Is Our Nation Learning?

{This is my third and final reflection on Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book, Human Scale.}

Re-reading Human Scale, it can be difficult at times to remember that Kirkpatrick Sale was offering a critique of American society, including government and politics, from the political Left. His emphases on localism, on smaller and more cohesive communities, on the importance of civic institutions, and on the need for subsidiarity (the notion that issues of governance ought to be handled by the nearest, smallest, and least centralized competent authority): all of that sounds more like conservatism a la Russell Kirk than it does mainstream liberalism. That fact testifies to how far American liberalism, terrified by George McGovern’s 1972 electoral debacle and desperately trying to disassociate itself from the Sixties’ counterculture and the New Left, fled in panic from the Left and scrambled towards the center.

Here is what Sale had to say in 1980 about what Kevin Phillips called “the Balkanization of American politics”:

There may have been no time within the last century of our history when there has been such a fundamental distension of the bodies politic and social as in our present generation. Other times have seen pressure groups, of course—but today we have special-interest groups on every conceivable matter, in every conceivable enterprise and industry, most of them well organized and well financed, able to influence the course of legislation and elections.

Today there is not one social aspect of our life—birth, sex, death, education, health, environment—and not one biological aspect of our being—age, gender, race, ethnicity, physical handicap—that does not have one group, and usually two or more and often competing, around it. Today there is not a single ethnic group, however marginal, that is not organized and vocal and as often as not directly opposed to the interests or policies of at least one or two of the others.

Sale was in no way delegitimizing advocacy groups, nor was he condemning what we now call “identity politics”. He was simply noting that, given the proliferation of competing interests, the nation seemed to be coming apart:

Laying aside the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, seldom has there been the depth of hostility and fragmentation that we see today, with sectionalism infecting practically every national issue, setting a number of regions against each other and all against the Federal government…at no time since the advent of the national media has there been such a pluralism of tastes and forms and accepted practices, such an acceptance of disparate styles according to age, race, region, or status.

Kirkpatrick Sale’s remedy for this “Balkanization” was not to invoke sunnier times or some hoary myth of national unity, but to suggest that Americans acknowledge our differences and go our separate ways—amicably, of course; to paraphrase John dos Passos, "Alright then we are many nations." Sale proposed that we form regional collectives, revive our small communities, and create urban enclaves of like-minded (or at least open-minded) people; the point of all that being to allow people to design their own human-scale lives without needing permission or blueprints from Washington.

Simply put, America was too big and too diverse to be governed effectively from the center; Sale wanted power and responsibility (the two being inseparable) removed from the national government and returned to the states and localities. He was, alas, going against the tide of neo-liberalism, which promoted an alliance of centralized government with Wall Street finance and corporate globalization; and, despite his sympathy for “states’ rights,” he was also fighting the tide of conservatism, which shared his distrust of large central governments but had no interest in the rest of his Left-populist agenda, which seemed suspiciously countercultural.

According to Sale, America had entered an age that sociologist Robert Nisbet called “the twilight of authority,” marked by a loss of faith in all institutions, local as well as national, and a loss of faith in the political process itself and in the very concepts of “community” and “the collective good.” Reaganism, like Thatcherism in England, was premised on the idea that “there is no such thing as society”; and while Sale disagreed with that premise, he insisted, like Reagan and unlike the neo-liberal Democrats, that the federal government was not the solution to our civic woes.  

Sprinkling his text with ominous phrases borrowed from Nisbet—“the decline and erosion of institutions,” “a vacuum in the moral order,” “the crumbling walls of politics,” and “a gathering revolt against the whole structure of wealth, privilege, and power that the contemporary democratic state has come to represent”—Sale portrayed an American polity on the edge of rebellion. The peasants were coming, angry and armed with torches and pitchforks: Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough.

As it turned out, that populist revolt was first disarmed by Reagan’s avuncular charm and then channeled, politically, into Newt Gingrich’s “Contract for America”; that is, it was channeled into the Republican Party’s all-out assault on Washington, into its demonization of the federal government, and into its decision to treat politics as warfare by other means and to treat the Democratic Party not as the “loyal opposition” but as the enemy. Then, in 2001, 9/11 gave us another enemy to blame for our dissatisfactions and against whom to target our resentments. The Republicans, elaborating on Gingrich’s “politics as war,” now routinely conflate the enemies of America, foreign and domestic, insisting that Democrats are in league with Islamic terrorists and with criminals, anarchists, communists, Bolsheviks, cultural Marxists, “antifa,” MS 13, and so on.

The Boomers among us should remember from our youth the admonition, “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Since we quickly reached the age of “over thirty” ourselves, that admonition was amended to “Never trust anyone.” Mission accomplished, fellow Boomers: according to Kirkpatrick Sale, “The University of Michigan has measured public attitudes toward authority since 1958, at which time it found that 20% of the public expressed distrust of political authority. Every year since then the percentage has risen, and in the latest survey, in 1979, 55 percent, more than half the country, pronounced itself against the institutions of authority in America.” I have no idea what that number is today, but I guarantee it has not gotten better.

Consider this: writing in 1980, Sale noted that “Government recommendations on health and safety, even those with wide support from doctors, are increasingly rejected by the American public, suspicious and distrustful of any proclamation from Washington even when it affects their own lives. A two-to-one majority rejected the idea that saccharin was dangerous and opposed the government ban on it; government recommendations for swine-flu vaccinations were ignored almost totally by the public at large; and more than two-thirds of pre-school children are not immunized by their parents against polio, measles, rubella, mumps, or tetanus, in defiance of years of government exhortations.”

Gee, that sounds familiar. We have met the enemy, and he has been us all along.

Kirkpatrick Sale closed Human Scale by acknowledging the difficulty of reversing the momentum of modernity, with its inexorable drive towards consolidation, centralization, and giantism. The forty years since have given us no reason to think that Sale's “human scale” reforms are likely; unhappy as we are with the status quo, we seem unable to make, or even to imagine, substantive changes. It may take some natural disaster, some cataclysmic event, to force a paradigm shift upon us: a pandemic, perhaps? ¹ "I think the deck chairs would look better if we face them this way; it would give us a better view of that iceberg up ahead."

I am not optimistic. A nation that puts Donald Trump in charge of its affairs is asking for trouble. A Waylon Jennings’ lyric comes to mind: “Ain’t living long like this, can’t live at all like this, can I?” I find it increasingly difficult to see how America and its way of life can be sustained; I find it difficult to see how our republic, our democracy, can avoid collapse or implosion in the near future. In case you have not noticed, Americans increasingly hate each other, and many of them are armed to the teeth.

I fear that Human Scale was already too late forty years ago, and its considerable wisdom remains  lost on us today; Americans, by and large, do not want wisdom, they want blood. All the hate, the rancor, the bitterness, the divisions, and the resentments that have been building up in America, and that have been cynically fueled and stoked for political gain: all that hate is going to explode sooner or later. “Dirty tricks” at the ballot box this November may be the least of our worries.

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¹ Except that the pandemic teaches us, among other things, the limits of localism and the need for competent central authority and a government big enough, and smart enough, to tackle our problems.