Most of you will have heard the term "Me Generation" to describe the Boomers, but do you know where it comes from? It stems from a 1976 essay in New York magazine, written by the immortal Tom Wolfe. I hadn’t read it for decades until revisiting it this past weekend while working on a chapter of my next book. The chapter compares the "social atomization" of 1920s Germany—which Hannah Arendt says was the most important factor in the rise of totalitarianism there—to the "social atomization" we are experiencing in contemporary America.
Social atomization is a sociological concept describing a society where the traditional bonds that hold people together—such as family, synagogue, neighborhood, and local clubs—have broken down.
When a society is "atomized," individuals no longer see themselves as part of a larger, meaningful "whole" (like a molecule). Instead, they become like lone atoms: separate, self-contained units moving independently, often feeling isolated, alienated, and disconnected from their neighbors.
As Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
"Social atomization and extreme individualization preceded the totalitarian movements... The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."
By "social atomization," we mean the destruction of nearly everything that gave post-WWI Germans a sense of meaning, leaving them disoriented and grasping for structure and purpose. The Wolfe essay is a wonder, as much a work of prophecy as journalism, and "remarkably funny."
It is my thesis that we in America have achieved a comparable level of social atomization as 1920s Germany. They got there the hard way: through a devastating war and hyperinflation. As Wolfe shows, America got there the easy way: through wealth and comfort, which created a culture of "expressive individualism." Wolfe described what had emerged in the mid-Seventies as a "Third Great Awakening"—but this time, the object of worship was not God, but "Self."
This mirrors the warnings of historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote in The Culture of Narcissism:
"To live for the moment is the prevailing passion—to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future."
Wolfe’s essay captures this perfectly. From the text:
"The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite [of binding together the masses]. They begin with … ‘Let’s talk about Me.’ They begin with the most delicious look inward... It’s exhilarating!—to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me."
The notion of "If I’ve only one life" challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name: man’s age-old belief in "serial immortality." Most people, historically, have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on.
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called "time’s pattern": "Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself..."
Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost "in the solitude of his own heart" has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as "alienation" (Marx) and "the lonely crowd" (Riesman). But once the "common individuals" started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They discovered and started doting on "Me!" All rules are broken! Where the "Third Great Awakening" will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the beat goes … "Me … Me … Me … Me . . ."
We now know much better where this has led: to an America that resembles Weimar, psychosocially, in terms of being radically atomized and unstable. We missed for a long time the totalitarian nature of "wokeness" because our idea of totalitarianism was conditioned by the dark historical experience of Soviet Russia. We make the same mistake if we miss the "Weimarization" of America because we haven’t suffered a lost world war. There are other ways to dissolve the bonds among a people.
Sociologist Robert Putnam famously documented this decline in Bowling Alone:
"We have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of a century... The bonds of our communities have withered, and we are paying a price for this in our collective health and happiness."
Three years after Wolfe published his essay, a beleaguered President Jimmy Carter, facing on television a nation battered by inflation, an energy crisis, and a general sense of dis-ease, delivered the only speech of his presidency that anybody remembers. The so-called “Malaise Speech”, broadcast to the nation on July 15, 1979, was a strikingly conservative address, calling on Americans to draw on the moral and spiritual reserves from our history, to address the crisis engulfing the nation. Excerpt:
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path -- the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
The speech went over badly. Nobody wanted to be lectured by a Sunday School teacher. A year and a half later, the Carters handed the keys of the White House over to the Reagans. Ronald Reagan succeeded in large part because he redefined and re-articulated the Third Great Awakening in a right-wing, libertarian mode. Reagan spoke with force and conviction about the freedom and dignity of the individual, and the agency a free American has. He embodied a certain kind of cultural conservatism, and, symbolically speaking, the hippies shaved, got a haircut, put on nicer clothes, and went to the office.
