Expressive Individualism in America

Continued dominance of "expressive individualism" in mainstream American culture has fostered alienation from the wider community and damaged trust of shared values and institutions, endangering the myth of the "American century". Even community involvement becomes territorial, alienating; social science, determined to be "scientific," discourages a humanist perspective in favor of quantifiable social analysis and technocratic solutions--with no benefit to either institutions or persons analyzed and in the midst of social disintegration. As critique of social scientism, advocates human-centered renewal of community and culture, centered in democratic institutions, to reawaken sense of shared social experience.

Black, George. The Good Neighbor: How the U.S. Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

An account of U.S. imperialism south of its borders since the 1890s but particularly during the 1980s, anchored in official policies fed by popular-culture American stereotypical attitudes toward its "backyard." Interprets source material, quoting pithy statements supporting thesis of increasingly serious anticommunist American militaristic "morality plays" throughout the region--as against American blindness to emergent regional nationalism.

ality and oppression. Little treatment of the elevation of partisan, balkanizing group interests to spirituality, but real challenge to optimism seen as both psychological and material. Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. Locates America's Vietnam period in the declaration of high national purpose around such comfortable moralistic myths of manifest destiny, the white man's burden, the frontier thesis, and the red menace (and Cold War). Documents response of American artists and intelligentsia to the reality of dashed expectations in Vietnam in cultural images transformed over time from being uncritical of America's heroic mission (e.g., The Ugly American) to suspicion, dissection, rejection of shared American values (e.g., Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Why Are We in Vietnam). Reassertion of national romantic consciousness came from an unlikely mythic source: the science fiction heroic romance film Star Wars. Jensen, Richard. "History and the Political Scientist." Politics and the Social Sciences, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset. New York: Oxford UP, 1969. 1-28. Survey of several key figures in the displacement of history in studies of government as political science cam