A number of writers have, over the past decade, referred to the radical changes that have characterized the United States since the 1960s. Frances Fukuyama, for example, speaking of the mid-1960s through the 1990s, claims that there has been »a Great Disruption in the social values that prevailed in the industrial-age society of the mid-twentieth century,« marked at the very least by »seriously deteriorating social conditions.«² I want to talk about these changes as the »unsettling« of the modernity of the United States, and the struggle to redefine that modernity.

Modernity generally refers to the emergence of a set of social formations, ways of life, historical conditions and processes, and systems of power which enabled and sustained the rapid development and global domination of Northern Europe and North America. There are two ways of further defining this modernity. The first describes the institutions and forces that transformed (and continue to distinguish) traditional societies and modern ones. The second focuses on the emergent logics or structures of values and meaning that animate and organize the struggle to bring these new institutions into existence, and to give these new forces the power to shape people’s lives and destiny. While it is difficult to separate these two versions or stories of modernity, I might suggest that the first story typically emphasizes, for example,
—a new organization of social space that (1) replaced large scale religious-based empires with small-scale sovereign nation-states³ and (2) constructed new forms of globalism based on colonialism and racial distinctions between »the West« and »the Rest.«
—new ways of producing and distributing economic value and wealth, with the growing power (if not invention) of market economies, the rise of capitalism, and, eventually, of industrialization.
—a new sense of the possibility and desirability of change and experimentation, and a faith in the power of science and technology to rationally direct such change.
— new forms of political power that opposed claims of absolute power based in divine right or violence and that simultaneously sought the consent of the people (democracy) even as they proliferated techniques and institutions aimed at shaping individuals and controlling their behavior,
—new structures and institutions of authority based on secular rationality and the capabilities of the human mind as opposed to the assumed or imposed authority of religion and tradition.

The second story typically emphasizes more abstract changes in the logics or diagrams that direct modern development. Including:
—a new understanding of the person through a commitment to individuality: including the individual as prior to the collective, as the locus of sovereignty, as an inner self (but not a soul), as a self-reflective subjectivity, and as an agent both of its own life-trajectory and of history.
—a new sense of temporality, of the relationships among past, present and future, and of the way in which both people and objects »belong« in time. Innovation and change become taken for granted as commonplace, acceptable and even desirable.
—a new geography or economy of value defined by the possible co-existence of multiple forms and sites of value, and the ultimate translatability of these different forms of value.
—a new division (compartmentalization) of social life into distinct realms, distinguishing between the economy, society, culture and politics.
—a new production (or discovery) of differences everywhere (e.g., public and private, physical and mental labor, art and mass culture). It produces differences among humans (e.g., race), and societies (primitive vs. civilized), across space (the West and the Rest) and within time (traditional vs. the modern). These differences were seen as creating, alternatively, absolutely distinct and pure oppositions at one moment or place, and complex hybrids at others.

There is no single change that can mark the beginning of modernity because there is no essence to it, no single thing that marks the boundary between the not-modern and the modern. Nor does it characterize any single aspect of human life, as if it were really about economics, or politics, or culture. Modernity, like any form of social organization and life, is about social institutions, ways of life, and people’s experiences. It provides maps of intelligibility, affect and value. It instructs people how to locate themselves in and navigate through the material, social, and psychic possibilities available to them. It describes the fabric of meanings, feelings, resources, values, agencies, and identities that define the »structures of feeling« of a way of life. It is comprised of a multiplicity of—overlapping, interacting, augmenting, hijacking, redirecting, competing, completing, antagonistic, cooperative, limiting and allied—relations, organizations, forces, and struggles.

Modernity is always built upon a distinction through which the modern (nation) distinguishes and separates itself—spatially, temporally and culturally—from the pre-modern or traditional. However, we should not think that »the modern« simply and entirely replaces the older forms, as if the nation-state replaced both local communities and transnational identities, or as if secularism simply replaced religion. The new structures and forces of modernity work both with and against each other: e.g., nationalism has a complex relation to secularism in various nation-states. They also work with and against the older forms, which may seek ways of ensuring their own continued existence through resistance and compromise. For example, secularization should be seen as a set of techniques and institutions working on a field already powerfully organized by a variety of religious institutions. Similarly, capitalism never completely succeeded in taking over the entire economic field; it defeats, negotiates with, and sometimes loses to other already existing systems of economic value and market relations.

Moreover, at any particular time and place, there are always alternative and competing visions and practices of modernity attempting to be realized, and often, attempting to gain power. Second, although modernity as I have described it is generally assumed to be located in certain privileged spaces, like the nation-states of the North Atlantic, its success depended upon the ability to transform, primarily through colonization, the other parts of the world. These colonies defined another kind of modernity even as they provided the economic and often the political foundations on which North Atlantic modernity was built. So there are always multiple simultaneous modernities.

Modernity is a collective noun that describes multiple formations and contexts, multiple trajectories and histories, and yet people often take the particular organization of modernity in which they live (both institutions and logics) for granted. They assume that their way of life defines modernity, which is then seen as the necessary and stable framework in which history unfolds. If they should recognize that even modernity has a history, then they will assume that it can be described by the very linear history that they take for granted. Modernity must be constituted by a single trajectory of change, the proper sequence of the different variations of what is essentially the same variegated modernity. For example, one hears that we live in the era of late modernity. But this is inadequate, for there are different modernities, each with its own history and geography. Each follows a unique trajectory as a result of the complicated determinations, compromises, and contingencies of its own history.