But the basic libertarianism of the Boomers did not reverse itself. Democrat Bill Clinton was the true heir of Reagan, in that he affirmed Reagan’s orientation towards free markets. Globalization took off under Clinton, and the Congressional Republicans who served in his time. I’m not prepared to argue that the statism and regulation characterizing the pre-Reagan economy was good for America. It wasn’t; we had stagnated. But at the same time, when we talk about how globalization destroyed American small towns and shipped manufacturing jobs abroad, we have to concede that this was Reagan’s doing. Clinton solidified the Reagan Revolution, at least economically — and so did the most important GOP figure of the 1990s, House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
I’m not going to get too deep into the particulars here, because hey, that’s what a book is for. Let me just say, though, that the history of the past fifty years, since Wolfe published his “Me Generation” essay, has been one of slow but steady social atomization. The one event that brought America together for a brief, solemn period — the 9/11 attacks — led to a disastrous war of choice waged by a Republican president, with 72 percent of Americans backing it on the day the bombs began falling in Baghdad. And what was President Bush’s advice to the American people in the immediate aftermath of the attacks? Go shopping. In a certain sense, this was reasonable. He was trying to prevent economic damage coming from the shock of 9/11.
Still, that tells you something about how much America had changed as the Third Great Awakening hardened into a cultural consensus. You cannot imagine FDR saying such a thing days after Pearl Harbor.
We now know that religious belief and practice peaked in America in 1991, and has been declining ever since. In 2004, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton published their findings about the de facto religious and spiritual beliefs of the first generation raised after the Third Great Awakening had become cultural orthodoxy. They found that Christianity had been replaced by what they called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a badly watered down form of Christianity perfectly suited for the Me Generation and its progeny. In 2011, after further studies, Smith glumly concluded that for the Millennials, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”
The LGBT rights revolution would not and could not have occurred without the Third Great Awakening nullifying the religion of its predecessors as a binding and authoritative force in American life. Americans had come to regard sexual desire as intrinsic to identity. Sex was no longer merely something you did; it was who you were. Once this view had been popularized, it was only logical that gays and lesbians should be given what they demanded. This is why, twenty years ago, despite polls showing strong majorities of Americans opposing same-sex marriage, I was writing that the battle had been lost. I knew how, in a country that had come to the widespread belief in expressive individualism as normative, the convictions upon which the defense of traditional marriage depended were shallow indeed. They were rooted in sand, and though liberal judges accelerated the gay-rights revolution, the Me Generation and its children and grandchildren were bound to get there eventually, as they have done.
Wolfe had characterized the fundamental principle of 1970s popular culture as “Let’s talk about Me!” This gave rise in the 1990s to identity politics on the Left, in which individuals proclaimed their me-ness by membership in a collective of victims seeking political power. Gone was the old world of Martin Luther King Jr., who fought for racial justice in the name of Christian virtues and American constitutional principles. Now it was all about seizing power to create conditions under which one’s own self-identified tribe — organized by race, sex, and sexual identity — could more fully express themselves. This would eventually lead to the illiberal left-wing ideology we call wokeness; it is impossible to imagine the election of Donald Trump in 2016 absent the triumph of wokeness in the dominant cultural and corporate institutions of America.
The popularization of the Internet in the mid-to-late 1990s, and the advent of the smartphone a decade or so later, marked the point of no return. If the hyperinflation of 1923 was the watershed event that made it irreversibly impossible, in a psychosocial sense, for Germans to return to anything like the stability and cohesion they had before the Great War, then 2007 — when Apple gave the world the smartphone — was America’s 1923.
Why? Because now every individual could carry in his pocket or her purse a personal computer that linked them to the virtual world of the Internet. To borrow from the late Neil Postman, when a child with a smartphone can access hardcore porn instantly, sitting in his backyard under a tree, then childhood as we have known it is over. So is society.
Don’t misunderstand me here: it’s not simply a matter of socially destructive and immoral content coming to us through the Internet and smartphone. It’s far more radical than that. What you pay attention to determines your own sense of reality. Prior to the Internet, Americans generally shared the same social reality. However distorted it was because of the work of information curators in newsrooms and Hollywood studios, it was still a shared culture.
