Toward the Recovery of American Culture

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Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.
 —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
As a cultural subject in, and by extension of, hypermodern America, you cannot believe in Rousseau’s return to nature, or Winckelmann’s return to the ancients, or the late Romantic insistence on the imaginative power of the poet. The closest you’ll get to the sacred is liking pictures of cathedrals on X, and the only way you’ll approach the infinite is through the secularized infinity of the scroll. Whenever you consume content, which is daily, if not constantly, you displace, and disgrace, the traces of the classics you came into contact with during the course of your education. Content is a weed that takes up your garden, and chokes out the fat vines upon which the soul had planned to feed.
In this Baudrillardian America—which articulates itself, creates itself, remembers itself largely on the screen—you can only sustain your sense of vocation through constant, even exhausting ironizing.
There are no songs of the self to sing; lyricism doesn’t stick to the brain smoothed out by internet discourse; the American sublime—both as a cultural memory and aspiration—is dying out with your generation; you feel like you are blowing oxygen on the last ember produced by a tribe that has forgotten how fire is made.
You’ve grown up during a long, evolving state of emergency, and the only miracles available to you are moments when that state of emergency is temporarily suspended, or when it feels like it’s suspended. From 9/11 to Iraq-Afghanistan, the financial crisis, climate controversy, the Trump fascism scare, Covid, the culture wars, and AI, you’ve seen it all; you’re convinced that everything is always breaking down in one way or another (and you can’t even be sure if things are worse or better than they’re supposed to be).
You’ve never written a letter; you’ve never memorized anything you’ve enjoyed reading. You’re sort of perpetually new each day—permanently new, permanently naïve, even while you hungrily try to acquire important ideas and insights. Your social network is always online in spirit, never truly leaving the digital world.
As both a participant and producer in the crude, memetic simulacrum that passes for cultural discourse, you’re stuck in a never-ending present, dependent on the grid—on many grids (material and electronic). You don’t know how to mend or make things. You don’t have much instinct for parenting or commitment; years and then decades go by with little by way of the milestones that marked the passage of a good life in previous generations. You would say that you hate yourself—but that would be too unironic, too literal, too unadorned. Whether you toil in finance, politics, nonprofits, media, or academia, a sense of purpose eludes you; there are neither traditions to ground your daily life nor a future to orient your dreams. You don’t know how much longer you can go on like this—as a mildly educated person of no special distinction in a decaying empire—but you imagine that it could be for the rest of your life.

Culture after the Fall

This fable or satire—of the spiritually strip-mined information laborer who perhaps still holds onto the romantic notion that they are an important artist or intellectual, while living vicariously through a digital avatar—is an attempt to capture what it’s like to have entered the American culture-sphere in its present state of fragmentation and thrash. It is a status quo that can plausibly be blamed on any number of social or technological culprits, from the oft-used bugbears of neoliberal capitalism and cultural Marxism to the internet itself, as the facilitating medium that gives meaning to these polemical categories. It is not enough, however, just to have some vague notion that everything has gone terribly wrong. As in the dysfunctional realms of statecraft or economics, there are manifold problems in American culture today that need to be defined in more precise terms before a proper diagnosis can be made, and then only can prescriptions be issued. For at the end of the day, there can be no way out of the national malaise without taking into account the cultural and artistic dimensions of our shared life, which alone can ennoble, clarify, synthesize, and sustain all other efforts at American renewal.
After all, we remember previous eras as unities in which the myriad of political, moral, and material forces that made up American life—however violently opposed or contradictory they may have been in fact—nonetheless cohered into something larger and more transcendent than their individual parts: there was, in other words, a culture that focused and embodied the Geist which prevailed at each stage in our history. This Geist may be discerned in individual works of art: in novels like Brother Jonathan, The Deerslayer, Moby-Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Blood Meridian; the paintings of Edward Hicks, Winslow Homer, and Norman Rockwell; or the verses of Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, and Hughes; or in broader phenomena like the Jazz Age, the golden eras of Hollywood and Broadway, rock and roll, the counterculture, New Hollywood, hip-hop, etc. More than acts of legislation or feats of military glory, it is to these touchstones that we turn in order to get a sense of what it meant to be an American at a particular time or, indeed, across all times.
