Bob Garfield - American Manifesto: Saving Democracy From Villains, Vandals, and Ourselves

Table of Contents

Praise for American Manifesto

Short, specific, and droll. It is very much worth reading, for ideas about the next stage in the worlds recovery from failed, weak, and in other ways troubled media systems.

JAMES FALLOWS, The Atlantic

Bob Garfield speaks truth not just to power, but to the dangerously disempowered. Unflinchingly direct yet courageously sympathetic.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF, author of Present Shock and Team Human

In American Manifesto, Bob Garfield bares our national soul, and its hellishly dark. Weve divided ourselves by everything under the sun, eroding the idea of America as the common home of the many. With wit, passion, and insight, Garfield dissects the problem and issues a call to action. He will convince you that its time to get out the door.

THOMAS E. PATTERSON, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University and author of How America Lost Its Mind

In the vast, bland American wasteland of homogenized, regurgitated media, there is a lone, heroic taco truck. Bob Garfield is that taco truck. Nourishing. Defiant. Also very smart and very brave. American Manifesto is his spicy masterpiece.

ALEC BALDWIN

Garfields (Bedfellows, 2012, etc.) manifesto stands out from those already published... An interesting manifesto that will incite debate.

Kirkus Reviews

Garfield offers practical advice on how to transform outrage into positive action. Fans of his Peabody Awardwinning public radio program, On the Media, will recognize Garfields bold yet grounded humor, while his trenchant analysis and surprisingly hopeful vision will motivate readers to pay attention and get involved.

Booklist

ALSO BY BOB GARFIELD

Waking Up Screaming from the American Dream

And Now a Few Words from Me

The Chaos Scenario

Bedfellows

Cant Buy Me Like

American Manifesto

Copyright 2020 by Bob Garfield

First hardcover edition: 2020

First paperback edition: 2021

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

Names: Garfield, Bob, author.

Title: American manifesto : saving democracy from villains, vandals, and ourselves / Bob Garfield.

Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017896 | ISBN 9781640092808

Subjects: LCSH: Identity politicsUnited States. | Polarization (Social sciences)Political aspectsUnited States. | Political cultureUnited States.

Classification: LCC JK1764 .G369 2020 | DDC 306.20973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017896

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64009-461-1

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes

Book design by Jordan Koluch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my children, and my childrens children

This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction.

LORD BYRON

CONTENTS

R ead this book. Commit it to memory. Tear out the pages and swallow them. Chew carefully, but hurry. Not to say necessarily that the political situation in this country will so deteriorate that ICE expands its roundups to political dissidents or the dangerously informed, but never say never. There are scoundrels loose in Washington, D.C.and Madison, Wisconsin, and Atlanta, Georgia, and wherever dark money lurkssystematically undermining the institutions of justice and civil freedoms. It may be deemed an extreme view that tyranny is upon us, but also let us not be lulled into complacency. Back in the early 60s, when Barry Goldwater was considered insanely far right, the Arizona senator declared, Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. He was worried about the Russkies.

Yeah. Me, too. But not in a commie way. More of in a fascist way, with domestic stooges doing the dirty work.

This book is a cry for help in three parts. The dry way of describing it: An examination of the tragic confluence of the American preoccupation with identity and the catastrophic disintegration of mass media, yielding a society that may be irretrievably fractured unless we act now. A less dry way of putting it: Run for your life. Were being Dumptied. As in Humpty, the self-satisfied jumbo egg that once sat atop a big, beautiful wall and wound up in countless irreparable pieces.

Take note: I am not speaking of Trumpty Dumpty. The greatest threat we face is not from a rogue president, but from ourselves.

The frightening evidence is all around us, but maybe none more troubling than the survey results that show millennials shopping for other forms of government. The 2018 Democracy Project, undertaken jointly by the Freedom House, the George W. Bush Institute, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement at the University of Pennsylvania, asked fourteen hundred adults about the importance of democracy as our form of government. Among respondents aged twenty-nine or younger, only 39 percent said absolutely important. Overall, only 60 percent of those polled expressed absolute adamancy. When asked if America is in real danger of becoming a nondemocratic, authoritarian country, overall, 50 percent said yes.

Half of us are in fear of democracys collapse? How in the world did we get there?

Well, I have a detailed answer to that question, and then I further presume to prescribe a solutiona solution that has little to do with the actions of government, quite a bit to do with the imperatives of the marketplace, and most of all to do with you, the citizen. So, yes, American Manifesto is a call to action, but it requires maybe a more challenging commitment: to be prepared to discard, or at least reconsider, aspects of your own personal orthodoxy, your assumptions, your affinities, and maybe even one or two articles of faith. Because the time for narrow interests, and the time for delicacy, has passed. This is an emergency. Its time for all the kings horses and all the kings men to get fucking busy. Please note also: I am not inciting a revolution. I am outlining a de-devolution.

Now, you might rightly wonder who the hell I am to prescribe anything. I am not a political scientist. I am not a sociologist. Or a psychologist, neuroscientist, or philosopher. I do have one PhD (honorary) in exchange for dispensing twenty minutes of advice to a stadium full of college graduates who just wanted to get out of the sun and commence moving back in with their folks. But an honorary degree is like an auxiliary police badge; you dont have to go to the academy to earn it. Until very recently, I wasnt even much acquainted with the scholarly literature on the subject I presume herewith to address.

What I am is a serial eyewitness to and chronicler of developments in society, technology, politics, and media. In other words: a journalist, drawing my livelihood for decades from reporting, contextualizing, connecting dots, and a fair amount of just plain gawking. And it so happens that a pretty significant part of my beat, in almost every permutation of my diverse journalistic career, has been the search for identitywhether in the coverage of identity politics, nationalism, social media, advertising, pop culture, or (for many years on the radio and in print) the quixotic tilts of ordinary Americans trying to achieve the pinnacle of Maslows (and Horatio Algers and Thomas Jeffersons) pyramid to make something of themselves. Its an eclectic resume, burnished by the mere fact of having walked the planet since 1955 and observing my ass off along the way. I may not have tenure at a prestigious private university, but I can observe like nobodys business. And that is precisely what I propose to do here.