Book Review: Morris Berman - "Why America Failed"

It should be rather obvious at this point that it is not "Morning in America" any longer. Rampant unemployment, a shameful level of poverty, a healthcare system that denies coverage to millions, crumbling infrastructure, a supposedly-matchless military that cannot find victory in either Iraq or Afghanistan, a gridlocked government...the list goes on. So the question is, then, where did America go wrong? And how can it get back on track?

Well, according to social critic Morris Berman's latest work, Why America Failed, America never "went wrong" but is exactly where the forces of history have brought it. And as you can guess from the book's title, Berman clearly doesn't believe that there's going to be any sort of eleventh-hour reversal of the nation's course. Like the titular hero of Shakespeare's Macbeth, America had many opportunities to turn away from its self-destructive path, but each time it ignored them, and that is the tragedy of the nation.

According to the author, Why America Failed was originally titled Capitalism and its Discontents (taking a cue from Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents). The publisher, however, felt that this title wouldn't lead to any significant sales, thus the change to Why America Failed. Of course, it's not as though that title is going to make a book into a bestseller, because the words "America" and "failed" simply don't go together in the American psyche. I would be very surprised if this book sold even 1000 copies.

What struck me about this book (and why I consider it such a brilliant work) is just how completely free of bullshit it is. Stephen Colbert famously coined the term "truthiness" for ideas and notions that people feel in their gut to be true, that they really, really want to be true, but are, in fact, bullshit. There's none of that in Why America Failed. There's nothing in this book that Americans want to hear. It is grim, unsparing, and eviscerating. The reader might disagree with Berman's conclusions, but there's a detailed appendix at the back of the book citing a source for every point he makes (this sort of academic approach, however, will probably lead to charges of "elitism." You just can't win with some people)

So why did America fail? The first two chapters, The Pursuit of Affluence and The Reign of Wall Street lay out the historical groundwork. According to Berman, America was a "hustling" nation from its birth, even prior to the American Revolution. And what is "hustling?" It's something I imagine most people are intimately familiar with: it's the idea that one has to "get ahead" and to "keep up with the Joneses." It's the idea that life is about winning, about getting the plum job, the big raise, the fancy house, and having a Mercedes Benz in the driveway. It's about spending all your time working, desperately trying to climb the ladder, not caring whom you must climb over to get there. It's about sparing nothing for the poor, because they are lazy, entitled slobs utterly lacking in any sort of personal responsibility. It's "I'm all right, Jack." It's "I got mine; sod off the rest of you!" It's best summed up by the first chapter's opening quote from Alexis de Tocqueville - "As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?"

And I think "hustling" is the perfect word to describe American culture, because it not only implies moving about frantically (consider the pitiful amount of days off American workers get compared to people in Europe) but also because it means obtaining wealth by fraudulent or immoral means. This attitude, Berman explains, has been the kernel of the American mindset since the time of the Thirteen Colonies. Of course, there have been those who railed against the mindset - Thoreau, Lewis Mumford, Vance Packard, all the way up to Jimmy Carter (who attacked mindless consumerism in his famous "malaise speech"). But of all these counter-cultural ideas were outright ignored, or turned into some trendy commodity, a sort of "ascetic chic." How many Americans today even know who Mumford or Packard are? And Jimmy Carter is regarded by many as a laughably weak and ineffective president; it's a fair bet that you won't see his name on a list of the greatest American presidents of all time.

The second chapter, The Reign of Wall Street, explains the effect that this hustling attitude has on contemporary culture. It is one of extreme consumerism, where every aspect of life is turned towards the pursuit of affluence, even religion (Berman points out to self-help book called Jesus, CEO)

With the rise of neoliberal economics during the Reagan era, hustling and consumerism went into overdrive. Everywhere it was spend, spend, spend, especially on a national level (consider the enormous deficits Reagan regularly rang up). And Reaganism didn't die with the 80s, in fact it carries on, zombie-like, to this day. Far from offering "Hope" and "Change," the Obama administration merely stayed the course, giving no rebuke to the Wall Street "Banksters" (or "Vampire Squid" as Matt Taibbi described it) responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown. After all, they were only doing what any self-respecting American would do: rationally pursuing their own self-interest.

The effects of this ultra-individualistic "me first" attitude on American society is glaringly apparent in the narcissism and self-absorption that pervades American culture. Berman quotes from Dick Meyer's excellent book Why We Hate Us, and I'd highly recommend anyone reading Why America Failed also have a look at Why We Hate Us, because it points out the coarseness, phoniness, and incivility that characterises life in America. A life dedicated to pursuit of acquisition is one that is spiritually bankrupt and, frankly, horribly depressing, as evidenced by America's disproportionate consumption of the world's market for anti-depressants. It turns out Jimmy Carter was right when he said that consumerism is a hollow, empty pursuit, but who was really listening to what he said? I'm reminded of a personal anecdote a family member once told me about his business trip to Washington, D.C., and the horrible experience of having to drive around that city. He said that if, while driving, you are perceived as holding up traffic for even a fraction of a second, you'll be immediately subjected to a flurry of honking and profanity. In a sink-or-swim, it's-all-about-me society, basic human decency is the first casualty.

