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The breaks in our civil religion and the rise of mob violence have been on the up tick for nearly 2 decades. The passion that fused us together after 9/11 is fueling the fissures that are fragmenting now. The 1/6 mob has a particular cause in Trumpism but reflects something more.
All of the worry about woke-ism and Trumpism, I think, must take place against that backdrop. These are not isolated incidents but interwoven phenomenon emerging from cracks in the same foundation. Trumpism is more violent and accutely more dangerous.
Woke-ism runs the risk of becoming a new form of the tyranny of the majority. There are Constitutional limitations to what it can do, so it is not an accute threat. It may even produce some positive outcomes when it is forced to moderate in the face of the law. It may not.
It's important we don't create false equivalences here but it's also important we don't think of these social dynamics as mere inversions of each other either. They are both responses to a political and cultural system that never really recovered from 9/11.
Perhaps unlike their echoes in the past, what makes them unique is both are aimed at dismantling the system by first destroying people's faith in our civil religion. People call this liberalism - and it is, to some extent - but it is more inclusive than one ideological framework.
It is manifest in the character of the people - an optimistic, ambitious people who aspire to die better off than they were born, who desire dignity for themselves and those in their lives, and who value the tranquility that comes from being ruled fairly by the law.
When you crack those pieces, or the pieces crack from atrophy or corruption, the problem is what fills in the cracks. It can either seek to repair what was done, and improve it to mitigate future harm, or it can fester and cause more and more damage to our collective mind.
My worry is the bifurcated way Americans like to think will drive us to think that these two facets are our only choice for how to address the cracks in our civil religion. But neither one is meant to fix the cracks. They are meant to crack them further and they both will.
Until we abandon the idea that these phenomenon simply feed on one another and that they are both means for our collective psyche to handle the disillusionment, distrust, and fear that shook the country's sense of self at its core, we miss the forrest for the trees.
The materialism that led to the Great Recession, a technological explosion that both fueled and exposed racial tensions, a social networking panopticon created of our own choosing, and a drug addition to entertainment to sooth our anxiety are much deeper than Trumpism or woke-ism
Policies, no matter how large, alone cannot fix what is essentially a crisis of character. That requires a far more difficult examination of why we want families, why we want jobs, why we want to live in a republic, how we give meaning to our lives and the roles we play in them.
Our shared civil religion is at the heart of that endeavor because it dictates so many of these answers to us. As it cracks, more and more holistic accounts will attempt to replace it. One may succeed.
This is the threat, one on character, at the heart of our current anxiety.
This is the threat, one on character, at the heart of our current anxiety.
This thread inspired, in part, from my conservations with @xavierbonilla87 and @Intrinsic29 but also from seeing the some of the concerns from @EPoe187 @BenWinegard @SarahTheHaider and @BenjaminABoyce on these issues.
