The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It (review)

This collection includes seventeen new essays by anthropologists and sociologists, nearly all hailing from leading universities on the U.S. East and West Coasts. Their topic is a feeling of insecurity that is increasingly prevalent among Americans, its sources and manifestations. Together, they marshal impressive evidence of recent, real-world bouts with appalling adversity in their own experience or their family's, among census-tracked subalterns, acquaintances or fieldwork subjects whose struggles would overwhelm lesser mortals. Starting the count (imprecisely and a bit too conveniently) with the 1970s, the end of the Cold War, or the Presidency of George W. Bush, just about everything seems to be getting worse—or at least risky—for everyone except a narrower and narrower elite.

All that suffering seems especially inexcusable because its causes are so familiar and so readily named. (In fact, it is also bit discouraging that the authors rarely acknowledge the many, long traditions of both popular and scholarly criticism in which their work fits. Jeremiads are at least as predictable in cultural studies, pop psychology and sociology as they once were among Puritans; so, it is odd to see that connection effaced.) And it is certainly possible to turn the moral of these stories in a positive direction, from damnation to conviction. They could counsel, not a look on the bright side, but concrete steps toward remedies—as the subtitle promises, "what we should do about it." But few specific suggestions are even mentioned. The authors could have begun with their own jobs, working to brighten the lives of university students, or with their own activism, steering citizen groups toward a better world. The bulk of what finds its way into these essays, however, comes closer to doom and gloom: more bathos than manifesto or jeremiad or even pathos. To hear most of the authors tell it, their own company mysteriously excluded, the U.S. is and, if justice prevails, should be going to hell in a hand basket.

These specific perspectives were first workshopped at MIT in 2006, then previewed in DC, as a "standing-room-only panel" at the 2007 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. They now appear as fully formed essays in a handsome University of California paperback. The cover photo invites a viewer to a long jump at the end of a short pier.

Inside, the volume opens with a celebrity endorsement by Barbara Ehrenreich and an introduction by editors Hugh Gusterson (George Mason University) and Catherine Besteman (Colby College). They promise a social-science overview of the sorry state of current affairs. The essays are grouped around themes that, in varying proportion, anchor nearly every essay: inequality, militarism, deindustrialization, materialism, racism, nativism, xenophobia, neoliberalism, outsourcing, offshoring, neoconservatism, unilateralism . . . all supposedly distinctly "new" and "American."

Whatever the specific stimulus, the response, the authors and editors agree, is an unprecedented level of insecurity at-large, but none of them addresses their disagreements about its justification. In some chapters, the feeling appears to originate in delusion propagated by corporations or right-wing ideologues for their own benefit; in others, it is a reasonable, necessary, or even understated response to systematic engines of degradation, suffering and death. In any case, lest the list of reasons to feel insecure remains too short, readers can now add the insecurity craze to their reasons for feeling insecure. Significant caveats, inconsistencies, disagreements, or questions for future research are generally for readers to find on their own.

Each chapter focuses on a destabilizing aspect of institutions, everyday life, and larger world systems that are subject to elite Americans' lead. Each may be distinct, but at bottom they remain supposedly "American" (and chiefly for that reason also going global), cruel in consequence (if not also design), and new.

What is it, exactly, that gives "us" the heebie-jeebies? Each contributor targets a variant:

• • Setha Low (CUNY): "A Nation of Gated Communities"

• • Catherine Lutz (Brown): "Warmaking...