Brokenism
Tablet | Alena Newhouse
Forget Democrats and Republicans. Tablet Editor-in-Chief Alena Newhouse makes the convincing case that the dividing lines are between those who remain committed to existing institutions— education, arts, politics—and those who think our institutions are fundamentally broken and need to be rebuilt. “The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.”
“At its base,” she explains, “brokenism revolves around the idea that institutions and even whole societies can and do decay—sometimes in ways that are obvious, often in ways that are not.”
“Status-quoists [are] people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled…. [Whereas] brokenists [are] people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services…have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country.”
“Many of today’s brokenists…are not fringe fanatics lustily drawn to authoritarianism,” Newhouse explains. “Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, economist Jeffrey Sachs, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie—these people aren’t kooks; they have serious and well-argued concerns about how American society and its political and economic landscape are developing.”
In the end, Newshouse remains hopeful— “The ground is moving again. Everything bad comes from change, but so does everything good.”
