The contest between the forces of fragmentation and integration

From At the Cold War's end: Power is needed as much as ever, a book review from the August 22nd, 1992 edition of The Economist. The book being reviewed is The United States and the End of the Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis.

What now? "We would do well", thinks Mr. Gaddis, "to welcome the obselecence of great-power war but not necessarily the erosion of great-power authority." The chief danger in the decline of great-power hegemony, he says in some of the book's most interesting pages, is the contest between the forces of fragmentation and integration. "The search for freedom . . . tends toward fragmentation in the political realm, while the search for prosperity tends towards integration in the economic realm. The cold war itself, it now appears, was a departure from that pattern, in that it fostered integration in politics as well as economics.

A very interesting insight. I have discussed with friends when the totalitarian aversion to freedoms began manifesting itself at our best universities. Those of us there in the seventies and eighties saw perhaps some foreshadowing in individual professors but no real disconnect between the culture of universities and the culture of America. As best I can tell, postmodernist critical theory become dominant over the American creed sometime in the nineties.

And that would fit with the timeline inherent in Gaddis's observation. The fall of the Berlin Wall was in 1989 and Deng Xiaoping's reforms in China began in 1980.

The communist states fell in the 1980s and postmodernist critical theory - with its divisive (fragmentation) focus on groups rather than the American Creed focus on individuals, comes into ascendancy in the 1990s. Gaddis' model matches the trends.

Postmodernist critical theory has indeed fostered division, polarization and fragmentation as Gaddis predicted and at the same time, we have gone a whole generation with little anti-monopoly enforcement. In 1992 Gaddis foretold political fragmentation and economic consolidation and that is indeed where we are right now.

No wonder things are so tense - we need to knit back the classical liberal precepts of the American Creed, individuals, rights, rule of law, market, etc. and we need to reintroduce competition into the markets which have become dominated by too-big-to-fail oligopolies. At least, that is my read of what middle America wants. The establishment parties and economic vested interests blanche in fear at such a reform and hence the roaring opposition of the elites against the will of the people.