Gone to Look for America: Where / What is the United States? PART TWO
CONTINUING FROM PART ONE
Diluted Representation.
The present crisis of representation is aggravated by diluted representation: as the population of the U.S. increases each Representative in Congress supposedly “represents” more and more people. Our government is caught in a whipsaw effect: while the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote falls to a dismal level, the population base in a congressional district continues to increase. The individual Representative owes his seat to a small fraction of an ever-increasing population. Again, number is an unsolvable problem for our “democracy.”
As laid out in Article One of the Constitution,
“The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.”
The first decennial census of 1790 revealed an under-allotment of seats: in the 1st Congress of 1789-1791 the 65 Representatives specified above were divided among a population of approximately 3 million, or one seat for every 46,000 citizens. That error was corrected in the 3rd Congress of 1793-1795 by a sizeable increase in the number of House seats to 105. Since then the number of seats has increased over time until the present total of 435 was reached in the 63rd Congress of 1913-1915. It was a formula for a representative government; as the population increased so did the number of House seats. But there was a problem. The 1910 census used to assign seats recorded a national population of 92.4 million, which meant that each member of the House “represented” 212,400 people – seven times the 30,000 figure deemed appropriate by the Founders. Since then things have become drastically more skewed. Population has increased to 334 million in a little over a century, more than triple the figure for 1910 (360% to be precise). House membership, however, has been allowed to stand at 435 members. The average congressional district now contains 761,000 people. Think about it:
In a population now highly polarized along every meaningful dimension – race, ethnicity, income, sex, gender, ideology – a citizen is now made to choose a single individual who will secure his place in society, who will, as the slogan goes, protect and serve him. It is an impossible choice, and that is why the majority of eligible voters choose the only rational course of action – they simply don’t vote. Things might be less drastic were we to feel that on the whole our Representatives are well-intentioned individuals who try to ameliorate the real problems we all face. But just the opposite is the case: we mostly regard them with indifference or contempt.
https://history.house.gov/Institution/Party-Divisions/Party-Divisions/
http://demographia.com/db-uspop1900.htm
One might object to this bleak assessment and claim that every government that maintains at least the semblance of democracy experiences a similar imbalance between a growing population and a limited number of seats in the legislature. Only the least populous nations could achieve anything close to the ratio of a single representative for every 30,000 people as envisioned by the Founders; on a planet of 8 billion representation is inevitably diluted. It is true that none of the most populous nations come close to that 30,000 to 1 ratio, but they come much closer than the U.S. Of the 20 largest nations with elected bicameral legislatures, the median number of representatives in the lower chamber is one seat per 298,000 people – less than half that of the U.S. with its 761,000 per congressional district. Only India with its 1.2 billion people has a more extreme imbalance. Even disregarding our dismal voter turnout, ours is the furthest thing from a representative democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_number_of_members
Place
Where/What is the United States? As presented here, the foundational myth or super-meme “America” is no more a place, a physical location than other cultural constructs such as “the West,” “the Third World,” or, for that matter, any “nation” such as Canada, China or Russia. It is an idea to conjure with, to invest with meaning according to any number of diverse and conflicting agendas. But what of that seemingly more concrete notion, the United States, a geographical entity with boundaries (such as they are), a nation with a Constitution, government, laws, and elections?
As with the issue of number, place is a crippling disparity in our system of government present since the nation’s beginnings. That disparity issues from the Founders creating the structure of a federal government by counting heads without regard for the relationship those abstracted heads had with actual places, i.e., the newly minted states. Population was everything; land or place did not matter. Thus the interests of Virginia with 10 Representatives and Pennsylvania and Massachusetts with 8 Representatives each dominated those of the other states. With the passage of time that gulf has only widened. If the greatest disparity of representation among the former colonies was 10 to 1 (Virginia with 10 vs. Rhode Island and Delaware with 1 apiece), today California’s 52 Representatives render irrelevant the solitary votes of Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Delaware. The disparity of place has reached such an extreme that New York’s 13th Congressional District comprised of 10 square miles of Upper Manhattan and parts of the West Bronx has the same Congressional presence as the entire state of Alaska with its 665,400 square miles.
