Tag: inaugural address
The Zeitgeist of Doom – The Atlantic
Sometime around 1970, the American personality changed. In prior decades, people tended to define themselves according to the social roles they played: I’m a farmer, teacher, housewife, priest. But then a more individualistic culture took over. The University of Michigan psychologist Joseph Veroff and his colleagues compared national surveys conducted in 1957 and 1976 and found a significant shift in people’s self-definition: A communal, “socially integrated” mindset was being replaced with a “personal or individuated” mindset. The right-wing
We’re Living in a Golden Age of Fatalism
When I was in school, American history was taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended it; then the civil-rights movement ended segregation. The vote was extended to more and more Americans—starting with white men, then women, Black people, and finally even 18-year-olds—thus fulfilling the promise of democracy. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, but somehow it didn’t invalidate the
Big Tech Founders Are America’s False Idols
My first job out of UCLA was in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley, in the 1980s. Like most of my analyst class, I had no idea what investment banking was—only that we were at the helm of the capitalist bobsled and could make a lot of money. We paid scant consideration to the wider role finance played in society. We were charged with birthing the apex predator of the capitalist species, the public company. Our economic mission, we
America Can’t Shed Its Big-Brother Persona
Donald Trump was supposed to have changed the world, robbing America not just of its luster but of its allies’ trust. Here was a president of such gauche ignorance and hostility, it seemed impossible that American power would ever be seen in the same light again. For Europe, in particular, Trump’s jingoistic belligerence was poised to be an adrenaline shot to the heart, Pulp Fiction–style, jolting the continent out of its American dependency.
And yet, here we are, facing