Toward a New Common Sense of Abundance |
Photo by Marija Zaric
“Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know,” the 18th-century British writer Lord Chesterfield advised his son. But common sense doesn’t stay that way. While it appears to most people to be something solid and steady, it changes from age to age, defined and redefined by the push and pull between rival social movements and the social, political, and economic forces that support one social movement over another.
U.S. history—like any other country’s history—is replete with such shifts in common sense. Examples include:
The American Revolutionary War, when independence from Great Britain rapidly went from being a marginal viewpoint to a majority position.
The American Civil War, when emancipation underwent a similar shift.
The New Deal, when a comprehensive social safety net suddenly became an accepted and expected part of the national fabric, and
The Civil Rights era, when political and economic equality, beginning with the campaigns of Black Americans, at last became applicable to other people of color, women, immigrants, and sexual minorities as well.
These shifts created a new consensus understanding of what we expect of government and what we expect from and extend to one another. They often occur in periods of political crisis or deep economic insecurity, when the entire culture seems to be in peril.
A new common sense can move society in a more inclusionary direction, where an ethos of abundance and embracing the democratic distribution of resources among the public at large seems reachable. When this happens, a common identity is extended to a wider circle within society, and security—physical and economic—is assumed to be possible for all as well.
Shifts in common sense can also, however, move society in the opposite direction sometimes during periods of crisis, but are often driven by fears and anxieties triggered by the very changes that previously moved society in a socially and politically progressive direction.
This occurred in the aftermath of World War I, when the Red Scare hysteria led to harsh new laws limiting immigration by national groups who were viewed as undesirable. Another such shift in common sense was embodied by the opposition to the Civil Rights movement, which generated a campaign of “massive resistance” in the South. In the Reagan era, the common sense of inclusiveness and an expanding field of rights was called into question and began to reverse. Following the apparent end of racial discrimination at the highest levels during the Obama years, Americans again turned to more conservative leadership, and common sense moved right. Today, the MAGA movement shares many of the same impulses that informed each of these previous exclusionary turnings.
The underlying tensions that caused these shifts leverage latent exclusionary ideas based on a single factor: biology. Deploying emotion and often irrational fear, reactionary forces succeed in racializing white identity, making it easier to set those who identify as white against other segments of society. White people of all social classes come to think in racialized terms even when they are unaware of it. For example, their understanding that some problems require social solidarity is checkmated by their fear that they would have to give something up to achieve it.
Often, this new common sense about identity turns the progressive agenda on its head. Suddenly, it’s the dominant white social and cultural group who are oppressed, and the civil concept of rights is redefined as a struggle on their behalf, rather than for the truly marginalized. Fears about economic security and identity built on underlying racial prejudice, against people of color and immigrants, and gender prejudice, against newly assertive women and the LGBTQ community, find their focus in a shallow, zero-sum economic calculation that if these groups achieve a better place in society, it must be at the expense of the culturally dominant white community.
The rise to dominance of latent biological biases plays to white people’s narrower sense of identity, even though these biases often work against their own material interests. Examples in U.S. history include: Jim Crow laws that closed off many lines of work to African Americans; intelligence tests in the post-World War I era created to marginalize immigrants; laws restricting immigration, which rob the society of labor and expertise it needs to expand; and cuts to the social safety net that hurt the middle class along with the least advantaged and make social mobility more difficult for........