One fears, however, that this time is fundamentally different insofar as many of the cognitive prerequisites that enable the formation of culture itself, of any culture, have broken down. It is a pervasive and yet inexplicable feeling: the sense that Americans are drowning in a sea of images and stimulation, but are nonetheless bereft of meaning, both individual and collective. If it is not too grandiose or vain a question to ask: how then might we begin to recover what has been lost? To that end, a number of theses on the state of American culture may be put forward:
(1) Our default assumption is that newer, faster, extra is better — that we should want more content, more stuff, more "connection" (to other people). Quality has been conflated with quantity, speed with purpose. As a result, we’re poisoned.
(2) We’re addicted to information-dispensation machines. We hun­grily open our apps without knowing why— just because. Cognitively, spiritually, Americans are fat but malnourished, obese but dying of hunger; we have more information than we could possibly need (that would have disgusted and overwhelmed our ancestors—probably driven them to suicide in minutes), and yet we ask for more and more and produce more and more.
(3) American culture, as such, has no recoverable sense of itself except for the scope of its chatter about itself; the function of endless, addictive content seems to be to prop up the psyches of Americans who are otherwise beset with anxieties about real and imagined material crises. America doesn’t have art, doesn’t have literature, doesn’t have theater, doesn’t have film; it has technology and media conglomerates; it has systems instead of artists.
(4) We assume that the surplus of content must have some hidden meaning, that the surplus, the plenty is a sign of divine favor. American culture remains legitimate to itself only insofar as it denies itself self-consciousness; there’s nothing hidden, no divine interior, no secret ferment. We call American culture the play of shadows in the back of the cave. This is not to say that great art is not being made or cannot be made in America, but it is to say that great art automatically is disqualified from the cultural conversation because its presence unsettles this repressed cultural psyche, which must believe it has meaning, purpose, and validity.
(5) Aggregation and digital homogenization have the effect of draw­ing up banality from any mode of speech, system of ideas, style of discourse. When everybody starts talking the same way, that way of talking becomes sickeningly sweet, pure corn syrup, poison. Some of the more obvious examples of that are the language of academic theory, in therapy-speak, astrology-speak, and more, a certain vernacular.
This could be a new kind of decadence, a technocratic decadence which has all of the flaws of the other decadences —like fin-de-siècle Europe — but none of the charms. Nothing matters in the sense that there are no consequences, no impacts that shake people out of their semi-pleasant, semi-awful stupor; the only consequence would be a disruption of the info-stream, but that isn’t happening anytime soon. Entertainment is how we ameliorate the suffering produced by our denaturalized, uprooted mode of life. We have no interest in being edified or challenged or stirred by art.
(6) The boundaries that once structured our understanding of culture have all but collapsed. Indeed, "mainstream" is an insufficient concept for what American culture is, since there is no corporate art or rebel art; the old distinctions don’t really make sense anymore. Whether produced by an individual or a studio system, culture is all algorithmic: formed by the same pressures, same laws, same incentives. The "indie" or subversive element has become indistinguishable, in spirit, from the establishment it seeks to subvert
(7) Since the mainstream is dead, a new category should be conceived to take its place. We may call it "samestream culture": it is a place where there are no distinctions between high and low, good and bad, where the format (the phone) molds everything into the same experience. This universal mode of consumption, a new national pastime, has also re­placed church and union as American’s preferred mass membership organization; the celebration of samestream culture (the proliferation of banal fandoms around media franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe) has become like a secular religion, complete with rituals of transcendence, the transubstantiation of obvious badness into goodness. The poptimist is a priest, convincing us that this is completely reasonable, fated, historically irresistible, that nothing else could be or should be imagined.
(8) As a consequence of this samestream culture and its values, creative work is judged by the quality of its marketing campaign, not its form and content. Creativity has purely commercial ends; commerce has artistic pretensions; no one has the integrity to draw boundaries any­where. The endless self-sampling of samestream is essentially rootless, disembodied, and destined for irrelevance. Detached from the daily practice of memorization (interiorization), conversation, letter-writing, reflection, and (silent) revery, samestream culture remains matter with­out mass, light without luminosity: a cultural conversation which renders no change, no perspicacity, no wisdom. Culture does not, or should not, simply mirror the gross national product of cultural com­merce. It should be more than chatter about itself.
