Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America
Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America
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Overview
Drawing on a wide knowledge of American history and literature, the latest social science, and contemporary social issues, Brown investigates continuity and change in American race relations, politics, religion, conception of selfhood, families, and the arts. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary America, showing how postmodernism is perceived and felt by individuals and focusing attention on the strengths and limitations of American democracy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300127874 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
An influential social thinker, the late Richard Harvey Brown was professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication, published by Yale University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America
By Richard Harvey Brown
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2005 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10025-9
Chapter One
Differences That Make a Difference: Some Exceptional Features of the United States
The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from modern to postmodern, from national to global. But which aspects of these shifts are peculiarly American, and which does America share with other advanced capitalist states? What aspects of America simply reflect more global social processes, and which have their origin in the United States? How are general tendencies common to many nations, such as economic rationalization or changes in gender roles, shaped by unique local historical and cultural factors? How can we distinguish Americanization and globalization? Further, what is the connection between the structural shift from industrial to postindustrial society and the cultural distinction between modernity and post-modernity? These questions require an assessment of the exceptional features of the United States, such as the preindustrial modernization of American culture; its ethnic amnesia and myth of the melting pot; the coexistence of American apartheid and the dream of civic inclusion; and the tensions between the American tradition of decentralization and the extension ofcorporate and state power, which leads to a greater concentration of control and a narrowing of public space.
America is unlike other countries. America is like other countries. Disputes concerning the supposed Americanization of the world illustrate underlying similarities and convergences between the new American society and other states and cultures. The role actually played by the United States around the world is sometimes difficult to distinguish from the influence imputed to it. For instance, U.S. veterans returning to Vietnam have been welcomed by their former adversaries with the exclamation, "America Number One!" American journalists only ten years after the Gulf War were getting the thumbs-up in the souks of Baghdad. Perhaps these are gestures against the local regime more than an acclamation of American power, much as placing a Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square was a symbol of protest. People may adopt American modes of music, food, dress, or drugs to show that they are liberated from tradition or repression. To adopt American images is not simply to be Americanized. More important, it is to assert the right to be modern. "Number One" refers as much to the fact that America is deemed to be the most modern country as to America's current preeminence in relation to other nation-states.
AMERICANIZATION AND GLOBALIZATION
Like "Westernization," the very term "Americanization" masks a number of conflicting processes. Just as "Westernization" masks the plundering of the natural riches of weaker countries by strong ones, "Americanization" sanitizes the subversion of foreign governments by the CIA; the penetration into foreign markets by American-based transnational firms; or the adoption of modes of mass consumption through the use of credit cards, shopping malls, or fast food (Ritzer 1999). But "Americanization" also evokes a movement toward freedom and individualism. From Beijing to Berlin, from Poland to Palestine, the posters of antigovernment demonstrators have often been in English, which shows both the reach of the American media and the allure of American ideals. "Americanization," like its counterpart, "Westernization," has many facets.
As a counterpoint to the Americanization of other countries, the United States itself is becoming more globalized. American stock and real estate markets and more generally the whole American economy are increasingly shaped by capitalists overseas. The crash of October 1987, for example, was imputed in part to disaffection with the U.S. domestic economy by foreign investors. The economic jolt in 1997 following the fall of the Thai bhat and other East Asian currencies showed a similar interdependency. The third-largest American automaker, Daimler-Chrysler, is German, as is the largest American publishing firm, Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, Bantam, and Doubleday. Americans also are adopting Thai or Brazilian cuisines, as well as Thai or Brazilian babies. They now eat formerly exotic fruits such as kiwi or plantain. The same holds true for words. The French complain about the increasing use of "Franglish" and Latin Americans of "Espanglish," and much advertising copy worldwide uses English words merely as symbols of what is attractive. But a similar borrowing goes in the reverse direction, as when words and institutions such as "kindergarten," "discotheque," "salsa," "yoga," or "zen" are converted into English. In the same way, Mexicans, Filipinos, Iranians, and a multitude of other immigrant groups are converted into American. Thus, whereas the term "Americanization" refers to the export of American culture-of Coca Cola, The Terminator, and blue jeans-it is matched by the symmetric globalization of the United States. Indeed, for much of what America exports, there was originally an alien cultural artifact that was introduced into what became American culture.
