Today as I read New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie’s recent column on vaccines, I was struck by these words.
Is it any surprise that millions of Americans treat this fundamentally social problem — how do we vaccinate enough people to prevent the spread of a deadly disease — as a personal one? Or that many people have refused to get a shot, citing the privacy of their decision as well as their freedom to do as they choose?
Consider, too, the larger cultural and political context of the United States. We still live in the shadow of the Reagan revolution and its successful attack on America’s traditions of republican solidarity and social responsibility….
Longtime readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of Daniel T. Rodgers‘s 2011 book The Age of Fracture. I was reminded of Rodgers again after reading Bouie.
Rodgers writes:
Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books on social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave away to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectives shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture
For Rodgers, the shift from a post-World War II nation defined by solidarity to a post-World War II nation defined by “individuals, contingency, and choice,” took place in the Reagan era. Reagan’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter, called the nation to sacrifice in the midst of its energy crisis. He represented an “idea of the nation as a gathered community of faith” and talked “easily of the ‘common good’ and the ‘beloved community.'” In his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence Speech” (often called the “malaise” speech), Carter tried to redirect the country away from “the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest” because “down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others.” That path, Carter said, is “one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.” This sounds prophetic. Watch:
But in the 1980s, Americans preferred the sunny optimism and personal freedom-talk of Ronald Reagan over Carter’s language of sacrifice for the greater good of the country. Here is Rodgers:
At times, Reagan’s speechwriters slipped into something close to Franklin Roosevelt’s image of the people as a broad occupational phalanx: workers, farmers, and businessmen bound together by bands of economic interdependence. “We the people,” Reagan limned them in 1981: “neighbors and friends, shopkeepers and laborers, farmers and craftsman.” But Reagan’s word-pictures of the people almost never showed them working together, their energy and talent joined in a common action….Reagan was fond of saying that his political opponents saw people as members of groups; his party, to the contrary, saw the people of America as individuals.“
Under Reagan, Rodgers notes, “freedom was cut loose from the burdens and responsibilities that had once so closely accompanied it.”
Ironically, it was the individualism and personal freedom celebrated by Reagan that led to much of the identity politics that dominates our discourse today. According to Rodgers, “identity” now “loomed larger than ever before: not as a collective given…but as a field of malleability and self-fashioning.”
Reagan’s libertarianism (if you could call it that) went hand-in-hand with his faith in markets. Markets became synonymous with personal choice and the opposition to government regulation. Markets would rid the country of its “troubling collective presence” and replace it with an “array of consenting, voluntarily acting individual pieces.”
God bless America, that “shining city on a hill” where everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes. COVID is spreading, but at least freedom is ringing!
