How our culture is not democratic, but something else

American society has democratic aspirations that are realized in various cultural trends and informal social practices but little evident at all in our institutional life, which is merely liberal, and neither very rational nor very just. Largely Protestant Christian, it relegates justice to law and punishment and rationality to the proper concerns of certain professionals with their expertise, whose business it is to concern themselves with ideas of rationality that largely reduce to technique (sometimes mistaken for science, as in medicine), the pursuit of interest that is a mere extension and tool of business (as in law), and accumulation of knowledge (which assimilates science to journalism, which appropriates and sells more than it queries and investigates), as in academia, or of entertainment (to which art is reduced, rendering it apolitical in the interest of sales, a kind of highbrow pornography whose purpose is to provide the consumer, who in a mirror projection of the company boss is always right, with that ultimate good that is 'pleasure'). Justice is replaced by self-interest, reason with technique, democracy with liberty. Fraternity only exists in tribal communities and voluntary associations, like social clubs and churches, which mainly differ in that the latter are non-profit companies of like-minded persons who share a point of view organized coherently by the organization's mission. This society is irrational. I have come to recognize that almost no one treats anyone else fairly. That friendship and family are the only exception to this makes sense to the extent that Margaret Thatcher is right and society itself does not exist. Nationalism does, but mainly in evocations of war, and otherwise on behalf of politicians who lobby voters for allegiance and an enthusiasm that displace the citizen's concern onto something little different from the payments they get from the company and issue-based organizations that support them. The society prides itself on its legacy as a kind of democracy, but whose only real is freedom. The evidence that you cannot expect to be treated fairly is that you will only seem ridiculous if you do. The society's values are Christian in the worst sense. As an identity group, rather than some kind of cultural tendency that is indistinguishable from the broader secular culture of the modern Western world, the Jews are now another interest group. They always agree in the end only on defense of their own interests and its grand signifier, America's 51st state, which is central to our own patriotism because of the politics of fossil fuels and the fact that the United States in the present world order can only oppose internationally those forces that are bound to oppose it, like Russia, and Iran and parts of the Arab world, which desperately would contest the hegemony of the US and its principle allies, whose capitalism is now in crisis without a clear alternative. In some ways more rational, being a managed, bureaucratic society, China is of course equally undemocratic and less liberal. I sense that American society and its capitalism are in crisis without, globally, attractive alternatives. Our liberalism has the curious effect of promoting a disenchantment that depends on values that somehow are advertised without being much in evidence.