Why should number take priority over place? And why should that priority take such an extreme form? These are valid questions for any American to ask since the most critical moment in our history was precipitated by a demand for sovereignty, for the right to proclaim a boundary between an oppressed group and a foreign oppressor. The Revolutionary War was waged to carve out a place to live a particular sort of existence, to establish a land of our own. It is simply impossible to quantify that motivation by doing a head count. It is a fundamental of human existence that every individual requires a home, a place where he belongs. And every human group whose members recognize themselves as a community requires a homeland, a Heimat, a patrie. Those concepts are much more than the delineation of a boundary, of lines drawn on a map. They signify a deep sense of belonging, of identity inseparable from a given physical territory. The institution of private property is based on that sense and in turn reinforces it. In fact, ones bond with a land supersedes whatever political arrangements are put in place to govern or control the individual inhabitant. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, one of the first official acts of Congress was to pass the Homeland Security Act, which “was the largest U.S. government reorganization in the 50 years since the United States Department of Defense was created.” Homeland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Homeland_Security
The disparity between number and place in American society is increasingly a source of political conflict. Ours is a deeply divided, highly partisan populace where reasoned debate and civil attention to others have succumbed to what Jonathan Turley calls an “age of rage.” Public life is disturbingly like that of the Iatmul of New Guinea, who Gregory Bateson described as governed by an ever-increasing divisiveness. Iatmul society manifested social disorganization at its core. Rather than the kumbaya of shared experience, Bateson identified an exactly contrary principle that he labeled schismogenesis: individuals become progressively estranged from each other by reacting to increasingly stereotyped perceptions of their behavior until they are consumed by jealousy, fear, hatred, and a blinding pride.
“I would define schismogenesis as a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals.” (Naven, p. 175)
“If, however, a [behavioral] pattern, when once adopted, becomes more and more emphasized by schismogenesis, it is likely that the personalities of the individuals involved will undergo some sort of distortion with over-specialisation in some one direction, whether it be exhibitionism, fostering, assertion, submission or what not. With this distortion some degree of discomfort will be introduced into the relationship, and it may even happen, though this requires verification, that the individuals in trying to find again the answer which was formerly satisfactory, actually specialize even further in their respective roles.
Sooner or later, the distortion of the personalities is likely to be accompanied by three effects: (a) a hostility in which each party resents the other as the cause of its own distortion, (b) at least in complementary schismogenesis, an increasing inability to understand the emotional reactions of the other party, and (c) mutual jealousy.
At a comparative late stage in the schismogenesis, when the personalities of the members of the two groups have definitely begun to suffer from distortion, it is probably usual to find a development of mutual envy. The distortion is a progressive specialization in certain directions and results in a corresponding under-development of other sides of the personality. Thus the members of each group see the stunted parts of their own affective life fully developed – indeed over-developed – in the members of the opposite group. It is in such situations that mutual envy arises. Not only do the serfs envy the aristocrats, but the latter develop a distaste for their own ethos and begin to crave the simple life.” (Naven, pages 187-188)
— Naven. Gregory Bateson. 1936, 1958.
Some of the labels we assign the paired opposites in an American schismogenesis are Democrat / Republican, left / right, liberal / conservative. These divisions are so compelling because they pit number against place as the basis for governance: a majority of Democrats live in restricted areas of high population – the coasts or scattered metropolitan areas of the interior – while most Republicans are spread across a vast heartland. In popular culture these political / cultural differences are sometimes flagged as East Coast and Left Coast, separated by what the comedian Wanda Sykes dismissively calls “all that middle stuff between New York and LA.” A map of the United States showing divisions by congressional districts and election results (blue for Democrats, red for Republicans) from the 2022 midterms says it all:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/house-results
What is the United States? The answer follows on where is the United States.
America, This Land
“This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the Staten New York Island,
From the Redwood Forest, to the Gulf stream waters,
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
And saw above me that endless skyway,
And saw below me the golden valley, I said:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
I roamed and rambled, and followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts,
And all around me, a voice was sounding:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property,
But on the back side it didn't say nothing —
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling;
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting:
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people —
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.
[This land was made for you and me.]”
