RE: gets promising here -

Posted on: January 18, 2020 at 12:05:57 CT

In saying this, I am to some extent agreeing with what has become a common complaint made by neoconservative writers and left-liberal pundits. They have said for years that the civic culture is no longer coherent and cohesive. They complain that the nation-state has lost its hold on the public imagination. They whine and wail about how we have all retreated into our suburbs and internet connections and no longer rally around grand national projects that inspire us with a vision of all that government can do.

Or to put it another way, they worry that the government has run out of good excuses for spending money, taxing us, regulating us, drafting our kids, and getting us embroiled in wars. For the neoconservative crowd, 9/11 really was a godsend, just as the Oklahoma bombing was a godsend to the left-liberals of the 1990s. They were equally adept at exploiting these horrible tragedies to the great advantage of the state, and to browbeat the rest of the population into going along with the political priorities of the regime in power. But in retrospect, it is clear that these events only represented a brief parenthesis in the long-run decline of the nation-state in our social consciousness.