> In the last century, two generations of elites tackled the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, and came ahead on every count. They built the great dams and nuclear plants that electrified the country, and threw in the interstate highway grid for good measure. What has changed?
What! Completely overlooking the popular nature of these accomplishments. Watch interviews with even telephone operators for major government projectsin the 40s and 50s and you'll see a pride in them even a fairly senior governmental manager would not display today. People believed in these things and I think not because of their faith in elites but because they saw these instructions employing their friends and neighbors. People believed in their team. There were overlapping institutions like church which also connected people. We have a huge decline in people doing things together. Mass media could in part be to blame but Reagan style cowboy individuality might be too.
> I will say this: the struggle today is structural, not personality-dependent. Even an FDR or a Reagan would have difficulty preserving institutions whose authority has collapsed because of a radical reversal in the information environment.
Absolutely. See the failures of one Barrack Obama
> As flawed as these narratives were and are--the map was very definitely not the territory--they were coherent worldviews that helped that society navigate reality.
This accurately describes the media of the post WWII era but totally ignores the hodgepodge corrupt media landscapes of the late 19th century and early 20th century. You think people are in a bubble now. Imagine getting all your news from one or two papers which were directly party appartuses and probably ethnically isolated.
> The most disruptive innovation of this nature was surely the printing press.
I think this point is taken too often for granted. 1848 begs to differ. At the time the printing press came about regional european powers were beginning to equalize in strength. The decline of hedgemons could as easily be responsible for reforms theology as the press. You can't set up your own church unless you can keep the Pope's armies out. Once you can it's only a matter of time until controlling your regional branch of the church becomes desirable enough to break things off.
> History has never sponsored reruns of dead ideals, even as sitcoms
Oh come on. This is pure progressivism. There's no "conservation of momentum" in history. No one decides or devine's the rules of what will and won't happen next. Nothing is ever the same and nothing is ever new but change can be heavily weighted to looking much like it did before. Maybe we won't get the third reich again but am ecofascist exclusionary state could absolutely be in the cards. Just as America now greatly resembles Empiral Britain at it's zenith and turn towards decline.
> At the individual level, the nihilist is the random shooter who stalks into a gay bar or a mosque and slaughters dozens of innocent strangers.
This is borderline, "video games cause school shooting" level of association. Political nihilism is not obviously the proximate cause of lone wolf violence. In fact such violence often comes from those politically irrelevant or even activated by a sense of these acts leading to a kind of victory. Timothy McVeigh viewed his action as a successful pokticial act not as a "fuck it, burn it down" shrug.
What I can't help feeling about this writing is that it has fallen deeply for the progressive narrative that is popular in both the elite Republican and Democratic parties. Not to be confused with contemporary "progressivism". Rather the narrative that links Washington, Lincoln, TR, FDR, sometimes LBJ and sometimes Reagan into a single progression of civil cosmopolitan liberty. I'm not saying here that that narrative is necessarily wrong. But to get this far on an intellectual level and not interogate closer the conflicts which bred these changes and the places where equality has failed to find a hold on liberal democracy. It's like taking for granted labor progress as a part of liberal democracy. As if it will just happen and left movements didn't have something powerful to do with that.
Whiles it's not "end of history", it reads very "end of history but...". Regardless of my complaints it's very thought provoking but I am getting a Slavoj Zizek, lapping himself in his own rationalism, vibe.