast—-system of thought can do that, and this new system cannot be imported from outside. It must be built from the actual experience of American life, even and especially when that experience seems most random and unintelligible.