Tom Brokaw called it the “Greatest Generation,” the generation that saved America and the world from tyranny by making the greatest personal sacrifices ever demanded of an American generation in World War II (1939-45). Mark Bauerlein, in his 2008 book, called our present cohort the “Dumbest Generation” ever.
What happened between the two generations? Something catastrophic took place to change the very character of the three generations of Americans, gradually at first and now as daily news. Explanations abound: Some say the decline of religion caused it; some say it’s social media that did it. But these observers, like many others, confuse causes and effects.
It is said that Donald Trump told 30,000 lies during his presidency. But lies are repeated only if they continue to be believed. Why is white America dumb and gullible enough to believe them? What happened to these Americans? The answer we find is in the seldom-used analytical tool: The Great American Deregulation, a historical-sociological phenomenon that fundamentally altered American character.
The decades-long development called “deregulation” began with the post-WWII Affluent Society, dismantling the rules of society, one at a time, and steadily eroding America’s national unity and individual self-control. When the work was done, the process left in its wake a morally-tattered nation and indulgent-but–vacuous citizenry, setting the stage for Donald Trump.
Deregulation lifted the lid on conventional social restraint and conscious individual self-control, giving free reign to America’s own unruly hearts and uncontrolled selfishness that began with Ronald Reagan’s famous exhortation: “The world is your oyster. Go get it!”
Accelerating in the late 70s, and spanning three generations from the end of WWII to Trump, the United States underwent the most society-changing and humanity-altering expansion of consumer freedom the world had ever seen — the Great Deregulation of America. In the frenzy of a deregulating society, Americans learned to expect their daily lives to be supplied only with what they wanted, resulting in mass narcissism and self-indulgence. American consumers got everything they wanted, easily and around the clock. To feed this insatiable appetite, American television expanded from three channels — ABC, NBC, CBS — to over 1,000 channels and, therefore, no more pain of watching something that didn’t wholly please you.
Naturally, getting only what they wanted led to the changing character of Americans, multiplying their selfishness, childishness and dumbness, one thousand times. In a deregulated society, they could not control or regulate the system that gave them everything they wanted. Not many Americans — especially when your own consumption was so open to anything your heart demanded — could survive free choice and remain intelligent citizens or decent neighbors. As a society, America had changed from a self-regulating, disciplined unity to everyman-for-himself self-expanding, isolated individuals empowered to pursue their own pleased lives, who were taking their first step toward being “the dumbest generation ever” in American history. In short, deregulation gave them everything to tickle their fancies but deprived them of important citizen functions, such as protecting liberty and justice for all. The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, popularly called an “end-of-history” triumph for capitalism, only invigorated America’s headlong plunge into consumerism. It was easy picking for Donald Trump to promise a white utopia to these pampered but deprived white men (and women) of America.
Deregulation began innocuously as a purely profit-motivated expansion of American capitalism in the name of free enterprise and globalization. But it ended up releasing the most natural and powerful, but long-suppressed, impulses of a frontier nation and its solitary individualists, now super-charged with technology and psychology. The result was that it created an utterly transformed society, culture and personality in America, which had become a nation of five-year-olds who got nothing but sugar in their diet. Capitalism’s deregulation made America childish, and from its childishness sprang the perfect ingredients for Trump’s fascism. Liberal Americans note that their deregulated country has become “crazy” in a way that was never seen before. Capitalism destroyed our collective intelligence, and fascism took advantage of our social vacuum. Together, they are marking the end of America as we know it.
The utter irony in all this is that our white men’s fascism is the unintended progeny of our white men’s capitalism: America’s capitalists fathered America’s fascists. White men once tamed the wilderness and created a virtuous republic of liberty and equality. But, inheriting the everything-goes consumer liberation from capitalists, who fed them nothing but sugar for three generations, they have become dumb, gullible and insane.
They say children pay for their fathers’ sins, and the fascists may be ready to ruin America to atone for their capitalist fathers’ sins. There are many white sins in America but the deregulated destruction of America, because we cannot recover from it, is the greatest sin of them all. America’s fascist children sired by capitalist fathers have become so alien to humanity that it’s inconceivable that their broken humanity can be stitched back together by any known social engineering. Capitalism sowed and fascism is reaping, America’s demise assured between them.
Both capitalism and fascism, as the cause and effect of deregulation, are uniquely white men’s curses. Together, capitalists corrupted white men and these white men, now as fascists, are destroying America itself. With no social restraint or communal shield, just full of self-indulgence, isolation and, ultimately, massive citizen insanity, white America has just passed through the dress rehearsal for its funeral (2016-2020). Now, it is ready for the real thing in 2024.
We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. As Abraham Lincoln said, nobody can escape history’s judgment — not even American exceptionalism.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield. He is the author of a dozen books of social criticism, art philosophy and political economy.