THE TRIUMPH OF MEANNESS:
America’s War Against Its Better Self
By Nicolaus Mills
Houghton Mifflin, 260 pages, $25
You might call it the peace-and-prosperity paradox. With no external enemies threatening and amid robust economic growth, a majority of Americans remain pessimistic about the country’s course and direction.
What prompted almost 60 percent in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll to say the U.S. is heading the wrong way? “The Triumph of Meanness,” by Nicolaus Mills, provides several explanations for the gathering clouds on our psychic landscape. Sunny optimism of the past is being challenged by economic, political and cultural forces that test–in Lincoln’s memorable phrase–“the better angels of our nature.”
Quoting from books, articles, film scripts, song lyrics, even bumper stickers and T-shirts, Mills documents that meanness in the 1990s has become “a state of mind, the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.” Whether it be negative political advertising, dehumanizing rap music, gory video games or the bare-knuckle barbarism of ultimate fighting, American life today has so many sharp edges it’s no wonder doubt pervades public opinion.
A professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College, Mills seamlessly weaves his argument, emphasizing how changes in the economy have contributed to growing anxiety, if not fear, among the middle and lower classes. Corporate profits might be up and the stock market soaring, but large-scale downsizing and reduced employee benefits have helped produce the favorable balance sheets for many companies.
In Mills’ analysis, the huge disparity between the rewards for business leaders and the rest of the people is a key factor in the meanness abroad in the land. “In 1974 the typical CEO made 35 times the average worker’s pay,” he notes. “By the nineties the figure was one hundred and fifty times and climbing, compared to a sixteen-to-one ratio in Japan and a twenty-one to one ratio in Germany.” With executives engaging in “a strategic ruthlessness that cut jobs and salaries” for the sake of greater yields and larger dividends, the rank and file have been leading lives of “Dilbert”-like desperation and worse.
Although an exponent and defender of liberal thinking, Mills doesn’t merely deplore the consequences of “the new corporate Darwinism” or rail at the barbed rantings of conservative radio commentators such as G. Gordon Liddy. He is also pointedly critical of leftist extremism on the “outer bounds of decency,” with militant feminists and gangsta-rap musicians principal targets for censure.
To illustrate the balance of the author’s approach, he devotes one chapter to the rise of “attitude”–and the decline of objectivity–in the journalism of the 1990s. Reporting, he says, especially in the coverage of President Clinton, has become cuttingly personal, with “meanness and denigration central to mainstream political writing.”
Mills also laments the relative absence of probing analysis of programs and policies, and a reader tends to sympathize with Clinton over all the journalistic spitballs fired his way. In the next chapter, however, Mills examines the president’s performance in adapting to the ascent of Republicans in Congress after the 1994 elections. Throughout this section, Clinton is sternly taken to task for making government not only “leaner and meaner” but also much less compassionate toward the poor and those struggling to get ahead.
Though fair and thorough in describing the fraying fabric of contemporary America, “The Triumph of Meanness” would be more compelling with a stronger emphasis on historical context and comparison. If the country is, as the subtitle states, at “war against its better self,” that “better self” is posited with only a brief reference here and a sidelong glance there.
In several places, Mills seems nostalgic for the good intentions of 1960s activism, remarking at one point: “It is difficult to imagine rap having its current appeal a generation ago, when the civil rights movement was at its peak and fundamental social change seemed at hand. None of the cruelty that is so central to rap would have made sense in the milieu created by sixties politics.”
Of course. But nostalgia is not history, and that turbulent time was not without its own excesses and controversies. What’s called “the new savagery” deserves more rooted explication.
On the whole, “The Triumph of Meanness” is a humane, humanistic critique that bravely draws a warts-and-all picture of America today. Depressing in its recital of current realities, the book ends with an even more frightening glimpse at a future when “meanness and spite” will be “so deeply entrenched” we will be immune to shock.
