More Grinching

Notwithstanding my recent post here, I want to avoid being that "stay off my grass" kind of guy. Nonetheless, I want to send folks to another downer of a piece: Corporate Capitalists Killed American Identity. How, one might wonder, can the free market and not, say, cultural Marxism or immigration, account for the ever-deracinated nature of what it means to be "American"? In The American Conservative David Mascriotra asserts that

All arguments about immigration aside, changing demographics did not transform the country into the planetary capital of asphalt and replace its rich terrain with the endless suburban sprawl of office complexes, strip malls, and parking lots. The reduction of the American character to a giant Walmart and the mutation of the American landscape, outside of metropolitan areas, to the same cloned big box stores and corporate chains is not a consequence of immigration.

Mascriotra expands on Cotton Mather's observation about the decline of Puritanism ("Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother"):

A culture of corporate capitalism demands conformity, and most people cooperate. But because its center is hollow, few people feel any sense of connection to each other, even as they parrot the same values. It is no wonder that most forms of rebellion in the United States are exhibitions of stylized individualism—inspiring theater and often enlivening to observe, but politically fruitless. Rather than a “marketplace of ideas,” the United States is a mere marketplace.

Ouch. 

That the ever expanding place of the market has contributed to the disintegration of natural and social bonds cannot plausibly be denied. So I've argued here, here, and here. Alternatively, take a look at my two-parter on Adeline Allen's excellent work on surrogacy contracts here and here. Or what I had to say about Margaret Radin's "contract degradation" here, here, and here.

But that the market is a useful tool of exchange and development is equally the case as I noted here and here. In other words, without a highly efficient, decentralized series of market exchanges, I doubt that I would enjoy the benefits of AC in Delhi in the coming weeks. And that, dear readers, would be a BAD state of affairs.

(Of course, no one said I had to come to India. If I'd stayed home and not participated in two 6+ hour flights with their attendant degradation of the ozone layer, and if I weren't able to stay in India surviving by dint of pollution-generating electricity powering my AC, then perhaps the world on balance would be a better place. Well, let's not go too far down that road. After all, even folks spending their entire lives in India can live them better by virtue of AC.)

While I appreciate a good curmudgeon as much as the next guy, any critique of corporate-consumer capitalism must also take its benefits into account. And, as I concluded in the my post noted above, only be creating a new social imaginary can we hope to reverse the relentless tide of reducing all of life to the marketplace.

In other words, Mascriotra overstates the case. The market alone can't explain what's happened to Americans (and America) over the past 150 years. There has long been a bent toward pragmatic consumerism in the hearts of Americans. And as for Walmart, who knows if it will long survive the collapse of big-box retail?

So, perhaps it would be better to say that Americans killed America while corporate capitalists ran away with the loot.