— This Land Is Your Land. Woody Guthrie, 1940
(Original lyrics, not the mongrelized version sung by Jennifer Lopez at Biden’s inauguration)
The foundational myth of America, like Whitman, contains multitudes.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
— Song of Myself (51). Walt Whitman
Today internal divisions in American society are many and acrimonious. Race, ethnicity, class, sex, gender, age and even ability trace schismogenic fissures that, as with the Iatmul, provoke hatred and violence. However, in this fractious mess it is possible to discern two underlying principles that incorporate the divisiveness of those multitudes. In a debate infested with labels it is difficult to provide more names here; perhaps it is best to dip into a long-lost past of scholarship and call them, following Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The concepts reference modes of belonging to a community. Humans are inherently social, but how are their social bonds constituted? How is it that the individual adult human, an autonomous organism capable of functioning in an environment on its own, comes to be inseparably tied to social arrangements at a variety of levels – family, kindred, neighborhood, political entity? What, and this is the most fundamental question in social thought, is the relationship between the Individual and the State? From the perspective of Gemeinschaft that relationship is a visceral, emotional attachment; metaphors of blood and autochthonous origin figure prominently in articulating social identity. The community is a kind of super-organism, a physical thing that issues from the land itself and that invests an individual life with meaning. In contrast, Gesellschaft is a head rather than heart thing; the individual conceives his relationship to a group as a rational arrangement designed to protect and promote his well-being. Rather than one-on-one emotional ties, the glue that unites people is a more or less elaborate set of rules that specify proper and improper behavior. As Weber described it the best example of this kind of social arrangement is the legal contract.
The United States considered as a nation with boundaries and an elected government is a Gesellschaft, one that has grown immensely in size and complexity since the founding of the country. That transformation, however, has not made the contemporary U.S. a model of Weberian rationality. Far from it; although firmly established our political institutions are not widely embraced. As discussed earlier, most of us regard our Congressional “representatives” with indifference or contempt – a pervasive attitude that is manifest in the dismal turnout at elections. At present there are some four million federal employees, whose authority is secured by a standing army of about one million. Those millions of bureaucrats administer and enforce a crushing burden of some 90,000 federal regulations and laws. Regardless of what you’re doing, you’re never beyond the administrative reach of a maze of laws and regulations. We may live within a Gesellschaft but we are not entirely or even primarily gesellschaftlich. It is one polarity of an American schismogenesis.
The other polarity of our schismogenesis is gemeinschaftlich: while recognizing the overwhelming power of the federal State we nourish the belief that the individual American truly belongs to smaller and inherently compelling social units. Our distrust of Congress and all things federal is manifest in two ways: first by turning away from those oppressive institutions and second by embracing with real emotion a popular culture that celebrates the rejection of authority. Consider our contemporary heroes: they are individuals who are dramatic figures caught up in the struggle of family and community against the impersonal forces of government and capital. Often they are akin to shape shifters: liminal characters whose exploits chart the convoluted boundary between fundamental categories of being (human vs. animal in traditional myth, big government and corporations vs. the powerful ties of family and kinship today). In our most popular cultural productions – the modern myths of an American Dreamtime – they are rogue agents, maverick cops, alienated gun fighters. If they are part of an institution they flaunt its rules, challenge its authority.
A poignant example here is the political vs. popular cultural role of the FBI in 21st century America. [I develop an aspect of this topic in some detail in “Truth or Prison? The FBI as a State Secret Police” on academia.edu.] Since its inception in 1935 under the controversial J. Edgar Hoover, the agency has transitioned from a band of swashbuckling agents chasing bank robbers and bootleggers across the Midwest to yet another intrusive federal bureaucracy of tens of thousands headed by a few scheming apparatchiks (James Comey, Peter Strzok, Andrew McCabe). The agency’s political bias coupled with its fearsome power – merely lying to the FBI is a felony punishable by prison and a ruinous fine – have made it the exemplar of everything the public hates about Washington D.C., that city of lawyers and lawyers-cum-politicians. In stark contrast to the negative sentiment directed at the actual federal agency is the immense popularity of a media classic featuring a fictional FBI: The X-Files. Fox Mulder (“Spooky Mulder”) is an outstanding example of the modern shape shifter who operates within an authoritarian institution to expose and combat its oppressive goals. Pursuing his quest to document visits by extraterrestrials, Mulder uncovers a monstrous plot by a shadow government including FBI heads to install a race of alien-human hybrids that will reduce Earth’s human population to a state of slavery. The arch-villain of the series – a figure you truly love to hate – is the Cigarette Man, a chain-smoking sickly-looking bureaucrat who works tirelessly to frustrate Mulder’s investigations. The television series of The X-Files ran intermittently for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2018 and along the way inspired two films, The X-Files (1998) and The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008). It is the longest-running science fiction series in the history of television.
The show’s gemeinschaftlich appeal consists in much more than its anti-authoritarian message. Mulder’s fixation on extraterrestrials stems from a traumatic event when, at the age of twelve, his sister was abducted from their family home by aliens (accompanied by the signature bright lights and stoppage of time). As he unravels the conspiracy in subsequent episodes it appears that the mysterious death of his father was caused by elements of the government in league with the aliens. Mulder’s struggle to find his sister and restore his father’s reputation represents a sorely under-appreciated element of our cultural productions, of the myths of our Dreamtime: allegiance to that ultimate form of Gemeinschaft, the family drives our deep interest in them and our identification with their protagonists.