If this, then, is the condition of American culture—and it is ubiquitous—where or how does one begin to resist it? Are there any spaces left to imagine and implement alternatives? Of course, there are people who believe they are exempt from the samestream, protected by their own good taste; the kinds of people who still subscribe to print magazines (like this one), and could give you a nice, year-end list of the books they’ve read and films they’ve seen. There are still "copes"—still modes and means of denial available to the cultural aspirant who wishes to be protected from their own intellectual insecurities.
So, what does one say to the upper-middle-class urbanite who hides behind their prestigious degrees, ensconced in whatever social networks recommended by their "mentors"? What, if anything, can be said to the samestream consumer who believes they are actually a member of the cultural elite—and that there is an elite to belong to? Should they be let down easy or be made to confront the unpleasant truth: that they don’t know about art at all, only about whatever ideology their university of choice promotes; that whatever culture they’ve acquired is a mask for their underlying training and passion, which is pulling bureaucratic levers?
In short, does one tell the average university-educated consumer of art, of culture (the self-satisfied young PMC striver, whether of the Left, Center, or Right variety) that they do not, in fact, love beauty, or know how to recognize it—and that their preferred partisan starting points, whether reactionary or progressive, are actually symptoms of spiritual impoverishment? Should they be alerted to the possibility that, in spite of their arts and humanities degrees, they remain deeply uncomfortable with mystery, with complexity, with tragedy, and that their education serves mainly to numb the feeling associated with "the pain of birth," in Schopenhauer’s words? That their culture is just a little ideological space heater in the corner of a cold room?

Rootless Nostalgia

Culture is a membrane through which our thoughts can be translated. Something that allows specific kinds of complex communication, through a specific kind of form and operation. This is the meaning of McLuhan’s famous adage that "the medium is the message." We can communicate certain things through TV, so only those certain things get communicated. A society that reads classics and writes letters is going to think differently than one that trades memes on Instagram. Societies in which nobody reads are going to have reduced means of communicating; the sound of thought will lack ether to pass through.
A high-culture simulacrum isn’t a high culture. "Trad" aesthetics, therefore, won’t fix anything, won’t produce an American renaissance. Neoclassical buildings and bodybuilders—the fetishes of the reactionary X.com crowd—reflect a hollow, ahistorical vision of human excel­lence. The circulation of semiotic tokens of classicism doesn’t purchase a living culture and cannot, in turn, commission real geniuses to commence real artistic work. Internet-inspired neo-neoclassi­cism has no organic relationship, no spiritual relationship to actual creation. It has no isomorphic relationship to actual networks of artists and patrons.
What such would-be reactionaries fail to grasp is that neoclassicism, by and large, has always been a misunderstanding. The Italian Renaissance, while connected to a revival of classical learning, was also ultramodern, representing a synergy of old models with a new spirit of proto-scientific investigation and invention. The Italian renaissance had Roman ruins to study and to copy, and classical texts were being disseminated widely and rapidly, but a new spirit, a new ethos, was responsible for transcending and transforming those models; the an­cients were a starting point, not an ending.
The classical past was only available in fragments, and early modern European artists of the renaissance, in a very literal sense, had to fill in the blanks, invent, imagine. They were doing more than recreating or reacting: they were creating anew, fusing a Hellenic love of beauty with a Catholic understanding of the sacred, and an early modern sense of curiosity and experiment.
Today’s AI-generated neo-neoclassical art, on the other hand, or computer-aided drawings of new cities, charter cities with quasi-classical layouts, are not going to be a new Florence; these places, if they are ever even partially built, will not produce Leonardos or Michelangelos; they will be peopled with modern technocrats or sentimental play-actors with no concept of study, learning, prayer, memorization, apprenticeship (no notion of humanitas).
In the era of samestream, the generic, middlebrow liberal dresses up poptimism with a few modernist touches (autofiction). A few real— in the sense that they can play the chess game of aesthetics past conventional openings and endgames— critics survive, but they mostly, can only, offer living models of great art by ransacking contemporary world literature and film.
