“Ordinary Americans of all backgrounds and convictions recognize that the entire political ecosystem—not only its leadership and its governing institutions, but also its leading ideas and ideals—is failing.”
With this quote, University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter telegraphs his fundamentally gloomy view of the future of the American experiment - a pessimism broadly shared by many Americans of various political stripes.
His new book Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America's Political Crisis is an explanation of how we got here, and what it means for our current cultural and political conditions. It is a return to the focus of his early 90s work on cultural conflict in Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America and Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America’s Culture War.
This is an important book. It’s not a light read, but for those who aren’t afraid to take on a more intellectual work, I highly recommend it.
Like many such works, Hunter’s book tells the history of America seen through a particular lens. In this case, it’s what he calls the “hybrid Enlightenment,” or the shared cultural underpinnings that enabled social and political solidarity in the US.
The hybrid Enlightenment is a combination of multiple elements, principally the English and Scottish strands of the Enlightenment and a millenarian Christianity of both the austere Calvinistic variety and a sort of populist folk one.
This hybrid Enlightenment was flawed, with various incomplete or contradictory elements that needed to be “worked through” (his adaptation of a Freudian term), such as racial injustice. But this working through, along with the evolution of society, caused the hybrid Enlightenment to slowly dissolve over time to the point where it no long provides a basis for solidarity, of which he says:
Solidarity is not just about the will to come together to do the work of democratic politics. It is about the cultural preconditions and the normative sources that make that coming together possible in the first place…Solidarity in this more capacious sense defines a framework of cohesion within which legitimate political debate, discourse, and action take place…The power of solidarity is found in the unspoken, often vague or fuzzy resonances of shared identity, shared affections, shared challenges, and a shared destiny.
After tracing his history, Hunter then provides a deeply depressing overview of our current cultural and political climate, one that raises fully legitimate questions about the future of American democracy due to the loss of the pre-conditions of solidarity.
Read the rest of this piece at Aaron Renn Substack.
Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.