OtherWise

23Me, Us, and Them

“Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.” Historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote those words in 1960. What would he make of us today?

On the political front, nearly two-thirds of Americans have a negative view of the federal government. Tea Partiers “want their country back.” And a quarter million Texans have signed a petition to secede from the United States, an idea that the state’s governor didn’t think was particularly outrageous. On the social front, the cultural distance between people of different income levels and educational attainments has never been greater. They live in different worlds. They eat different foods, shop ...