There’s a progressive bent to cultural production which celebrates its own existence (thus the contemporary style is "careerism" as Christian Lorentzen has observed); there’s a conservative bent to the discursive reaction to samestream, which also ends up celebrating itself (look, there’s an alternative: cathedral posting on Twitter!). In both the Left- or Right-inflected versions, political alignment serves as a stand in for both creation and engagement with autonomous art. Neither art nor criticism stand a chance when reduced to the status of platform for everyone’s social and political personas. In this mode, art is harnessed to the ego needs of the social media poster with supposedly big ideas and subversive insights— and the ideology they’ve decided to bind to for the sake of keeping that ego intact and upright.
Good culture from the past is instrumentalized for the sake of people who can’t sustain a debate with themselves or others—who can only offer "takes," that is, mono-directional, typically shallow statements that they can only defend with ad hominem. If you don’t like my take, you must be X, Y, or Z— someone with the wrong identity, the wrong ideological optics. Cultural canons are ransacked for evidence to support confirmed biases; books and films become fodder for screenshots. What culture can’t do in this mode is change anyone, pass the blood-brain barrier and threaten the assumptions that prop up the inner-life of the content consumer. And as a result of this ceaseless, cyclical process of deracination, American culture is reduced to what Peter Viereck called "a rootless nostalgia for roots."

Creatio Ex Nihilo

There is, however, a sense in which such pathologies have always been present in the American psyche, which has often confused the attempt to create culture for the thing itself. In the colonial and early national period, learned societies like the American Philosophical Society and American Academy of Arts and Sciences promoted intellectual and artistic endeavors. The nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of art academies and museums, like the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, making significant contributions to art education and preservation. The twentieth century marked a shift toward modern and contemporary art, with the establishment of institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art. More recently, American arts institutions have promoted diversity and inclusivity as cultural production has become increasingly conceptual and overtly political.
What tethers together these different phases, genealogically, is that they were all predicated on the belief that American culture had to be built, that it wasn’t happening naturally, that it had to be implanted artificially. Ironically, this has always meant copying what Emerson called, derisively, Europe’s "courtly muses" (down to the critical theory that American universities draw from now), and building institutions meant to transmit values from more refined cultures at the expense of responding to the sublime American landscape. Instead of responding directly to "nature," Americans performatively dressed up and talked like Europeans, building their culture around European (specifically French and English) aristocratic beaux-arts. Emerson considered this a "tragic consequence" of a lack of national confidence and individual creative daring.
What Emerson, the first and maybe best American writer, believed is that you have to live at a certain pitch of intensity to be a genius; an artist can’t have completely smooth edges; they are actually formed by intense pressures and anxieties. There has to be some brush with the outside—with nature, with systems, with God; genius isn’t something that’s cultivated in a private sanctum, but something that’s sculpted by the world. In a sense, genius is actually the membrane that controls the flow of inner and outer phenomena at just the right pace; it’s a flexible gate which allows an inner self to exist, but also doesn’t let it get too safe. Works of genius have borders, but also gates; they are grand estates with unlocked doors.
Bob Dylan (through his recordings, songbook, and endless touring) is maybe the clearest near-term (the last half century) example of Ameri­can genius, according to this definition. Dylan’s songs are simultaneously products of the midcentury boom, songs of the open road, the highway, and the vagabond and the bohemian—and transcriptions of a hermetic, solitary, and unique consciousness. They turn outward as myths, and inward as prayers. Similarly, the work of light designer James Turrell functions both historically and spiritually; Turrell builds observation stations—like "Roden Crater" in Arizona—that, I think, provide experiences comparable to European cathedrals; Turrell too, creates works that can be inhabited, that are subjective, and mutable, that channel and transform the individual observer, but are also highly fixed, authored, and permanent. The same might be said of Donald Judd’s workshop and installations in Marfa, Texas. American culture, at its points of highest attainment, has monumentality—a mythic stature that rivals other world traditions. But rarely are our native plants allowed to grow freely.
The tendency of Americans (as an outcome of our historically belated relationship to European culture, and our political institutions, as both Emerson and de Tocqueville observed) is to place genius under the control of democratic consensus and at the mercy of institutional norms. Indeed, Emerson warned that being individualistic in politics and public spirit, Americans have secretly never trusted their "own thoughts." As a result, we scarcely have artists, writers, thinkers, or composers—only MFAs, grants, foundations, awards.
