Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up. Packer, "How America Fractured into Four Parts")
This goes to what I have been saying about our current cultural decadence. A society has become decadent when it has lost any collective sense of future possibility. It's happens when the music dies, so to say. Since at least the 1600s Liberalism and the Age of Reason has provided the basic framework for most North Atlantic societies that had given them that sense of future possibility. Liberalism is the song North Atlantic societies sang. Within that framework, there have been a variety of thematic variations and improvisational riffs, and often they have been out of tune with one another, but pretty much everyone, especially in America, believed that progress toward a better, prosperous, happier future was there for anyone who was willing to work for it. It energized the liveliest minds and souls, from entrepeneurs and scientists, to transcendentalists and utopian dreamers. But it has become at best for us now elevator music.
Liberalism no longer has that kind of vitality; people are still singing it but not with the same guileless conviction. It's rather like the way people sing in most Catholic churches, dutifully but weakly humming along with the melody that they don't really like that much. So we are no longer in the Age of Reason, we're in the Age of Whatever, which means the Age of Whatever Comes Next, and whatever comes next is either going to be regressive or progressive, but regressive by default unless a robust, unifying progressive future-oriented song emerges that most sane people can find both inspiring and plausible, that most people want to sing with gusto.
People want to believe there's morning in America, but there's a difference between the false promises of politicians and the real thing. Buying into Reagan's America was rather like the guy who is going thorough middle-age crisis who divorces his wife, buys a sports car, starts wearing an ascot, and dates someone half his age. It felt good for a while, but it was really stupid and often irresponsible. Reagan's 1980s fantasy of America laid the foundation for the delusional thinking that led to Jan. 6. But because there have been numerous false promises does not mean that the real thing isn't possible. But until it emerges, most of the cultural energy is coopted by cynics and fanatics.
So unlike most conservatives, I do not believe that decadence is a morally pejorative term; it's rather a descriptive one. It's the cultural equivalent of a slack low tide--we're in a time between tides waiting for the new tide to come in. Or perhaps a better metaphor is that a decadent cultural period happens when the cultural song becomes something that no one really wants to sing anymore. Conservatives think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and they want to get things back to the way they were before the music died. They want to force us back into church and sing songs we no longer love. They want us to eat our spinach, and that's not possible in the consumer society that Liberalism created. The trick is to listen for a new melody, new in the sense of original, not novel.
Sooner or later it will be sung, and most people of good will will hear it, and we can once again move forward. But for now, we're wandering in the wilderness, putting one foot in front of another. Some of us are humming a tune that we hope will catch on.
More Packer--:
But Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism. It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing. It stirs emotions that can have ugly consequences. The winners in Smart America—connected by airplane, internet, and investments to the rest of the globe—have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can’t grasp its importance for others. Their passionate loyalty, the one that gives them a particular identity, goes to their family. The rest is diversity and efficiency, heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars. They don’t see the point of patriotism.
Patriotism can be turned to good or ill purposes, but in most people it never dies. It’s a persistent attachment, like loyalty to your family, a source of meaning and togetherness, strongest when it’s hardly conscious. National loyalty is an attachment to what makes your country yours, distinct from the rest, even when you can’t stand it, even when it breaks your heart. This feeling can’t be wished out of existence. And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big. If your goal is to slow climate change, or reverse inequality, or stop racism, or rebuild democracy, you will need the national solidarity that comes from patriotism.
"Love of country" has to be part of a new melody of future possibility. Hopefully it will be a song that calls us to be our best possibility. The kind of vulgar MAGA patriotism on display the last several years is what happens by default when a better song is not available.