“Americans”

Abstract

Americans of all persuasions have long assumed that it is meaningful to speak in terms of cultural decline. In general, those on the right measure decline against what they take to have been the national past, and those on the left measure it against what they consider to be the civilization of the west. To attribute malfeasance or malaise to cultural decline is to magnify isolated or imagined grievance into grounds for alienation and pessimism, to make conflict chronic and intractable, to make mutual disparagement an expression of lofty standards and historical insight. Our “culture wars” reflect our tendency to consider antagonism toward ourselves a handsome moral posture.