This is not to say that artistic and cultural production ought to be de-institutionalized. Rather, such institutions can be successful when they’re contingently built around the concrete vision and abilities of a person or small group of persons who are motivated by some kind of transcendent vision or insight; these spaces make sense in the arts as pragmatic extensions of an organic spirit of creation. But they basically die, or die out, with turnover in time. Bach’s sons, to give a historical example, were able to continue in a much weaker form their father’s profession, but they weren’t able to maintain the machine of religious music production that was centered around the Bach household. In the same way, the Globe Theater was a hive around the mind of Shakespeare, and so its golden age lasted, obviously, only as long as Shakespeare’s creative life.
In the modern American way of doing culture, however, infrastructure comes first, created by a rich person’s will or a public mandate, and then culture is supposed to fill the vacuum created by the infrastructure. From a historical perspective, simply throwing money and resources at an abstract cultural mission is more or less guaranteed to fail: it follows the wrong order of operation, as there is no organic community beneath it; there is no seed of individual genius.

Struggling for the Sublime

In Kierkegaardian terms, the present age is one where crowds are firmly in control of American culture, having co-opted and assimilated "that single individual." Nevertheless, despite this most discouraging reality (or, indeed, because of it), we must question why individuals, either as cultural producers or consumers, often display unquestioning obedience to the imperatives of conformity. Why do they align themselves with the very mechanisms through which the crowd asserts its influence upon us? Why is the vernacular, the analog, and the physical considered so out of place? These are questions that require thoughtful consideration and contemplation.
Technological advancements have become so deeply ingrained in our lives, shaping our routines, patterns of communication, and even identi­ties, that rejecting something like the smartphone provokes discomfort: it is perceived as intentionally contrarian, deviating from convenience and efficiency to prove a point. The marketing and promotion of new technologies often emphasize their benefits and superiority, creating a sense of tribal pressure to adopt them. The rejection of certain technologies is not viewed as a nuanced act of self-preservation, a quest to define one’s identity apart from the assimilating forces of a hyperconnected world; rather, it is seen as just "hipster bullshit." In essence, the percep­tion that rejecting technology is "trying too hard" is rooted in the tension between the desire for individuality and the pressure to conform in an American world that increasingly relies on technology to make daily life palatable.
We can’t return to the past, however, nor can we undo modernity; it is not for this essay to chart new regulatory policy through which Americans can remedy the above-mentioned crises in their culture. Even after years of a so-called techlash, there is neither the appetite nor the willpower to enact any of the truly revolutionary, society-wide changes needed to begin to turn back the digital and memetic deluge into which our cultural consciousness has been submerged.
But there are a few places to begin: a child could start to memorize poetry. Parents could read to their children. The wealthy could employ artists and intellectuals; public works could employ craftspeople to beautify public buildings new and old. Churches could return to stone and wood, as could upper-middle-class home builders. People could spend less time on social media, or better, none. Writing letters costs the price of a stamp. Most paperback classics are still one or two dollars at used bookstores. Art galleries could reemploy the canons of beauty—and not simply act as glamorous money-laundering operations. None of these very broad proposals are at all impossible, though none of them are probable.
Yet, in this ultra-fragile, comically bourgeois culture, gloating and aesthetic refinement or even raw intelligence are not enough to save us; cultivating better habits is only a start, a palliative measure, but not an end itself. Having failed to either inherit or make a better world, a deeper, a truer, a more soulful and moving world, all that can really be done for now is face up to the bleak failures of the present, while at the same time contemplating what it would take to begin anew. American culture is back to where it started with Emerson and Whitman—seeking to find a form and expression equal to the sublimity of the land and (no matter how confused and uncertain) our democratic politics, while reck­oning, at the same time, with its own collective potential for delusion and concrete evil.
