The Trouble With America

America is in deep trouble.  Donald Trump says the reason is flawed and failed leadership in Washington.  Bernie Sanders says it is bigoted billionaire oppressors who have rigged the economic and political system.  Jonathan Cahn (The Harbinger) says it is tied to both Democrat and Republican leaders who refused, defiantly and arrogantly, to repent after the divine judgments of 9-11 and 2008.  I blame our deep trouble on the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism.

Michel Crozier, a French sociologist, should be put on a par with another famous Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in  America.  Tocqueville wrote about America in the early 1800s; Crozier writes about America from  1946 to 1980.  His book Trouble With America was published in 1984, but it may give insight into what is going on in America in 2016.

Crozier first visited America in 1946 at age 25.  Disillusioned with France, he became an enthusiastic admirer of America.  He found America to be a land of hope.  "The people believed so deeply and so sincerely in unlimited social progress, free from violence and revolution, fueled only by sincere dialogue, that only barbarians could reject them."

Crozier returned to America often---in 1956, in 1959-60, every year during the 1960s, again in 1980.  "When I returned in the spring of 1980, I experienced a terrible shock.  Everything was the same and yet everything was different: what had changed was the meaning.  The dream had faded, leaving behind nothing but empty rhetoric."  This was true among the young people, the university, the corporations, America as a whole.  Crozier believes that America may have put too much faith in "its models of [rational] decision making, its mechanisms of negotiation [labor-management], and its hallowed institutions [the truth-seeking university]."  Crozier's first in-depth contact with America was through its labor unions.  He was impressed with the ability and faith of the labor leader, in the process of organizing and negotiating.  American labor leaders were aggressive, but they were not as irresponsibly radical as were many of their European counterparts.  They achieved results.  The resulting labor contracts were given a "transcendent significance .  At the time Americans were demanding a contract as if they were calling for the end of oppression."

The labor leader said:

       Look at me.  I came from Russia as a little boy with my parents.  It took a very long time for me to understand that when you stay in a corner, you don't get the whole picture.  But afterward I worked, I went everywhere, and I realized that you could do anything, really, anything at all.  I'm not pushy, I'm not even ambitious, but I loved to work.  And I've had a good life, a full life, more than I ever dared to dream.  I owe that to America.

     Young man, don't ever forget this: you are in the land of freedom.  And there's another thing you have to know.  Your going to stop off in the Midwest and West., in the states where the Homestead Act applied.  You may not know that Congress had required that land be reserved in each state to finance a college.  The land grant colleges helped to improve agriculture and later they formed the bases of the state universities.  Young people have to be able to study, everybody has to have a chance.  Education is freedom, too.  It is the new form of freedom.  Never forget that, young man; the land of freedom!

Thirty five years later, Crozier states that the "unions have lost much of their vitality." 

In chapter two, Crozier discusses "University America" or the "Dream of Truth."  Just as labor had a dream and pursued it with some success, so also the American University.  "In the university neither race nor color [not quite true] nor religion nor ideology had the slightest importance.  The grand army of scientists was open to whoever came to serve the cause of Truth, with the sole stipulation that the norms of scientific work be respected."  In France at the time, there was no respect for truth because "it did not exist; it was a bourgeois invention."  Truth was a matter of perspective, from what standpoint (class, special interest) you were talking.

The American cult of truth was deeply entrenched at the University of Michigan.  Crozier visited UM in connection with "one of the productivity missions which the Marshall Plan had imposed on the Europeans and which made a key contribution toward the transformation of Europe. . . . hundreds of Europeans spent several weeks in the United States, during which they were shown the latest advances in their specialty."

The crash programs were exhausting, exhilarating and "extraordinarily effective."  They moved the Europeans from secrecy to open-minded dialogue and sharing of ideas.  "French executives have become addicts of seminar training" and continuing education.  There was a quasi-religious spirit in this pursuit of truth.

Students also believed in this pursuit of truth.  They were less skeptical and more open to dialogue that their European counterparts.  But in 1980 those same "quick, open, intelligent, hardworking" students had lost the dream.  They studied sadly, necessarily; a "discouraging wind was blowing."  Visiting French students had more spirit than their American counterparts.  Had the dream just been a fantasy?

Crozier believe that America went through a moral crisis during the agony over the Vietnam War [and the end of the civil rights movement] and this impacted the American spirit.  Crozier recounts a class discussion in May 1970 at Harvard.  The anti-Vietnam War protest movement was winding down.  The students pursuit of justice was only partially successful; the war was continuing:

      Our class discussion. . . revolved around the only possible subject: the war.  They were so disheartened that all of a sudden they broke into tears, both boys and girls.  It came as a shock to me, and I realized sadly that the student antiwar movement had collapsed.  They would go no further.  This same aftertaste of sadness is what I recognized" in 1980.

The naïve belief  in progress, in national righteousness, had been shattered.  Faith in science, in truth, as an infallible guide to progress, was disturbed.  America "held its truths to be absolutes, forgetting that no one truth is ever complete and that a partial truth [American exceptionalism] embraced for too long becomes an insane idea."

Crozier believes that America needed President Reagan to provide a peaceful interlude with a note of hope.  On the other hand, Reagan has provided  more rhetoric than reality, because serious unresolved problems remaind in spite of the good feelings associated with a Shangri-La atmosphere.  "People care about their own private world, which they do not associate with the public good.  They care about holding their own, if necessary, by defending their interests against the public good."

A distinguished black leader says with sadness in his voice that young blacks "don't have that gleam in their eyes anymore. . . .  there is no drive, no inspiration. "  Among both black and white youth increasingly "everybody is left free to do his or her thing without caring for others."

     What is really at stake is America's traditional patterns and values, its image of itself.  Not that it should discard its identity, but it may have to rethink and readjust it. . . .  German, Italy, France and Japan---they all learned a great deal from their failures and changed a great deal and built a stronger identity.

America must forget "its dreams of innocence and superiority;"  make some fundamental changes.

America has depended on a false sense of chosenness, a false sense of superiority, a false sense of exceptionalism, a Manifest Destiny, a self-righteous refusal to learn from the example of other countries.  We have been hollowed out from within.

Some summary comments by Noble.  Crozier's perceptive comments need to be put into a larger historical context.  I think our great time of social evils occurred from 1750 to 1865; this period was characterized by heavy involvement of the slave trade, slavery, Indian genocide, Indian removal.  Our founding fathers and first presidents were heavily involved in these evils.  They were a small, white, male, rich elite who created the American trinity.

The period of greatest economic equality occurred from 1945 to 1970, the time Crozier came to America.  He saw our strengths, but he also observed its disintegration because of sand in the foundation.  The American church should have risen to the occasion, introduced kingdom of God principles, but it did not do so.  Into the vacuum rushed the American trinity of hyperindividualism, hypermaterialism and hyperethnocentrism; this evil trinity created catastrophic income and wealth inequality and unjust mass incarceration based on the new prohibition, the War on Drugs which was combined with racial profiling.   This began in the 1980s and continues into 2016.