The third chapter - The Illusion of Progress - describes the deleterious effects of America's relentless pursuit of technological innovation. The hustling mentality invariably leads to an ever-growing restlessness among the population, and for a while the American frontier served as a sort of "safety valve" for this restlessness. But with the closing of the physical frontier, the technological frontier took its place, and America has never looked back. The most obvious manifestation of this is America's love affair with gadgets - Smartphones, iPods, tablet PCs, all that sort of thing. But instead of improving peoples' lives, these "innovations" are little more than distractions that ultimately have a baleful impact of social interaction (as anyone's who ever had dinner guests ignore everyone in favour of texting on their smartphone can attest). And the pace of this "progress" is relentless - smartphone owners buy a phone, then throw it out in favour the newest model a year later. There's a running joke that any computer your buy is obsolete before you option the box. "Planned obsolescence" has become a design feature.

If anyone doubts the American love of gadgets, just watch this video of Wal-Mart shoppers worked into a frenzy over a Black Friday sale on phones:

Really, is there any clearer example of the truly wretched state of Western culture than this? These people are literally behaving like animals. As Berman writes, if this is progress, I'm not sure we can take much more of it.

The fourth chapter - The Rebuke of History - is perhaps the most fascinating, because it deals with the American South, a region often stereotyped as a being a backwards, redneck-infested part of the world that is awash in racism, bigotry, ignorance, and religious fundamentalism. But Berman argues that the South was the only alternative to the hustling tradition that had any "teeth" (that is, it had guns and was willing to fight). The South was an agrarian, neo-feudal society that was diametrically opposed the fast-paced, materialistic, entrepreneurial culture of the North, and it was the clash of civilisations; not slavery, not states' rights, that ultimately brought about the Civil War. Of course, the South's economy was based on the monstrosity of slavery, which one could argue is another form of hustling, but the point Berman makes is not that the South was any sort of utopia, but rather, that as an alternative to the hustling mindset, the prevailing culture regarded it is an aberration that had to be destroyed. (Berman points out that Jimmy Carter was from the South, and draws a clear link between this and his attitude towards the consumerist impulse of American culture). Of the whole book, I'd mark this chapter as the most eye-opening, given the constant depiction of the American South as being the most backwards part of the country. It's unfortunate that whatever admirable qualities the South possessed will forever be tainted by the spectres of slavery, racism, and bigotry.

The final chapter - The Future of the Past - concludes by stating that America's current condition isn't an aberration, nor has the "wool been pulled over the peoples' eyes" as critics such as Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky would argue. Instead, "the wool is the eyes;" this was always the country Americans wanted, and they have no one to blame for their dire straits but themselves. Berman likens America to a steamroller that flattened all opposition, and is now headed straight towards a cliff, and it is far more likely that the steamroller will plunge into the abyss rather than suffer a crisis of conscience and emerge new and improved. To that end, Berman himself moved to Mexico after finding the cultural climate of the United States simply too inhospitable. He has no romantic notions about Mexico, however, and fully acknowledges the rampant poverty present in that country, along with the violence of the ongoing drug war. Yet Mexico possesses elements of "traditional cultures" which Berman contrasts with the hustling culture of capitalist societies. Life in traditional societies possesses a timeless quality; it is unhurried and not rigidly bound to the clock. There is a graciousness and humanity to social interactions, which take place face-to-face instead of on some flickering screen. Perhaps most importantly, daily life provides moments of silence and time for reflection, something desperately lacking our modern, fast-paced world.

Now, I'm aware that there are many such "Troubled America" books being written nowadays (Berman's previous book, Dark Ages America, sits on my local library's shelf amidst works such as Barbara Ehrenreich's This Land is Their Land and Matt Taibbi's The Great Derangement). But what separates Why America Failed from the others is its broad historical focus, which illustrates (with numerous examples) that America's frantic, consumerist, workaholic mindset isn't a recent occurrence, but something that has been deeply ingrained in the American consciousness since day one. And as a result of this dubious heritage, the United States was doomed from the start.

Why America Failed is bleak and very often depressing (though I imagine non-Americans might find a great deal of Schadenfreude within its pages). It will almost certainly go unread by the fraction of the American population that still reads, and as Berman points out, a handful of books aren't going to do much against centuries of hustling culture. But as a historical artefact, perhaps it will be serve as an excellent post mortem for the United States of America.