Brand names aren’t reason for hope; the demands of the market and of genius are perhaps further apart than ever. To my mind, the most important American artistic project of the last decade was Terrence Malick’s run of films from Tree of Life (2011) to Song to Song (2017), with To the Wonder (2012) and Knight of Cups (2015) in between; these films push the techne of cinema, a literal and unusual depth of focus, with historical and spiritual depth—capturing the human, American subject and oversoul in new ways. Malick is a late American modernist: a cinematic Faulkner.
But major creative artists with institutional backing, and daring, completely uncompromised intelligence are vanishingly rare. The samestream of the late 2010s and early 2020s, by and large, celebrated thinly veiled agitprop; it’s unclear how consolidating mega-galleries, media corporations, record labels, and publishers are supposed to discover and support artists whose way of seeing, feeling, molding, and creating might flow against the current. It’s not only possible, but likely, that the American arts are alive in squats, dying suburbs, in camper vans, expat communities—anywhere other than in the ideologically vetted major urban markets. Some of the best artists I know are largely itinerants and unknowns: folk-singers, writers, filmmakers, painters; they’ve long since given up hope of being discovered, some were smart enough to never try.
The irony here is that I work and create in the big city, the metropole; my theater company is here, and I’m not anonymous; I’m definitely "trying." I have attempted to prove my own cultural nihilism wrong—which has taken me the better part of a decade (of relentless fundraising, writing, revising, workshopping, staging). And even then, despite achieving name recognition and an audience, my theater com­pany has no more than a month’s rent at a time in the bank account; I must maintain my day job; my modicum of talent has won me little relief from material anxiety. What I’ve learned is that self-reliance, a pursuit of the sublime, a longer horizon must be their own reward; none comes from the outside.
In a more nimble, competitive, and open artistic ecosystem, there might have been greater reward (or any) for bootstrapping a career, a style, an audience—but in the era of blind, monolithic entertainment machines, there is none. The consolidation of media entities, rising costs, dystopian technological saturation, and the acceleration of and popularization of philistine pseudo-radical ideology all coordinate against a self-reliant artist. American civilization turns its artists against their own deepest creative impulses—makes them question whether there’s some­thing wrong with them (rather than the structures that can’t even recog­nize them enough to ignore them).
Simply put, working-class artists need help to compete with soulless careerists and nepo-baby cyborgs, and populist, countervailing political parties ought to take up the cause. Insofar as culture is undergoing a long, slow heart-attack, there is cause for government intervention, though it must be undertaken in creative and counterintuitive ways. A populist cultural program, for instance, ought to commission artists to stay offline, away from advertising and the algorithm, away from academia—and shield them, at least temporarily, from the truly endless hustle of the big city, or the demoralizing groupthink of established institutions. In a healthy society, a robust patron class would exercise taste and discernment. But in the America of 2024, the wealthy are more interested in demonstrating their virtue than cultivating excellence.
As eccentric as it might sound, we should be setting up secular monasteries, public workshops, in the great American wilderness, in emptying towns, in both gentrified and decaying cities. A wise populism would recognize that aesthetics and leisure are basic needs in an ad­vanced civilization, and that one of the points of improving public, material infrastructure is to meet these needs. The potential genius in a forgotten American place should have greater opportunities and access to substantial platforms; the urban hustler should have recourse to options other than finding a brand sponsor or hoping to go viral on social media.
In a materially unjust and morally degraded era, it has to occur to many people that there might be human services not expressible in terms of exchange value. The only precondition for personal triumph is under­standing that we might be capable of developing truths with intrinsic and binding and yet unexchangeable value. We may realize that, actually, pride and passion count for everything, for these emotions call forth that spontaneous, primal willingness to defend the few things that are truly one’s own. These may be the only things we can really be sure of. And once armed with such conviction, the only way to exorcize the shame of having tapped out the dance of a dying, middle-class, consumerist culture may be to embrace the uncertainty and fear of whatever comes afterwards, as if to say, "well, I’m willing to face it, whatever it is, a war, a pandemic, the breakdown of the grid, a stolen election, a dra­conian new law, social instability. . . ."
We must be able to hold on to our inwardness in the face of History, while remembering that inwardness can’t be an outcome of leisure, or career mobility—but of action, survival, fortitude, a capacity for creating order within and around oneself. That is true culture.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VIII, Number 3 (Fall 2024): 140–52.

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/toward-the-recovery-of-american-culture/