Is America’s greatest strength also her greatest weakness?, or David Brooks v. David Brooks
1.“A nation of immigrants is more permeable than say, Chinese society.” From David Brooks, with MBB adding,”The strongest argument for the United States’ sustained competitive advantage is its open culture — openness to ideas and peoples.”
2. Unfortunately this is also America’s greatest weakness. Major studies, most notably Putnam’s, have shown that increased ethnic diversity and immigration have devastating impacts on social capital, associations, trust and neighborliness.
3. This impacts what can be done in American politics. Modern republican (small r) theorists like James Hankins and Harvey Mansfield have usually pointed to the nation’s bloated legal system as one major example of declining trust, ie. social conflict is increasingly resolved in courts rather than informally. Similarly, the tax code is now 67,204 pages long, as people seek to secure their goodies from the state.
4. Brooks vs. Brooks. I have no idea what David Brooks is talking about when he says, “study after study suggests that America is one of those societies with high social trust.”
In fact, David Brooks in March 18, 2010 might not know what today’s David Brooks was talking about. In the column “A Broken Society,” he describes America as “atomized” and writes approvingly of an idea to “take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations.”
5. David Brooks of January 2009 would also be puzzled by November 2010’s Brooks. Here is the former:
“Institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.”
6. America under Tocqueville’s pen may have been one big communal sleepover. But since the 1960s, the story has been that of individual rights trumping any social duties. In the legal field, this can be seen by an overemphasis on “rights” as opposed to “obligations,” as Obama’s old professor Mary Ann Glendon noted many years ago.
7. The more the diversity, the less the trust. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone painted a picture of a people radically isolated from each other. Foreign students routinely point out that the U.S.—despite its formidable virtues—is a much colder place than the communities back home. People are too busy making money, or something. Less seriously, Gillian Tett pointed out this week that American offices are probably the only ones in the world that provide separate keys to use bathrooms. This, she says, perhaps “speaks volumes about the degree of trust (or mistrust) in parts of American life.”
8. Perhaps it is not social trust that keeps America going but the American economic engine. America is not Scandinavia, or Japan, or Germany where social peace can be maintained despite long periods without economic growth. America is, as Republicans like to say, exceptional. Well, time will tell. If this is correct, cutting entitlement spending in America will be more difficult than doing so in France or Britain.