Where were you when, on February 28, 1983, CBS broadcast the final episode of M*A*S*H? Nielsen found that 106 million Americans were sitting in front of their televisions that night, watching the movie-length farewell episode. That means 45 percent of all Americans shared that experience. Can you imagine? It happened, and it was possible because back then, we only had three television networks, and cable television did not yet have the penetration that it would soon obtain.
The M*A*S*H final episode’s viewership was historically extraordinary, but my point is that the media technology of the era meant that it was possible to have that kind of shared experience. That’s gone. I wouldn’t want to go back to the era of only three networks, and neither would you. My point is simply that the Internet has revolutionized what Charles Taylor calls our “social imaginary,” such that we no longer live in the same reality, because we no longer pay attention to the same things.
We have all had the experience of finding ourselves at a dinner party or social gathering, and being shocked by how few people are aware of some event or phenomenon that we assumed everybody knew. Happens to me all the time, and it usually separates out the people who are on Twitter, versus those who aren’t. (And even then, the algorithm sorts us Twitter tribes out, and silos us.)
A people that do not and cannot share a broadly similar social reality are an atomized people, whether they want to be or not. I sit here in my Budapest apartment writing to you on my laptop. My psychological reality is determined by this machine. I spend my day reading and writing on it, and corresponding, and texting, with friends and colleagues across town, across borders, and across oceans. Though I have lived in this apartment for over two years, I don’t know my neighbors, and they probably don’t know each other. This is our common condition.
In his bestselling 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, political theorist Patrick Deneen posited that it has failed as a way to organize society precisely because it has succeeded in reaching its telos: liberating the individual from subjection to any unchosen obligations. The Me Generation, now ripening into senescence, had brought into a being in which “We” is an abstraction. It’s very hard to make a “We” out of 340 million Mes, all convinced of the rightness of their sovereignty.
What’s next? Psychological research on the first generation raised fully within digital culture is extremely discouraging. We now know that heavy Internet exposure — which is the norm for young people today — causes organic changes in the brain. For one, we lose the ability to sustain attention. True, this is something all of us who are heavily online experience, but it is especially dangerous to those whose brains are still forming. We know that it affects the development of their prefrontal cortexes (where, among other things, our decision-making capabilities are located), and distorts the amygdala, which regulates emotional response. In short, we are probably forming, through our technology, the next generations of Americans to be slaves to their passions and their fears, and increasingly incapable not only of self-government, but of reversing social atomization except through something barbaric — like what the Nazis offered the German people. The triumph not of reason and love, but of the will, and hatred of the Other.
The Nazis — Adolf Hitler, of course, but also his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels — knew what the German people craved, and knew how to give it to them. Living in a socially atomized world was unbearable, especially when the Great Depression brought about widespread poverty and desperation. People wanted a return to community, meaning, and purpose. They wanted to regain a sense of agency. Hitler gave it to them. I’m telling you, the deeper you go into the history of the era, the easier it is to see how you, had you lived there, and suffered what they suffered, might have surrendered to the promises of Nazism too. The psychological and social pressures to do so were incredibly difficult to resist, especially as the centrist political parties proved incapable of dealing with the dire challenges of the Great Depression.
Germany got to Hitler through losing a horrible war, the middle class seeing its savings dissolve into thin air through hyperinflation, and finally, the coming of the Great Depression. All of these things rendered the average German man feeling adrift, lost, purposeless, and afraid of the future. Again, we have arrived somewhere close to the same place, but we took the pleasant scenic route. Deprivation and hardship atomized 1920s Germany; abundance and comfort did the same for us.
My great fear — a fear intensified by this war and its potential economic repercussions for the globe — is that America as we know it will not be able to survive a true economic collapse like the Great Depression. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But 1920s Germany shows us how vulnerable a people becomes when their social bonds, the ones both tying them together and anchoring them in a shared transcendent reality that provides them an authoritative basis for living together, dissipates. Time to take this seriously, and act as best we can to head it off.