I want to argue that the new »American revolution« is a struggle to transform the nature of American modernity. It is a struggle over the very shape and meaning of modernity itself, as most of the struggles of the past five hundred years have been. It is a struggle to transform one particular modernity—liberal modernity⁴—into another.

On the surface, this may seem unlikely. After all, both the neo-liberals and the new conservatives sound as if they would like to take the United States out of modernity. The new conservatives are often represented as traditionalists who oppose the demands and claim of modernity. A wide range of political, intellectual and citizenship groups from both sides of the political spectrum assume that the problems facing our society are the result of the failures and the unresolved contradictions of modernity.

But if we look more carefully, those attacking modernity claim to be committed to modernity, but of a very different sort. Even while the new conservatives propose »old-fashioned values« as a solution to the insanities of the modern world, they are also dedicated to »untrammeled modernization.«⁵ Schoenwald asserts that the new conservatives are attempting to make »a more >modern< political culture.«⁶ The »neoconservatives« opposed the 1960s counterculture because they thought it was an attack on modernity. Throughout the world, the successes of a variety of »new right« movements are the result of explicit efforts to create a modern and modernized Right, and to offer a new understanding of modernity. They understand that the very nature of modernity changes with its ever-changing context. How else can we make sense of Phyllis Schlafly ‘s description of Bay Buchanan (Patrick’s sister and campaign manager in his presidential bid) as »a modern traditional woman«? The success of the Christian Right is partly due to the ability of its charismatic spokespersons, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson, to use the mass media while linking traditional Christian values, nostalgic images of small-town »American« life, and a strong sense of their own modernity. Unlike previous religious »revivals« in the United States (sometimes called the »great awakenings«), which were decidedly anti-modern, anti-capitalist, and anti-consumerist (anti-self-indulgent might be more accurate), the present incarnation of a Christian politics presents itself as entirely modern. It seeks a different sense of modernity, one that is more compatible with Christian notions of civilization. It rejects »liberal modernity« as secular humanism and argues that it has ignored and even scorned both Christians and Christianity.

John Fonte’s »Why There Is A Culture War« offers an explicit acknowledgment that modernity is the prize of contemporary struggles.⁷ Fonte begins by agreeing with all those who have talked about the contemporary context as the site of a revolution of sorts: »Beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews.« It is a struggle between those attempting to hold onto American exceptionalism (the »de Tocquevillians«) and those continuing to Europeanize America (the »Gramscians« »who challenge the American republic at the level of its most cherished ideas«).

American exceptionalism, according to Fonte, is defined by the fact that, from its very beginning, America refused to give in totally to modernity as it was practiced in Europe, choosing instead to create its own unique modernity, with a different mix of the modern and the pre-modern. It combined »(1) dynamism (support for equality of individual opportunity, entrepreneurship, and economic progress); (2) religiosity (emphasis on character development, mores, and voluntary cultural associations) that work to contain the excessive egoism that dynamism sometimes fosters; and (3) patriotism (love of country, self-government, and support for constitutional limits).« As a consequence, »Americans today …are much more individualistic, religious, and patriotic than the people of any other comparably advanced nation.« This is, for Fonte, all about modernity: »America’s special path to modernity … combines aspects of the pre-modern (emphasis on religion, objective truth, and transcendence) with the modern (self-government, constitutional liberalism, entrepreneurial enterprise).«
According to Fonte the Gramscians are winning, as evidenced by the growing commitment of corporations to group rights (e.g., sensitivity training) over individual rights. How is this possible? »Perhaps America’s path to modernity was itself flawed«—too much modernity and too little pre-modernity, too much dynamism and too little morality. This is why the new Right is fighting the culture war: because the unique configuration of American modernity has been lost and needs to be found again. The new revolution is, for Fonte, a struggle for »cultural renewal,« that is, a renewed commitment to that uniquely American form of modernity.

I want to think about the changes and struggles within the U. S. as a moment in the continuous and continuing struggle to reconfigure American modernity: not to overthrow or escape modernity but to transform or reconfigure the modernity we take for granted into another, different kind of modernity. It is a challenge to and an attack on many of the assumptions and values, many of the structures and relations, which have defined and shaped modernity in the U.S. for most of the twentieth century. As a result, presumably, some things will appear to remain the same, while others appear to resurrect alternatives from the past, and still others will appear to be new, coming from an as yet only imagined future. Of course, in context, what appears to resurrect the past may well be invoking the past in the name of a significantly transformed present. This actually involves competing struggles, with their own histories and agendas, to undo and rework at least some of the compromises that were made at particular crossroads in the history of what is imagined to be »American modernity.«

We are caught in the midst of any number of efforts to undo one social reality and to make another one. We are being dragged along, with different degrees of assent and resistance, hope and resentment. We can see and hear a variety of proposals for this other (counter-) modernity in the explicit visions and politics of the new conservatism and neo-liberalism. But that does not mean that we can assume that they are successfully determining the coming modernity, or even that we can predict which trajectories will shape the coming modernity. We have to begin to understand the agents, forces, and logics that are reconfiguring and redirecting our modernity, and thus reorganizing both the present and the future (and in the process, remaking the past). If we are to challenge the war kids, we will have to locate it in these contemporary struggles over, and transformations of, modernity.

 

 

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