Here is some speculation for your enlightenment. This post discusses the fragmenting of America, the causes of our inability to see our common needs and act together for the common benefit.
Future generations will see things clearly that we cannot. For example, can we perceive what is happening in the souls of the common people, and in particular of the lower classes?. Their education and way of life open to them insights on human affairs which, peculiar to them, remain close to us.
It is worse for our ruling elites. When the rich man and the poor man no longer have any shared interest, any shared grievances, any shared business, the shadows which conceral the mind of the one from the other become unfathomable. They can live side by side (as in Manhattan) without any contact between them.
Although the fate of the upper and middle classes has diverged, they resemble one another in one respect: the middle class lives as cut off from the lower class as the rich. The middle class has run away from contact their the lower classes and their wretched state in the inner cities. Instead of uniting closely with them to engage in a common struggle against a shared inequality, we seek only to create new injustices for our own purposes (so that the laws and taxes better meet our needs).
The middle class as enthusiastically obtained tax exemptions (e.g., mortgages, retirement plans) as the rich. The lower classes from which most of us emerged as immigrants have not only become strangers but are largely unknown to us.
When the middle class has become isolated from the rich and the lower class from both, a similar fragmenting acts at the heart of of each class itself small groups form in the center of each. We divide by race, by ideology, by special interests (e.g., greens, pro-life, animal rights) — becoming almost as isolated from each other as the three classes are between themselves. Then the nation becomes a mass whose parts no longer link together. Nothing hinders the government — now the largest entity — any more than anything supports it. This creates the risk of the whole structure collapsing together at once, as the society, its foundation, weakens.
If only these were my words! This is an excerpt, lightly paraphrased, from Alex de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the Revolution. However descriptive of modern America, it describes the doomed regime of French Monarchy in its last generation of life.
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Other posts in this series about America, how we got here and how we can recover it
- Forecast: Death of the American Constitution, 4 July 2006
- Diagnosing the Eagle, Chapter III – reclaiming the Constitution, 3 January 2008
- A report card for the Republic: are we still capable of self-government?, 3 July 2008
- Americans, now a subservient people (listen to the Founders sigh in disappointment), 20 July 2008
- de Tocqueville warns us not to become weak and servile, 21 July 2008
- A soft despotism for America?, 22 July 2008
- The American spirit speaks: “Baa, Baa, Baa”, 5 August 2008
- We’re Americans, hear us yell: “baa, baa, baa”, 6 August 2008
- Obama describes the first step to America’s renewal, 8 August 2008
- Let’s look at America in the mirror, the first step to reform, 14 August 2008
- Fixing America: elections, revolt, or passivity?, 16 August 2008
- Fixing American: taking responsibility is the first step, 17 August 2008
- Fixing America: solutions — elections, revolt, passivity, 18 August 2008
- The intelligentsia takes easy steps to abandoning America, 19 August 2008
For all posts on this subject see America – how can we reform it?.