America 3.0

David Swindle of PJ Media wrote a long, discursive, and strongly favorable review of America 3.0, entitled “On 9/11 and Benghazi’s Anniversary, We End Conservative Pessimism and Right-Wing Apocalypticism”. David focuses on our hopeful message as an antidote to the defeatism which saturates so much thinking on the political right.

The gradually intensified fever-pitch fear-mongering on the Right is both unnecessary and emotionally destructive. People get burnt out by staying in a constant state of crisis. Concrete solutions and practical ways to overcome America’s problems over the course of the next 30 years not just thinking in four-year election cycles are needed instead. And it turns out they’re now available.
 
I’ve been waiting for a book like Bennett and Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In the 21st Century—Why America’s Greatest Days Are Yet to Come for years. We’ve needed a book that proclaims with confidence and literary elegance both how we got here and how to move forward to bring about unimaginable levels of prosperity.

David concludes with his own stirring message, inspired by the book:

We must stop dwelling in a scared paralysis when confronted with the world’s most evil ideologies both those in the White House and their allies running wild in the Middle East. Faced forward with eyes open, America 3.0 and the amazing technology we create to enable its birth will overcome both our economic and totalitarian threats. The sun will continue to shine on our nation and again we will prove by our military might and capitalist ingenuity the superiority of our value system, the resilience of our nation, and the Truth of our Creator’s watchful providence over our quest to stand as the City on the Hill, proclaiming the triumph of the Enlightenment through American word and deed.

I can only offer a heartfelt “amen” to these sentiments.

Thanks very much to David for his review. Please RTWT.

In recent interview in the Wall Street Journal the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri discussed growing up in Rhode Island, with Indian parents, and the experience of feeling neither Indian nor American, and about moving to Italy.

She also made these telling comments — without of course using our terminology! — about the assimilative power of a culture based on the Absolute Nuclear Family, as we describe in America 3.0:

“I think the thing I admire about America, and admire even more now that I don’t live here, is that it is a country that absorbs other nations, and one can become an American over time—maybe not my generation, but my kids, yes.” She has found Italy to be more homogenous and less equipped to understand “the phenomenon of otherness.”
 
Ms. Lahiri still remains skeptical of America’s ability to fully understand the idea, too. Looking back at her childhood, she marvels at how difficult it was for her parents to keep their Bengali identities. The U.S. “just absorbs everything,” she says, sighing. “It accommodates differences but always extinguishes them in some way.”

Ms. Lahiri is absolutely right that it is a multi-generational process to become American. But in the end, people really do become American. She is also right that other cultures that lack the individualistic culture of America have a tougher time incorporating others. As Emmanuel Todd wrote, the ANF culture expects siblings to be different, and has comparatively less difficulty accepting differences between individuals. As a result, Americans see little of interest in the “phenomenon of otherness.” It simply does not matter. Diversity is naturally occurring and expected. Further, the voluntaristic nature of American culture, where individuals form a web of personal, voluntary bonds, without relying on group solidarity, makes it easier to incorporate people from other cultures who are able to play by the American “rules of the game.” Ms. Lahiri is also correct that America “just absorbs everything” and this process “extinguishes” differences. The melting pot analogy has a basis in fact, though some groups have proven less “meltable” than others. And to be melted and be absorbed is not a wholly costless or painless process.

In our book we make this reference to the process of assimilation:

The story of immigrants coming to America for opportunity and freedom, but feeling they are losing their children to a culture they do not always like or understand, is an old one that has been repeated many times. There is an element of sadness to this. This process of loss of the old way of life may be felt as tragic by the parents, but it has been a triumph for Americans over the centuries. We have peacefully, though not painlessly, assimilated millions of people, one marriage and one family at a time, into a shared culture. It is part of the price, often unrecognized, that many people paid to come to America and be part of it. Assimilation to our culture is not costless, but it has hopefully been worth the price over time, to most people who came here and to their children and grandchildren.

Ms. Lahiri mentions being raised by Indian parents who remained Indian, and that she is neither Indian nor American. I have not read any of her books, but they are apparently about the struggle of immigrants to the USA to fit in here while maintaining ties to the old country, and the process of later generations losing those ties and becoming focused on their personal and family concerns.

This is a process that has been going on for centuries, and likely will go on for centuries to come.

(I got a copy of her first book, a short story collection, called Interpreter of Maladies. There is no saying if or when I will get to it!)

John Fonte’s thoughtful review of America 3.0 is entitled “E Pluribus Bonum.” Mr. Fonte is paraphrasing the motto of the United States, E Pluribus Unam — one from many. He is saying from many, the good.

Mr. Fonte’s professional concern in many of his writings has been on immigration, assimilation and national culture. And he correctly notes that we argue that America has indeed formed something good out of the many who have come here. We note the extraordinary assimilative powers of the American people, and of the Anglosphere generally in our book.

The mantra “We are a nation of immigrants” is repeated endlessly, but this incantation is essentially misleading. The addition of one adjective, “assimilated,” as in, “We are a nation of assimilated immigrants,” would greatly clarify our understanding of American identity. The question then becomes, Assimilated to what?

In America 3.0, we answer that question.

“Our American culture today,” Bennett and his co-author, Michael J. Lotus, tell us, “is part of a living and evolving organism, spanning centuries.” At the center of that culture is the American nuclear family. In the American nuclear family (as opposed to the traditional extended family), individuals are free to select their own spouses; grown children leave their parents’ homes and form new households; women enjoy a high degree of freedom compared with those in other cultures; children have no legal right to demand any inheritance from their parents; parents have no legal right to demand support from their adult children; and people have no right to expect help from their relatives.
 
The consequences of the American type of nuclear family, according to Bennett and Lotus, are that Americans are more individualistic, entrepreneurial, and mobile than other peoples. Suburbia is a major consequence, as American nuclear families prefer dispersed single-family homes over dense urban arrangements. Despite what they admit are “chaotic” changes in American family life, Bennett and Lotus do not “anticipate a basic change in cultural attitudes” that are “shaped by upbringing, language, institutions, and unconscious patterns of behavior that take centuries to form.”
 
Applying their anthropological-historical analysis, the authors note that the nuclear family emerged among the English. Bennett and Lotus state explicitly that the English family type became the American-style nuclear family, and this “underlying Anglo-American family type was the foundation for all the institutions, laws, and cultural practices that gave rise to our freedom and prosperity over the centuries.”

Mr. Fonte concludes on this note:

Bennett and Lotus have produced a very important evergreen book making a strong case for their myriad arguments. Interest among the conservative intelligentsia should be intense. There have already been endorsements from Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, Jonah Goldberg, and John O’Sullivan. Rebuttals from our friends at the Claremont Institute are sure to come:”ˆAs Straussians rather than Burkeans, they will insist that politics (the Declaration of Independence)”ˆtrumps culture (the nuclear family).

We are grateful to Mr. Fonte for his encouraging review. RTWT.