Moreover, "Americanization" also has a moral dimension-the spread of ideals of liberty and equality that the United States announces, embodies, and violates. Early settlers learned that there was nothing so divisive as the pursuit of intensely held values, and as early as 1641 the people of Massachusetts had determined in their code of liberties that individuals should be protected from the moral edicts of any church (Albrow 2001). With the globalization of such ideals, as Herman Melville wrote in 1849 in Redburn, "in some things we Americans leave to other countries the carrying out of the principle [of equality] that stands at the head of our Declaration of Independence." Even today the United States refuses to support the establishment of the International Court of Criminal Justice and other such conventions that are inspired in part by American ideals for fear that Americans themselves may be judged by non-Americans in such venues (Albrow 2001). Thus globalization continues to challenge the United States even as Americanization challenges other nations.
Economic Shifts
Emerging patterns of finance, manufacture, and trade are perhaps the most striking sign of the general globalization of contemporary life, even though citizens and government officials often do not notice it. For example, both the elder George Bush's Special Trade Representative Carla Hills and Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher insisted that America guard its technologies from foreign firms, subsidize sunrise industries, and force other nations to open their markets to American products. Bill Clinton and his trade representative, Diane Barshevsky, and George W. Bush and his representative took a similar line.
But what does it mean exactly to be "American"? Ms. Hills accused Japan of excluding Motorola from its domestic markets, but Motorola designs and makes the cellular telephones it tries to sell in Japan in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Similarly, General Electric is Singapore's largest private employer. At the same time, Sony exports to Europe audio and video tapes and recorders made by Americans in Sony factories in the United States; Starbucks imports Italian espresso machines; Honda sells over sixty thousand cars per year to Japan and other Asian nations from its American factories; IBM employs thousands of Japanese in its factories and laboratories in Japan and is now Japan's leading exporter of computers; and about one-third of Taiwan's trade surplus with the United States is attributable to American-owned firms that have set up operations there. When an Iowan buys a Pontiac, 60 percent of her money goes to South Korea, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, and Barbados, though many of the contributing firms in those countries are at least partly American-owned.
A parallel situation has developed in finance, with capital raised and stock traded in a number of global capital markets. Over one-third of U.S. dollars is held abroad in non-American hands, and two-thirds of all U.S. currency in circulation is overseas. Americans own large portions of non-American firms, and vice versa. Thus, as the very concept of "American" products made by "American" firms is becoming less meaningful, the idea of the "Americanization" of the globe must be supplemented by an awareness of the globalization of the United States. In short, the process of delocalization is ubiquitous. Things are rarely produced or consumed any longer in single places. The underlying patterns of economic and cultural diffusion suggest that almost all societies are becoming more porous and open to alien but soon domesticated influences.
Demographic Changes
In the area of family life, industrialization and especially postindustrialization trigger declines in the rate of marriage and increases in the frequency of informal cohabitation. As women increasingly have paid jobs outside the home, they become more independent financially, have broader awareness and choices, and find it more costly in forfeited alternatives if they opt to be full-time mothers or housewives. Whereas industrialization and urbanization generate decreases in birthrates but rises in the relative number of children born out of wedlock, they also encourage audacious innovations aimed at preventing or facilitating pregnancy and increases in divorce rates but parallel longevity of marriages. In other words, in the United States as in other economically advanced societies, there is change in the profile of average families as well as in their differentiation.
Similarly, all economically advanced countries have been experiencing sharp increases in immigration. America has kept its doors open to Russian Jews, Vietnamese or Cuban refugees, and Latin Americans or Caribbeans looking for better standards of life. Britain, Germany, and France have been havens for the political refugees of the Middle East and have absorbed an unskilled labor force from former colonies or from semiperipheral areas such as Eastern Europe and Turkey. These workers take low-end jobs that citizens of advanced economies are now less willing to do. Similar arrangements exist in Australia and Canada, in relatively prosperous Argentina and Chile, and, more and more, in Japan. Persons registering with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New York State in 1989 named 164 countries or dependencies as their native lands (Fuchs 1990). Moreover, whereas America continues to draw immigrants from a wide range of countries and social strata, there has been a thickening stream of Americans residing overseas. Thus there are English-language dailies in Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and most large cities of the globe. Most of these Americans will return home, making the United States itself a culturally more international society.
