The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened

In 2001, a pair of sociologists—Michael Emerson and Christian Smith—published a landmark book, Divided by Faith, which lays out what they call a “cultural tool kit” used by white evangelicals—the “ideas, habits, skills, and styles” that help them organize experience and evaluate reality. The key component is what they call “accountable individualis

in 1980, when I was in school, a Pell Grant covered about 70 percent of a college student’s expenses at a four-year college. “By 2011,” writes Filipovic, “it only covered a third.” Younger people spend decades paying off debts that literally didn’t exist for earlier generations, and of course the burden is magnified for Black and brown students, an

Looking back, Thing Two—that referendum vote—perfectly symbolizes the hyper-individualism that has marked my lifetime. The selfishness.

I am well aware now that all of these actions had more to do with charity than justice—that they would probably now fall under the general rubric of “white savior complex.” And I’m aware that those are sound cautions. When we were at Frogmore, our college acceptance letters were arriving back home; when we got off the bus we went home to envelopes

What I’m trying to say is: my life, and the life of other people like me, was built in very real part on the suffering of others. That’s not wokeness, and that’s not “critical race theory.” That’s history. And the fact that, to some extent, we’ve stopped doing these things doesn’t mean we get to ignore the effects of earlier actions. As Richard Rot

“George Washington wasn’t moonlighting as a slave holder. That was their career. That was how they garnered the resources to go off and do these other great things that we so admire and we praise.”

WHAT WE MAY lack is the sense of neighborliness. For me, the scariest thing about the last forty years, even more than the rising temperature, was the ascension of the libertarian idea that the individual matters far more than the society an individual inhabits. The New York Times called Ayn Rand (“altruism is incompatible with freedom”) the “novel

the American suburb is perhaps the greatest economic engine yet devised. An enormous percentage of America’s postwar economic might—of the winnings that came from global dominance after World War II—was devoted to a single project: building bigger houses farther apart from each other. Once they were built, they had to be heated and cooled; the dist