Max Lerner

Americans have always turned inward, into an awareness of themselves as a people-their provenance, their image in history, their mission in the world. Lately this self-awareness has taken on overtones of a sense of being at the end of the tether, a mordant feeling of disintegration and decay. In the early Republic, American nationalist identity had a healthy, assertive braggadocio about it, which seems to be replaced by a Hamlet-like loss of self-confidence, with an apocalyptic sense of doom for the civilization. On the Right it embodies a conviction that the sensate culture is pushing the society down the Gaderene slope of drugs-and-fornication to destruction. On the Left there is the vague sense that America is imperialist, fascist-oriented, caught in inner contradictions of class and ethnic struggles which will end in self-destructive wars or civil chaos.