Political Changes
On both sides of the Atlantic, definitions of the state and its functions have been subjected to similar challenges. The triumph of neoliberal ideologies almost everywhere has encouraged market-oriented social changes. Both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher denounced overgrown public sectors and supposedly counterproductive welfare, and both sought to privatize activities that formerly were conducted by the state. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair have continued these policies. The same pattern characterizes France since the return of the right to power in 1985. When the Socialists regained power in 1988 and again with Lionel Jospin in 1998, they did not change the thrust of measures adopted by their conservative predecessors. The same is true of Gerhard Schroeder in Germany. Indeed, the new administrations have kept on denationalizing enterprises, including radio and television stations-a drastic innovation for France, where for more than a century the birth of any large private communications enterprise was seen as a plot against the government. Such state devolution and market extensions have been even more dramatic in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. This does not mean that the state is less important. It is spending more per capita than ever before. But its image and its role almost everywhere are shifting.
Thus, what is imputed to "Americanization" sometimes may be due more to structural changes or economic and technological innovations that appeared earlier or more visibly in the United States than elsewhere. The international proliferation of shopping malls or Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) stems from new economic conditions as well as from America's particular consumer culture and marketing know-how. In one view, "Americanization" reflects the constraints, opportunities, and crises resulting from independent efforts toward modernization and industrialization and their "post" varieties. In a second view, "Americanization" results from the diffusion of institutional, cultural, or psychological traits born in the United States.
It is important, however, to note the dialectic underlying the variety of changes I have mentioned. It is one thing to describe the central tendencies of the economic, demographic, and political changes that accompany the emergence of a postindustrial order. It is another, and probably even more significant, to highlight their increased variance and the reactions that they elicit. For example, as multinational corporations become more powerful, countervailing international social movements, as well as autonomous neighborhood organizations, become more significant. Likewise, as the state's power diminishes relative to international forces, it is increasingly expected by its citizens to modify, compete with, or protect them from such forces. Similarly, trends toward more individualized lifestyles are associated with a selective restoration of extended kinship networks. In the same vein, as standardized patterns of behaviors and beliefs become more pervasive, a greater emphasis is placed on personal choice and identity.
In sum, as the world becomes more interdependent financially, ecologically, economically, and even culturally, local invention, global diffusion, and consequent relocalization become more intertwined. This shift often shows in small but significant ways. A pump invented for industrial use-say in Munich-may be adapted for rural hydropower in Togo. A plant used to ease menstrual pain in the Amazon may become a pharmaceutical manufactured in Boston. Thus, invention, adaptation, diffusion, and reinvention are always going on in diverse ways in many places and at many levels.
THE PREINDUSTRIAL MODERNIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE AND AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
While modernity and postmodernity today are global in scope, they play themselves out differently in different societies, including the United States. First, American culture, including a political culture of democratic participation, was largely formed before the Industrial Revolution. Second, ethnic and racial diversity and discrimination continue to operate in the United States amid an ethos of universal citizenship and, with this, a vacillation between ethnic amnesia, on the one hand, and assertions of particular ethnic values, on the other. In other words, not only is there a continuous tension between the ideals of the melting pot and cultural pluralism, but also the way this tension is handled keeps changing. A third important feature of the United States is its decentralized system of government, which, combined with an increasingly national and international political economy, has generated new ambiguities in Americans' attitudes and conduct toward the state. Like and unlike other countries, this decentralization reflects and stimulates a continuing diversity of regional cultures. Finally, certain ubiquitous trends often take early and extreme forms in the United States, such as the extension of corporate power and the market; the narrowing of civic space; and the decline of class politics, which has characterized the late modern period.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America by Richard Harvey Brown Copyright © 2005 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents
1 Differences That Make a Difference: Some Exceptional Features of the United States....................12 A Peculiar Democracy: Race, Class, and Corporate Power in the United States....................36
3 Ideology After the Millennium: Problems of Legitimacy in American Society....................67
4 Social Movements, Politics, and Religion in a Postliberal Era....................113
5 The Dialectics of American Selfhood: Individualism and Identity in the United States....................142
6 Transformations of American Space and Time....................172
7 Genders and Generations: New Strains in the American Family....................205
8 The Postmodern Transformation of Art: From Production of Beauty to Consumption of Signs....................264
References....................299
Index....................343