Our Problems Aren’t Procedural
… Like many centrist arguments of our age, Haidt’s essay emphasizes the procedural over the substantive. Missing from the 8,000-word argument, though, is an acknowledgement that meaningful national problems might also account for the fracture of American democracy. Credentialed experts, smart centrists, and small-l liberals of all stripes held the reins of power right up to 2016. They presided over a catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, two decades of defeat in Afghanistan, a hollowed industrial base, an earth-spanning recession, a secret surveillance regime, an opioid epidemic, and stagnating livelihoods in both the black communities of America’s inner-cities and the white communities of America’s rural hinterlands. With events like these, retweets are hardly needed to explain faltering faith in the American creed.