Look closely at the story lines of our most popular science fiction, spy, and detective-police dramas. Beneath the obvious theme of kiss-kiss, bang-bang explored by Pauline Kael (please let’s not call it a “subtext”) is the hero’s struggle to preserve or reconstitute his family. The kernel of the serpentine plots of the Star Wars franchise is Luke Skywalker’s quest to find his father and lost family. Similarly in E.T. the lovable little alien becomes a surrogate father and friend for Elliot, who yearns for a return to the suburban California household destroyed when his father abandoned the family. Even Jaws, a seemingly guy’s adventure movie par excellence is held together by Chief Brody’s mission to protect his family from the intrusive, marauding force of nature represented by the Great White. Moving on from science fiction, the everyday world portrayed in leading spy and detective-police series finds colorful individuals pitted against grey and mirthless characters who, in series after series, are that nemesis of American life: the FBI. In Burn Notice, for example, the charismatic rogue spy Michael Westen is surveilled by a pair of FBI agents whose oafish behavior makes them more clowns than villains and recalls a jest from the antiwar movement of old: demonstrators spotting Hoover’s goons tailing them would heckle the “two suits in a Seville.”
At the other extreme, most treatments of the FBI and institutional authority generally elicit our anger and disgust. A stock character who appears in multiple occasions in real life as well as the reel life of TV drama is the confidential informant, a sleaze whom agents coerce to entrap individuals who have challenged authority. The agents themselves are often guilty of far worse than political bias. These men in black are frequently complicit in murder, as in the acclaimed Bosch series in which an FBI official is responsible for the assassination of Bosch’s wife. Or, an alarming fact that somehow never receives prolonged media attention, agents are themselves murderers. Which names do you recognize without benefit of Google: Fred Hampton, Vicki Weaver, LaVoy Finicum, or the seventy-six – including many women and children – Branch Davidians burned alive?
These cinematic and television sagas of the American Dreamtime renounce the rot we perceive at the heart of our political institutions; while our “representatives” busy themselves with handing out contempt of Congress rulings, we nourish an abiding contempt for Congress and all it stands for. The Gesellschaft of Washington D.C. is a world of scheming bureaucrats cut off from a Gemeinschaft most of us inhabit, where family, community, and land are far more important than impersonal agencies that dispense pay-as-you-go justice in an intangible global world order.
Today nowhere is this vision of America more forcefully projected than in the runaway TV franchise Yellowstone. To date the Yellowstone series itself together with its prequels 1883 and 1923 (with more spinoffs to come) chronicle the history of the Dutton ranching family from their settling in a Montana valley after a long and devastating journey by wagon train. Following that, 1923 chronicles the lives of the next generation of the family as they struggle to hold onto their ranch through the challenges of a range war, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. Yellowstone takes the Duttons into today’s world, where its patriarch John Dutton contends with a host of threats: rapacious developers who want his land to build condos and malls; bureaucrats who seek to impose crippling regulations; environmentalists who protest his treatment of cattle; Indian leaders angling for a casino resort complex; and Montana politicians on the grift. Through these ongoing struggles John Dutton manages in part to turn the table on the interlopers by entering the political fray himself and being elected governor of the state. The series thus provides an intense dramatic focus to the political and cultural divides that rend our lives: the urban East vs. the rural West; the paper-shuffling of pasty office workers vs. hands-on work epitomized by rugged cowboys; gender fluidity vs. compelling male and female roles (Rip Wheeler and Beth Dutton); sheltered environmentalists vs. knocked-around pragmatists who exploit resources to survive; a distanced federal government backed by the strong arm of the FBI vs. state and local officials who grapple with the everyday concerns of their constituents. In sum, Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft, the United States vs. America.
Set against the formidable power of the feds is the incredible popularity of Yellowstone, which has burst on its American audience like an exploding star.
“The finale [of Yellowstone] was also the #1 most social show on Sunday as well as the #1 most social telecast ever for the series, surpassing the Season 3 finale by 115%. The season ranks as the #1 most social cable drama during its run. Yellowstone was also the #1 series of 2021 across broadcast, cable, and premium among adults 18-49 and 25-54.
