"Brokenism:" The Main Political Battle of Our Time

Alana Newhouse at Tablet wrote in 2022 that the critical issue of our age is not between the left and right per se: It's between those that recognize our institutions are corrupt and hopelessly broken, and those who continue insisting, in the face of all evidence, that everything's fine and Our Precious Institutions have never been better. They just need "preserving" and "protecting" from people who... criticize them.

This reminds me of Mollie Hemingway's observation from around 2017. She said she wanted to do a show called What Time It Is. Not "What time is it?" but What Time It Is, as in, "Do you know what time it is? This is The Time It Is. Are you one of the few who realizes we are much closer to the end of things than the middle?"

The entire rift in the Republican Party was between those who know What Time It Is and those who, like Soyjack Impersonator Seth Mandel, think that everything's fine and the entire 2000s-to-present cycle of Invading the World then Inviting the World is going just great, it's so great to have alien cultures filling our cities with the vibrancy (often blood red) of their devastated shithole homelands.

It goes without saying that all of the people swearing that the institutions are functioning perfectly are directly or indirectly paid by those institutions. They are either employees of the academy, the medical establishment, the government, the Military-Industrial Complex, the Government-Censorship Complex, the propaganda and disinformation mills who repulsively call themselves our "press," or they're throne-sniffing neocon Gollums paid by billionaires to prop up those institutions.

This is why, at this moment, it's so easy for sane conservatives to agree with sane lefties like Jimmy Dore, James Lindsey, or Russell Brand: We do not agree with those people on what the solutions are, but we are all agreed, firmly, that things are hopelessly broken.

It's also why these lefties support Trump to one degree of another: Even if they don't like his policies, they appreciate that he's done what a thousand communist theorists and agitators couldn't do: he finally convinced the masses that the establishment was greedy, selfish, and above all else, incompetent to the core.

Meanwhile, the establishment-suckers of both left and (pseudo-)right are in Fanatic Suicide Pact to defend the rotten institutions upon which they depend for their unnecessary sustenance.

A bit belated, but here is some of Alana Newhouse's essay from 2022.

At one point last year, Ryan [a correspondent] said something that struck a nerve. "I don't know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled," he noted. "I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, I don't even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life--in education, in the arts, in politics--are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they're becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is ... brokenness."

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the "other side" aren't all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold.

Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible--like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they're clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don't fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don't even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country's future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between "Democrats" and "Republicans," or "liberalism" and "conservatism." The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it's an emergency, and those who do not.

...

At its base, brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay--sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.

Now, to observe that a critical mass of American society is broken does not mean that America is falling like Rome or descending hopelessly into chaos like Weimar Germany. This country survived a civil war, the failures of Reconstruction, the Industrial Revolution and its destruction of previous ways of life, plus the political violence of the 1960s and the economic shocks of the 1970s--and arguably came out stronger after these crises.

Which is why many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully--without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe--this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn't needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the "establishment" is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on--what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else--is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

In fact, both brokenists and status-quoists are attracting people from what was formerly known as the left and the right. That's how you get left-wing guests on Tucker Carlson, and lifelong members of right-wing royalty making frictionless transitions into mainstream darlings. Marxist thinker Adolph Reed is a brokenist; Cass Sunstein is a status-quoist. Resistance Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Never Trumpers like Liz Cheney--these people are status-quoists. Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are brokenists, as are the famously leftist Glenn Greenwald and the famously capitalist Marc Andreessen. When I was in elementary school, our gym teacher used to split us into two teams and then, midway through class, divide each side and swap the halves to make two new teams. That's kind of like what is happening in America today.

And it's not simply that people are switching affiliations while the political parties largely remain the same. Instead, the parties themselves are changing--and in some cases swapping--what they stand for, a reality that observers from what used to be the right and the left are both starting to grapple with.

I know "It's old," but it was new to me, and maybe to you. Read the whole thing if you like.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 05:20 PM

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