The failures in America's coronavirus response suggests this is the wrong assumption to make. The scale of American errors simply range too wide. At every single level of society we have seen incredible, truly incredible, mistakes. None have done well: not the White House, not the federal government agencies, not the state governments and their agencies, nor even city authorities. Private enterprise was caught as unprepared as everyone else, and has subsequently struggled to produce a tenth of the innovative counter-virus workarounds their Chinese counterparts managed to dream up (and that under much greater time pressure). The media disgraced itself early on in the crisis and has no power to keep people's attention focused and efforts united now; much the same can be said for the largest voluntary associations of American civil society. Of course, each of these examples can be pulled out and explained away as the result of this or that unique set of conflicting interests, onerous regulations, partisan concerns, or terrible incentive trees, but as you zoom out towards the national view these micro-explanations grow less convincing. Before us lies a national catalogue of dysfunction and disaster. A national explanation is needed. Something must be found that holds together the staffers manning the Mayor of New Orleans response team and those doing the same thing in Washington DC. I am comfortable calling that thing "culture." America does not have a culture that builds.Instead, it is a problem of culture. I have a tendency to view these things cyclically, over several generations at a stretch. Reviewing the history of California, for instance, is fascinating because so much was built, destroyed and rebuilt over so many times that an amazing amount of material culture is lost here, in one of our newest frontiers. The last towns (other than suburbs of large cities) were settled in California, probably around the southern end of the central valley, by about the 1880's. But each has seen its most fundamental institutions torn down and rebuilt so many times that they contain the history of many towns. This was a process that lasted for several generations - perhaps up through the 1960s. Now, California can no longer build even a segment of rail line between two medium-sized towns.
The interesting question to me is - is this return to a non-building state: i) a reversion to a background mean against which we continue to progress in other ways, or ii) a sign of long-term decline, such as a new dark ages? T. Greer probably thinks the latter, as he assigns the cause of our lack of building to a deterioration of the self-starting moral fabric that used to stitch our country together (now sounding like a classic conservative!):
While this was happening, the civic and religious institutions that Americans traditionally relied on to manage their own affairs were quietly disappearing. Some organizations, like religious boards, unions, and bowling clubs, declined in number; others, like charities and NGOs, switched from a model of mass participation to a model of mass donations. Add it all together and you find that the percentage of Americans expected to be familiar with Robert's Rules of Order shrunk precipitously.Some of the civic architecture of California towns - frozen as it often is in its late-1960s state, bears silent testament to this loss of associative politics - the mouldering Elks Clubs, Masonic temples, bowling alleys, even bars, etc. When these institutions remain vibrant, or the mid-century architecture remains in an active state, these places are tourist attractions for outside onlookers.
Alongside this decay in our building culture, there are certainly sub-cultures that continue to build well. Can Silicon Valley lead the way?
Silicon Valley has shown that building sub-cultures can persist even in the face of general malaise. I am afraid this is a long term project. It may involve wrenching cultural authority out of the hands of existing arbiters and pulling it towards places like Silicon Valley, where men and women have not forgotten how to get things done. This may require building up the sort of cultural, media, and political infrastructure that exists along the Acela Corridor, just divorced from the patronage networks that currently keep things anchored in Washington and New York. Tech titans who care about these things should begin thinking seriously about what it would take to begin political and social experiments in the places closest to them: San Fransisco and its metro, other towns and cities in the state, perhaps California itself.
