This is from George Packer’s The Fight is For Democracy:
For the past century, the political philosophy of collective action on behalf of freedom and justice has been liberalism. For most of that time, it was an expansive, self-confident philosophy, and history was on its side. Since around 1968, liberalism has been an active participant in its own decline. A creed that once spoke on behalf of the desire of millions of Americans for a decent life and a place in the sun shrank to a set of rigid pieties preached on college campuses and in eccentric big-city enclaves. It turned insular, defensive, fragmented, and pessimistic. The phenomenon of political correctness, which fora period during the 1980s and early 90s became the most visible expression of liberalism, amounted to a desire to control reality by purifying language and thought, to make the world better by changing a syllabus, or a name, or a word. It was a kind of cargo cult. At bottom, it represented a retreat from politics…
While liberalism slept, the country became more corporate, less democratic, less equal, more complacent. Liberalism has been a kind of enzyme in America’s democratic system, periodically catalyzing reactions, speeding up change, making the organism more vital. Without it, our democracy tends to get fat and sluggish, as the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence becomes a wholly private matter. In the tension between individual and community that every democracy has to negotiate, what we saw in America in the years leading up to September 11 was the triumph of market individualism, without commitments. The polis was routed. As Todd Gitlin argues in his essay, the sense of civic responsibility died on both the left and the right. Instead, they offered a choice of hedonisms.
From earlier in the essay:
The mood that came over New York after September 11 — for me, it will always be tied to the “Missing” picture posted on my subway stop of a young woman named Gennie Gambale, and then all the other pictures that appeared overnight around the city; the flags sprouting in shop windows; the clots of melted candle wax on sidewalks; the bitter smell of smoke from lower Manhattan; the cluster of people gathering in Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Union Square to sing or write messages or read them; the kindness on the subway; the constant wail of sirens for no obvious purpose; the firemen outside a station house in midtown accepting flowers at midnight; the rescue workers at the end of their shift trudging up West Street with gray dust coating their faces and clothes; the people waiting at barricades on Canal Street with pots of foil-covered food; the garrulousness of strangers; the sleeplessness, the sense of being on alert all the time and yet useless — this mood broke over the city like a storm at the end of a season of languid days stretching back longer than anyone could remember. People became aware, as if for the first time, that they were not merely individuals with private ends. Whitman’ spirit walked down every street: “What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?” The embarrassment of strong emotions felt by sophisticated people in peaceful times dropped away, and strangers looked at one another differently. We became citizens.
