The First Invasion of America
And the
cultural earthquake it’s unleashing.
By David Brooks
Opinion
Columnist
·
May 21, 2020
I was an American history major in
college, back in the 1980s.
I’ll
be honest with you. I thrilled to the way the American story was told back
then. To immigrate to America was to join the luckiest and greatest nation in
history. “Nothing in all history had ever succeeded like America, and every
American knew it,” Henry Steele Commager wrote in his 1950 book, “The American
Mind.”
To
be born American was to be born to a glorious destiny. We were the nation of
the future, the vanguard of justice, the last best hope of mankind. “Have the
elder races halted?” Walt Whitman asked, “Do they droop and end their lesson,
wearied over there beyond the seas? We take up the task eternal.”
To
be born American was to be born boldly individual, daring and self-sufficient.
“Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string,” Ralph Waldo Emerson
wrote in an essay called, very Americanly, “Self-Reliance.”
To
be born American was to bow down to no one, to say: I’m no better than anyone else,
but nobody’s better than me. Tocqueville wrote about the equality of
condition he found in America; no one putting on airs over anyone else. In
1981, Samuel Huntington wrote that American creed was built around a suspicion
of authority and a fervent rejection of hierarchy: “The essence of egalitarianism
is rejection of the idea that one person has the right to exercise power over
another.”
I
found it all so energizing. Being an American was not just a citizenship. It
was a vocation, a call to serve a grand national mission.
Today,
of course, we understand what was wrong with that version of American history.
It didn’t include everybody. It left out the full horrors of slavery and
genocide.
But
here’s what has struck me forcefully, especially during the pandemic: That
whole version of the American creed was all based on an assumption of
existential security. Americans had the luxury of thinking and living the way
they did because they had two whopping great oceans on either side. The United
States was immune to foreign invasion, the corruptions of the old world. It was
often spared the plagues that swept over so many other parts of the globe.
We
could be individualistic, anti-authority, daring and self-sufficient because on
an elemental level we felt so damn safe.
University
of Maryland scholar Michele Gelfand has spent her career comparing national
cultures. Some nations grow up relatively spared from foreign invasion and the
frequent devastation of infectious disease. Gelfand finds that these are loose
nations: individualistic, creative but also disordered, uncoordinated and
reckless.
Other
nations have not been so lucky. Harsh necessity has made them tight nations.
Hardship has taught them to pull together, to be more conformist, but also
better at building social order and self-control.
Gelfand
wrote a book called “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers.” We Americans have been
rule-breakers, the classic loose nation.
But
what happens to a loose nation when the sense of existential security
disappears? Over the first two decades of the 21st century, America has lost
its sense of safety, the calm confidence that the future is ours, that our
institutions are sound or even minimally competent.
And
if there was any shred of existential safety left, surely the pandemic has
taken it away — around 100,000 dead so far, an economy ravaged. We’ve had
threats before, a few foreign incursions like in 1812, even pandemics when
America was less just than it is today. But we’ve never had them smack in the
middle of a crisis of confidence, a crisis of authority, plus social and
spiritual crises all at once.
So
in that sense, this is the first invasion of America. This is the first time
that a menace has crossed our borders, upended the daily lives of every
American and rocked our ancient sense of safety. Welcome to life in the rest of
the world.
Aside
from a few protesters and a depraved president, most of us have understood we
need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a
complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In
the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.
But
something more profound is going on. We are undergoing a more permanent shift
in national consciousness, a reconstruction of meanings, symbols, values and
narratives. If the old American creed grew up in an atmosphere of assumed
security and liberty, the new one is growing up in an atmosphere of
vulnerability and precariousness.
In
this atmosphere, economic resilience will be more valued than maximized efficiency.
We’ll spend more time minimizing downside risks than maximizing upside gains.
The local and the rooted will be valued more than the distantly networked.
We’ll value community over individualism, embeddedness over autonomy.
Something lovely is being lost.
America’s old idea of itself unleashed a torrent of energy. But the American
identity that grows up in the shadow of the plague can have the humanity of
shared vulnerability, the humility that comes with an understanding of the
precariousness of life and a fierce solidarity that emerges during a long
struggle against an invading force.
