Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 113

REVIEWS

experiences-moving from an era when two-thirds of television
sets were tuned to I Love Lucy to one where highly developed
subcultures thrive without any overlap-we see the disintegration of our common vision. We no longer share what it means to
be American, instead viewing the pursuit of happiness as a purely
individual act of self-actualization.
One can measure this collapse in the decade and a half during
which the American people witnessed the 9/11 attacks, a failed
war in Iraq, a bungled response to the Katrina hurricane, a financial
catastrophe, a Wall Street bailout, scandals in the Catholic Church,
a failed stimulus, the embarrassing launch of Obamacare, a series
of incomprehensible Supreme Court decisions, and the rise of the
Islamic State-all things that serve to raise distrust for our elites
and the institutions they run as having even a basic capability to
lead us through a time of turmoil.
Given the decline of trust in centralized institutions, one would
not expect that Americans would favor investing more power
in these entities. But that perspective represents a failure to
understand what Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Nisbet understood-that the rise of a hyper-individualism and excessive
centralization of government go hand in hand. As individuals
become detached from the sources of social order and meaning
for their lives, they also become more desperate for strong centralized leadership to make up for perceived failures. Levin writes:
"As a centralizing government draws power out of the mediating
institutions of society, it leaves individuals more isolated; and as
individualism further erodes the bonds that hold civil society
together, people conclude that only a central authority can pick
up the slack."
There is another nation where the absence of such mediating
moder nagejour nal .com

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Modern Age - Fall 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Fall 2016

Contents
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