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No, America is not falling apart at the seams

Published on 46 Comments on No, America is not falling apart at the seams

David Brooks says that America is falling apart at the seams. His evidence for this is surprisingly thin. First, he cites the recent rise in obnoxious outbursts, which even he admits is just temporary frustration caused by the COVID pandemic. Second he cites a few negative trends, but ignores the dozens and dozens of positive trends that have informed American life over the past couple of decades. Taken as a whole, American life has improved significantly for practically everyone in recent years.

Still, Brooks is right that we all seem to hate each other more than usual. But why?

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics....Some of our poisons must be sociological — the fraying of the social fabric....And some of the poisons must be cultural....But there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this.

I get that this is appealing to anyone interested in the deep roots of human behavior, but it's wrong. The answer is Fox News. That sounds reductive and simplistic—maybe even faintly ridiculous—but sometimes the simple answer is the right one. Fox News is dedicated to destroying our country because it's profitable to do so. That's it. Lob a cruise missile at 1211 Avenue of the Americas and I think you'd be surprised how quickly we might all return to our senses.

46 thoughts on “No, America is not falling apart at the seams”

  1. bharshaw

    Trump, Fox, and pandemic will account for a lot. Also, it's cyclical. We had a period of malaise called the 1970's, another called the 1930's...

  2. colbatguano

    Brooks is always looking for some spiritual or moral problem at the center because they can't be solved by government intervention which is the greatest evil to him.

    1. aldoushickman

      In that line, Brooks should perhaps have added to his column the morally troubling trend of columnists divorcing their longtime spouses to marry their quarter-century-younger assistants. No doubt a spiritual problem lies at the center of that, too.

    2. realrobmac

      Brooks is always looking for some spiritual or moral problem _caused by liberals_. Why take anything the man writes seriously?

  3. Doctor Jay

    I think the social isolation we are using to combat covid is taking a toll on us. It has reduced or removed a lot of the things that we would otherwise use to reduce stress.

    Humans are not built for isolation. That's not to say I don't support or endorse this policy. I'm just saying it's taking a toll.

  4. ronp

    +1000, yes correct. Murdoch(s) should be made to be ashamed of energizing the latent authoritarians to ruin the country for filthy lucre. Anyone working at Fox should really think hard about their impacts to the countries they work in.

    Sinclair, Newsmax, ONN, social media also bad, but not at all at the level of Fox.

    1. Dana Decker

      Murdoch cannot be ashamed, He intimidated 13 year old Charlotte Church to sing at his marriage in 1999 and forsake a £100,000 fee because she would get "good press" from his newspapers. News Corporation, Murdoch's company, denied the allegations and said that Church's performance was a surprise to him. Church said that she received a specific request to perform Pie Jesu – and that she was flown on Murdoch's private jet from Los Angeles to New York for the event.

  5. sturestahle

    Sorry guys… this requires an answer from a Swedish troll!
    Covid deaths, infant mortality, maternal mortality, gun deaths, child poverty, education , freedom of press , democracy, freedom..… you are slipping and slipping in the opinions of unbiased international experts on all crucial issues and in statistics on healthcare even compared to nations that sure don’t have your resources
    America is a failed state when it comes to public health , democracy, freedom, social progress , climate due to the fact that a minority of right wing extremists are able to manipulate the elections any way they choose
    You have ,for decades , been patterning yourself after a classic Third World plutocracy with no middle class since it’s possible for a group of insanely wealthy people to buy political influence, a gift handed over by a group of politicians dressed up in black robes impersonating judges .
    Claiming that money is equivalent with free speech!
    This is the result…
    Trying to govern a country ,claiming to be a democracy ,still using a Constitution dating from the 18th century based upon the values of those days isn’t that smart
    Your Constitution is a parchment consisting four pages and it was drafted by a group of upper class British slave owners who wasn’t that interested in democracy
    Amendments?
    Nothing of importance has been amended these last 100 years simply because your political system doesn’t work anymore
    A good night to you all

    2. Salamander

      Hey, in the last 100 years, the franchise has been expanded to include women! Native Americans! Kids of 18! The District of Columbia gets to weigh in for presidential elections! We finally banned poll taxes!

      Admittedly, there's a lot of other amendments that will be needed. The "money == speech" decision was incredibly damaging, not to mention totally absurd. Et cetera. But to say there have been NO democracy-enhancing amendments is just wrong.

