Chris Lehmann
The dirty secret of all American religion is its novelty. The sanctums of American faith resemble less a solemn pantheon of immutable divinity than a cluttered tinkerer’s workshop, with spare parts from one tradition carelessly soldered onto another, hastily scrawled blueprints on the whiteboard, and false starts and failed prototypes strewn throughout the works. 
In our unstable neoliberal world, the venerable social ideal of equality is perhaps the most precarious commodity of all. To be sure, evidence of its absence abounds—in the casual enclosure and systematic auctioning of once-public goods, in the gaudy bailouts of our nonproductive financial sector, in the riotous indulgences of the 1 percent and the gnawing penury of the 99. And as the sphere of its exercise has narrowed to the vanishing point, equality seems to have been downgraded into the great dirty secret of our public life—only in contrast to the old Potter Stewart saw, fewer and fewer of 
In his 2000 memoir, Blood of the Liberals, George Packer mentions a post-collegiate encounter with one of his Yale classmates, a young right-wing pundit who had hired Packer—then dividing his time in Boston between carpentry jobs at construction sites and volunteer stints at a downtown homeless shelter—to build him a bookshelf. This was the mid-1980s, and the conservative was a young man in a hurry, tacking confidently into the post-liberal zeitgeist. He was “an apologist for radical laissez-faire economics and a kind of high-Tory moralism on social issues,” Packer writes, “with an attitude toward the poor of contempt mixed with “I don’t have to tell you things are bad,” Howard Beale (played by Peter Finch) announces in the warm-up to his famed populist outburst in Network (1976), inciting his millions of viewers to rush to their living room windows and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Beale ticks off a standard litany of 1970s-era social woes—inflation, unemployment, bank failures, violent crime—to stoke the audience of his nightly news broadcast. In the end, his undoing proves to be not hubris but civics. He tries to goad Americans into thinking critically about the ultimate Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.” 
The conservative canonization of Ronald Reagan as the patron saint of the tax cut has always been a vexed rite. For one thing, Reagan actually raised taxes in 1982, when the country was sunk in a grim recession and the president’s economic advisers were sounding alarms over the gaping hole created in the federal budget by his 1981 package of tax cuts. 
When riots convulsed working-class communities throughout Britain this summer, the predominant reflex in the English media was to lash out at the rioters as criminals, thugs, and hooligans, engaged in senseless destruction for destruction’s sake. To be sure, there was plenty of unhinged mayhem, especially once the unrest entered the looting and fire-setting phase. But to write off the uprisings—which started at the end of a peaceful Tottenham vigil in protest of the police killing of a black man named Mark Duggan—as the “mindless” conduct of individual bad actors, as the general run of commentary did, was to ignore decades In the long-ago time of the mid-1990s, an earnest pair of radical British intellectuals named Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron surveyed the emerging, and deeply reactionary, dogmas of the Internet age. Barbrook and Cameron explained that this worldview, which they dubbed the “Californian ideology,” hinged on a curious blend of New Left and New Right orthodoxies: culturally tolerant, anti-hierarchical and experimental, it was also punitively neoliberal and profoundly antigovernment in expounding a rigidly libertarian vision of the global economy. n the long-ago epoch when Bill Clinton made a credible-sounding populist run at the presidency, he hymned the American dream as a compact securing a better future for those who “worked hard and played by the rules.” Here at the shank end of the great financial collapse of 2008, however, the national credo is pretty much “what work?”—and “screw the rules.” 
When America has had to stir itself out of calamity—or even just navigate its way from one calamity to the next—the cultural scene usually comes in for a bout of searing self-inspection. The psychic foundations of the Civil War were famously rooted, at least in terms of the Northern abolitionist sensibility, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Victorian melodrama Uncle Tom’s Cabin.