The Great American Malaise

An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literature share several features: reduced horizons and aspirations; conformism, institutionalism, and careerism; cronyism. Big systems ruled by greedy if useful idiots keep out dissent, or even mere difference. An elite degree, an elite network, and right-thinking are the ways forward and upward; eccentrics and originals need not apply.

A genealogy. To some degree, the rule of the institution and system over the individual is not new, it's the story of history itself; America was supposed to be the counterpoint, but there hasn't been a genuine counterculture here since the 1970s; the boomers killed their own movement, and their children internalized the pattern.

Optimism and imagination in American literature seem to have faded. The trajectory of living standards is no longer demonstrably upward, and expressions of genius have no social or political projects to harmonize with. Much of the American landscape has become a last resort for the American poet—either desecrated or inaccessible. In poisoned physical and digital spaces, the mind doesn't have time for grand projects: for epic poems or revolutions or long novels; clever people, rather--rather than pursue big, ennobling artistic and material projects--program algorithms to do rent-seeking tasks for them. Our cognitive elite do not write poems or treatises or legislation, do not design great private or public buildings, they make apps and websites and jargon... and perpetuate the cycle whereby our (and their) capacity to think and create is limited.

American literature's techniques, scope, and ideas are stuck because our lives are stuck... because nothing new has happened for thirty years except for the phone, and because the phone, in turn, reduces our collective ingenuity.

Emerson and Whitman wrote their best works in the decades and years before the Civil War, during a time when America was expanding, technology and science were advancing, abolitionism was gaining momentum and there was a palpable sense of (hard-won) progress. Figures like Melville, Emerson, and Whitman all shared in this capacious vision of America as a restless, daemonic organism—splitting, growing, and dreaming. Moby-Dick and Leaves of Grass are works of horizons and frontiers, of an expansive sense of the sublime, of joy and horror… and, most of all, of imaginative freedom.

Henry and William James wrote during the seething, but similarly sublime Gilded Age. The wild, post-war Jazz Age called forth Crane and Eliot, Toomer, Fitzgerald, Hurston, Hemingway, and Stevens. Lolita and Augie March are novels of the American Highways Act era. Each new frontier, each technological advance, each new era produced new literature. The 1960s and 70s – the beginning of the information age, the Xerox Age – gave us Roth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Morrison, Ashbery, McCarthy... The Internet clearly influenced the perspective of novelists like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, among others, in the 90s.

Despite the hideousness of the American empire, at home, there was a sense of growth, transformation, self-renewal, and originality that could redeem American life and suggest new pathways for it. There was always a sense of invention and play: of radical Whitmanian originality. There have been many new chapters added to Leaves of Grass, covertly, by other writers, as Whitman would have wanted.

Since 9/11, that energy has been subject to great entropy. Now, and this wouldn't have been true thirty years ago, there's no real American equivalent, for instance, to the career of Jon Fosse or Annie Ernaux. Eccentrics don't get to build careers, don't get to write books, until the broader public notices. The publishing world, with its immense resources relative to small publishers, cannibalizes and displaces anything that's too radical or weird. The literary publication system doesn't want to call its own bullshit–doesn't want readers, or rather, book buyers, to know there's an 'outside.'

There is where the parallelism with politics is clearest: parties and bureaucracies are so big and dominant, and corporate incentive structures are so deeply embedded within legislative bodies, that originals, eccentrics, path breakers, paradigm shifters can't get too close to power… And if they are, they're purged or canceled or killed.

In a democracy, a real, functioning democracy, you actually can sift for a man like Abraham Lincoln in a time of crisis; now we can only hope some rebel elite, like Trump or RFK or even Elon, (ostensibly) take the side of ordinary people; but there's no real bottom-up process for finding great orators and movers of men—not at the moment. The farmer or trucker or stay-at-home mom lack meaningful civic arenas outside of Facebook and X; the parties don't want unpolished members of the demos.

We simply don't find persons of talent–political geniuses–rising unaided and unabated by party machinery or corporate money to positions where they can creatively rethink how policy and the art of enacting policy, which is politics, can spur people to new forms of civic imagination. Even the most talented politician of the 2000s, Barack Obama, is very clearly a product of the Ivy League/Democratic machine.

A thesis. This correlation—between political and literary demoralization—might be spurious, but I am willing to speculate that a reversal of our political fortunes–via the transformation of the bureaucratic administration and defunct legislature back into a constitutional republic–would energize American letters. A leaner, and yet more democratic, and energetic civic infrastructure would be a more interesting place to live, and therefore, to think and write. Similarly, a wilder, riskier, culture of letters would stimulate the rhetoric and practice of politics.

An ideal. Institutions are supposed to harness and heighten human nature. They're supposed to notice genius and employ and encourage it. During a renaissance, at least, this is what institutions do: acknowledge that they’re empty shells without imagination and romance; open their doors to geniuses; let the most imaginative among us have a say.

Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.