      1. sturestahle

        Amendments?
        The 19th was important but it was completed August 2020 (more than 100 years ago)
        The 22th was to correct a flaw , one cannot have a life time president if the president is having the power of a sovereign monarch from times gone by (as your president is having)
        The 23th … well it was about time to fix that
        The 24th was meant to finally make the 15th work .. but racists are still successful in making it hard for non-whites to vote
        The 25th was to correct another flaw concerning the presidency
        The 26th wasn’t a big deal, that was a minor adjustment following the trend elsewhere
        The 27th ?….. LOL , that’s a funny one . You needed 202 years, 223 days to implement it
        This isn’t much development to brag about in the last 100 years if one is to compare with more successful democracies

  6. aldoushickman

    I think that anytime anybody suggests that the problem might be "spiritual," they don't actually have anything to say. If Brooks thinks there's a problem, but can't identify a cause aside from some non-material non-testable "core" for which he can't specify any mechanism by which it would affect things at all, one should really ask what the nytimes is paying him for.

    FWIW, I think that the stress of the pandemic likely explains much if not all of the short-term negative trends he cites. Constant-if-low-level worries about disease, disruptions in childcare and schooling, and uncertainty about the immediate future are all the sort of things that might drive Americans to drink more, drive worse, be snippier with each other and/or more prone to self-reinforcing conspiratorial thinking.

    Kevin is probably right that Fox News has been playing a negative role longer term, and it certainly ain't helping short term. The normalization of its influence can be seen in things like why the response to numerous Fox News personalities calling/texting Mark Meadows to plead the whitehouse to do something about the insurrection has been mostly "Ah-HA! They *admitted* it was a problem," and and less "WTF do a bunch of cable news weirdos have the whitehouse chief of staff's phone number?"

      1. aldoushickman

        Indeed they are, with the chief of staff's phone number likely being the highest value currency (aside from the Presidential cell itself) in the realm. But, that's sorta my point. The idea that a bunch of op-ed talking heads on a niche cable channel would all have a direct line to the second most valuable phone in the country is pretty remarkable; the fact that they did and nobody finds it that surprising is itself all the more remarkable.

  8. pflash

    But this time feels different. All the surveys show what I assume are record numbers claiming either openness to, or fear of, political violence. Talk of secession. I have a sense of existential dread and I'm sticking with it. I just don't see how we go on unless the right stands down and they won't stand down.

  9. middleoftheroaddem

    Sorry but Fox News as the center of this is WAY too simple. No one is forced to watch Fox News: rather, the audience selects to watch and believe....

    2. bebopman

      Yep. Fox is evil. But people choose to watch. People choose to believe. If Fox is gone, those same people will find a replacement. Better to address why these people choose to believe.

  10. Salamander

    Doesn't it just figure? We get lead exposures under control and start reaping the benefits, and then Fox News comes in to take up the slack.

  11. Justin

    I'm normally an anti-war guy and I abhor violence as a way of solving problems. However, I do find myself carving out some exceptions for the use of violence (by others unknown to me, of course) here in the US.

    Fox News is a good target for those missile strikes for sure! Thanks for the suggestion, Mr. Drum. My revenge fantasy payback list has a few other targets which, I imagine, you can all guess. I won't write them here since, you know, the republican spies are everywhere!

  13. tribecan

    Fox is certainly at the center of it, but the rot set in a long time ago. When Bill Buckley said -- in the late fifties -- that he'd rather be governed by the first three thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty at Harvard, he presumably wanted people to think he trusted in the wisdom of the common man, but in fact he realized that the likelihood of some of the smartest, best educated, most professionally thoughtful and skeptical people in the world embracing conservative ideas was vanishingly small, and for conservatism to succeed they'd need a lot of low-information voters. The right has been pandering to them relentlessly ever since, telling the lies necessary to obscure the fact that conservatives weren't interested in solving any of our serious problems. So they said, in the sixties, the blacks are getting too many rights, in the seventies they weaponized abortion (which had been supported by evangelicals when it was decided, before they went on to vote for Carter), in the eighties under Reagan they continued to depict black people as welfare cheats and insisted that government couldn't do anything right, and in the 90s they said "Bipartisanship is date rape," (Grover Norquist) and that the way to beat the dems was to cast them as evil, as communists, as terrorist lovers, as foreign and sick and demonic. All this before the founding of Fox News in 1996. Fox was created to further the message, and is the greatest propaganda shop in the country's history, but it's part of a whole vast matrix of politicians, think tankers, pundits (David Brooks, etc) and academics working to create the alternate reality in which Republican politics will make sense. To say it's only Fox News is to let off the hook too many people, and to ignore the entire half century that preceded its creation.

    1. spatrick

      Bill Buckley said -- in the late fifties -- that he'd rather be governed by the first three thousand names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty at Harvard, he presumably wanted people to think he trusted in the wisdom of the common man

      Actually I thought he said this because he was a Yale man.

    2. Wonder Dog

      No, not at all. Just because there are multiple lines of evidence does not mean they are all equal in effect. Yes, modern, late 20th century American 'conservatism' emerged from the depths with Buckley, Goldwater, et al, but the cumulative effects of Fox News' propaganda on how tens of millions of Americans think, feel, and act is exponentially greater than any other source, without question. It's like saying that one guy peddling black and white, mimeographed leaflets on the corner of Main Street is equal to a plane dropping millions of glossy, full color adverts across an entire city. Or, like saying that because there are other gasses involved in AGW, that CO2 is not THAT important. It's a matter of scale.