“Yellowstone continues to shatter records with more than 11 million viewers tuning into the season finale, proving we’ve hit a cultural nerve — from the center of the country to each of the coasts — and still have lots of room to grow on linear,” Chris McCarthy, President and CEO, Viacom CBS Media Networks, said in a statement. “Our strategy to franchise Yellowstone into a universe of series to fuel growth for Paramount+ is already exceeding expectations with 1883 and Mayor of Kingstown proving to be two of the top titles.”
— “‘Yellowstone’ Continues to Be a Ratings Hit with Season 4 Finale.” Meredith Jacobs, tvinsider. January 5, 2022.
“The latest season of Yellowstone was the most-watched show on television last year besides NFL football. [Taylor Sheridan] helped Paramount’s new streaming service, Paramount+, gain millions of new subscribers with multiple spin-offs of Yellowstone. A prequel, 1883, came out late last year, and will soon be followed by two more: 1923, which will launch in December, as well as Bass Reeves, which is slated for next year. Another Yellowstone spin-off is also due to premiere next year—6666, set at the legendary Four Sixes Ranch.”
— “How Taylor Sheridan Created America’s Most Popular TV Show: Inside Paramount’s Yellowstone Juggernaut.” Sridhar Pappu. The Atlantic, December 2022.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/12/yellowstone-tv-series-taylor-sheridan/671897/
The Yellowstone series and the long tradition of anti-authoritarian movies and TV shows underscore the schism – the schismogenesis – at the heart of our society. In their roles as donors and lobbyists, David Graeber’s 1% spend billions to influence / buy votes that result in pathetic turnouts – elections which in turn install candidates who are at best mediocrities. At the same time, the remaining 99% -- us – willingly pay billions to experience popular cultural productions we find fulfilling, gratifying, constitutive of who we imagine ourselves to be at the deepest level of being. The Weberian ideal type of one of our polarities – the gesellschaftlich, seemingly rational individual – is personified by the lawyer-politician (those roles were already merged when the Declaration of Independence was written). That insipid character is responsible for the language of contracts, laws, and regulations, making them longer and longer to create ever more fertile ground for his adversarial and mercenary behavior. He does not realize – or pretends not to realize – that no amount of verbiage can adequately describe much less evaluate human action. Even when it aspires to clarity, language is entirely circumstantial, a gesture drawing of an incredibly rich tapestry of meaning. Have no lawyers read Wittgenstein? John Dutton represents the gemeinschaftlich polarity of our impossible national identity; for him a connection to family and land is primal, not mediated by the legal trappings of coercive institutions. He sets out his own Declaration in his inaugural address as governor of Montana.
“Good afternoon.
Freedom. Been thinking a lot about that lately.
The word, what it means.
The dictionary thinks that it means "The power or right to think, speak, or act as one wants without hindrance or restraint."
As Governor of this State, I am sworn to protect that right.
Building a city in the middle of our most pristine wilderness strips you of that freedom.
It eliminates your freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water.
It strains the ability of our schools, our hospitals and our police.
That requires an increase in our taxes which in turn strains our families, forcing you to decide if you can even afford to live in a place that you call home.
That's not progress in my mind. That's an invasion.
And the invasion is over.”
— Speech by John Dutton, governor of Montana, Yellowstone, Season 5 Episode 2
https://tvshowtranscripts.ourboard.org/viewtopic.php?f=1103&t=57950
A message heard and taken to heart by millions. Millions who do not vote or who watch their votes count for nothing. Millions who in the unrelenting confusion that is life have forgotten the platitudes of a grade school civics class.
The United States, a government. America, this land. Again, land eclipses number as the decisive element of our social being. If you grow up in a city or suburb, go on to live in a six hundred square foot apartment on the twelfth story of a city high rise and travel by bus or subway to an office cubicle on the twentieth floor of another high rise, your contact with anything resembling the Earth is a weekend stroll in a park or another bus or subway ride to the tailored greenery of a ballpark. If you grow up on a small farm anywhere in that “middle stuff” derided by Wanda Sykes, you and your family engage every day with the land, its crops and animal life. The office worker puts in his thirty-six hours and receives a regular paycheck with benefits and a retirement plan; the farmer labors long days and hopes forces beyond his control will bring forth a crop or healthy stock to sustain his family. These stark realities are fleshed out in the personages of Washington D.C. apparatchiks and cinematic heroes, in figures like Michael Clapper (former Director of National Intelligence, perjurer, cable news commentator) and John Dutton.
Like latter-day Iatmul, our lives play out in a schismogenic spiral that if it continues can only lead to madness and devastation.