To understand why this might be the case, you have to begin by acknowledging the exhaustion of the reformist heritage to which Biden adheres. That tradition emerged from an identifiable historical context, simultaneously deriving from and expressing an identifiable cultural consensus. True, in the heyday of progressivism, the voices heard tended to be mostly white and mostly male. Yet the narrow basis of American democratic practice in that era made agreement on certain fundamentals possible. However flawed and subject to recurring challenge, the resulting consensus persisted through the twentieth century, imparting not only a measure of predictability but also a modicum of cohesion to American politics.
Even today, progressives tout the altruistic component of their tradition, with its emphasis on equality, justice, and sympathy for the downtrodden. Yet high ideals rarely suffice to win elections. In practice, the progressive agenda has centered less on admirable intangibles than on concrete deliverables. On that score, progressives have sought to satisfy an all but insatiable American appetite for consumption, convenience, and mobility.
Here we come to the beating heart of contemporary American politics. As that system evolved toward its mature state a mammoth enterprise that annually burns through trillions of dollars uninhibited consumption and convenience, along with unbridled mobility came to define what citizens expected it to deliver. Hence, the outrage when store shelves are even momentarily empty and gas prices temporarily shoot up.
At root, the ultimate purpose of American politics in the modern era, seldom acknowledged but universally understood, has been to provide for more and better, quicker and easier, and faster and further. The very pursuit proved endless the American political lexicon in those years did not include the word enough and therefore, in the end, proved inherently disruptive.
Properly understood, in other words, the progressive project was never especially high-minded. Yet it was never anything other than deadly realistic.
Two cherished but spurious claims have helped camouflage its essential tawdriness. According to the first, what the American people really care about is not getting and going but a conception of freedom worth fighting for. As my neighbors in nearby New Hampshire like to put it, "Live Free or Die."
According to the second, along with this love of freedom, what distinguishes Americans is their pronounced religiosity. "In God," Americans insist, "We Trust." A profound love of freedom and a conviction that the American experiment expresses the workings of divine (implicitly Christian) providence have ostensibly elevated the United States above other nations. Together, they imbued American crassness with a visible sheen of idealism.
Of course, in the century of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, neither of these claims withstand even casual scrutiny. In the present United States, freedom has become indistinguishable from the casting off of constraints. If advancing the cause of freedom entails sacrifice, citizens spare themselves the slightest inconvenience by hiring out fighting to specialists known collectively as "the troops."
As for God, an increasingly secular society consigns him to the margins of public life. To an extent that a century ago would have been unfathomable, religion has become more or less a matter of personal taste, of no more significance than one's preferences for movies or cuisine. In the New York Times and the Washington Post, race, gender, and sexuality command continuous attention. For the latest in theological insights, however, the curious should look elsewhere.
As a believer, a conservative, and a long-ago soldier, I may not personally endorse such trends, but it makes no sense to deny their existence. So, however much I might want to agree with Grinspan's contention that "reform is possible" full-out despondency being the sole alternative more-is-better American progressivism is unlikely to provide a meaningful template for change.
Sharpening the Contradictions
The imperative of the present moment requires not reverting to some mythic normalcy, but facing the actual contradictions afflicting the American way of life. Any such reckoning will necessarily entail political risk. For proof, recall the price that President Jimmy Carter paid when he called for just such a reckoning in his famously derided "Malaise" speech of 1979. Americans responded the following year by revoking his lease on the White House.
Even so, what Carter proposed then may well be what we need now. With the nation mired in what he termed a "crisis of confidence," Carter declared that "we are at a turning point in our history," obliged to choose between one of "two paths." One path, he said, pointed toward "a mistaken idea of freedom" centered on "constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility." The other, based on "common purpose and the restoration of American values," pointed toward what he called "true freedom."
No one has ever accused the Georgia peanut-farmer-turned-politician of being a deep thinker, so Carter was vague on what actually constituted true freedom. But his instincts were sound and his analysis prescient. Indeed, others since have rounded out his critique, even if with little more success than Carter had in persuading Americans to contemplate the true meaning of freedom more than four decades ago.
Perhaps our innate ability to "see further into the future," as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright so unforgettably put it in 1998, renders any such second thoughts unnecessary. Of course, when Albright made her own stab at deep thinking, the future seemed all too clear. The end of the Cold War had left the United States in a position of political, economic, technological, cultural, and above all, military primacy. What could possibly go wrong?
By now, we know the answer: just about everything. To allow the promises contained within Biden-esque progressivism to conceal the extent of the debacle we have suffered would, in my view, be a profound mistake.
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