  14. Leo1008

    I appreciate this blog post because I read that Brooks column this morning and I thought the column asserted a ridiculously thin premise based on seemingly anecdotal evidence. I even put a comment on that column expressing my disagreement (because apparently I have too much time on my hands);

    Nevertheless, there is one thing that struck me. There were hundreds of other comments, and I spent some time scrolling through quite a few of them. I expected a diversity of opinion in the responses, but I did not find it. Everyone agreed with Brooks. Different commentators offered different explanations, but no one else seemed to question the basic premise that the country was falling apart.

    And I don’t think this all comes down to Fox News (as Kevin asserts). I’m sure that Fox News is a part of it, but I would more broadly implicate the entire news media industry. It’s possible I’ve become more discerning or more sensitive over time, but I remain fairly certain that the press has never before been so relentlessly negative. I think it can be stated with some confidence that no one who ever listens to American news ever hears anything positive.

    There are so many recent stories that could be presented in a positive light: we overthrew a dictator, we thwarted his coup attempt, we vaccinated 70% of the adult population against Covid in a relatively short time (at no charge!), we’re experiencing a record economic recovery from a once in a century pandemic, etc.

    Instead, all anyone hears is this: our democracy is threatened (and therefore falling apart), political violence looms everywhere, pandemic “cases” are “soaring,” and, of course, INFLATION! INFLATION! INFLATION!

    The American news networks present “information” in such a relentlessly negative manner that one has to apply time, effort, and work to look up actual info in order to gain a better perspective: and a lot of people (understandably) just don’t have the time or inclination to do that. So they come away thinking we’re all doomed.

    I sometimes listen to the BBC on satellite radio, and that can be like tuning into a different world altogether. The calm and measured presentation of information is often an astonishing difference from American media. And that’s just a shame.

  15. golack

    Obama was right in saying this is the best time to be born into the human race (when he was president).
    Less wars, less poverty, etc., than any other time in human history.

    But we still have deaths of despair in the US. There are pockets where life expectancy is falling. There are towns that are dying.

    The Republican response has been to give those people someone (else) to blame for their problems, but not any way to deal with said problems. Dealing with problems would mean a lost Republican vote. The Democrats offer solutions, but that implies those people actually need help, which is insulting.

  17. thebigtexan

    I don't think that things are that much worse these days, but now there are cameras everywhere to record absolutely everything. Even our doorbells have cameras. On the Nextdoor app, the folks in my neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods post videos of them confronting people walking their dogs because some dog pooped in their lawn, and similar nonsense. Turn off the cameras and things won't necessarily get better, but there will be less fussing over every little thing that happens.

  19. akapneogy

    "I get that this is appealing to anyone interested in the deep roots of human behavior, but it's wrong. The answer is Fox News. "

    Yes, that is reductive, simplistic and it mistakes a symptom for a cause. The same would apply if you blamed Trump for all of America's current malaise. I believe the American experiment (as defined by Lincoln's Gettysburgh address) took a wrong turn under Reagan and has been on the wrong track (despite Democrats' efforts at course correction) ever since. Lincoln declared "government of the people, by the people, for the people" as the means of conducting the American experiment. Reagan declared "Government is the problem." Trump tried to fashion government in the image of his own currupt self. The results are there for all to see. Fox News has just been an enabler and amplifier of destructive policies from Reagan to Trump.

  20. ProgressOne

    Back in the day, AM talk radio was a way for right-wing, verbose talkers to reach like-minded conservatives. Talk radio proved profitable and effective at drawing listeners. It started at the fringe, and then the fringe grew as the talk show hosts became more charismatic in the eyes of conservatives. Rush Limbaugh was worth $600 million when he died.

    Enter Fox News. Their goal was to move AM talk radio to TV and to make the political narratives seem palatable and mainstream. Evening commentators were hired, most of whom had honed their schtick on AM talk radio. They could make themselves rich by being continually provocative and reactionary, and Fox News could get rich too. It worked, and now we all have to pay the price each day.

  21. D_Ohrk_E1

    I think you have a partial answer to the sudden surge in comment registrations. People have found your blog and word has spread that this is the place to be.

    As for whether things are great...there are hundreds more homeless camps in every major metropolis than a decade ago. Surely, progressives have ignored the plight of many Americans even while bemoaning the cruelty of conservatism's treatment.

  22. painedumonde

    It may be FoxNews but what makes FN tick? Profit. The same reason heroin is sold on the streets. Profit. Strike down FN, and another or more will replace it. There may be some fundamental reason people are drawn to hate and readily suck on the teat of propaganda, but if you take profit out of the equation, problems like that will vanish.

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