“We turned inward and called it freedom. Tocqueville warned us, nearly two centuries ago, exactly where that road ends.”

What Culture Used to Mean

There was a time when the word culture actually meant something specific: cultivation, refinement. The word comes from the same root as agriculture — cultura, the Latin for tending and tilling. It was applied to a human being the same way you’d apply it to a garden or a field. To be cultured meant you had done the deliberate work of developing yourself — your thought, your manners, your taste, your character. It meant cultivating a capacity the way you’d cultivate a desire to be genuinely good at chess. Something that let you grow, and then let you step back and measure, honestly, who you were against who you had become. Matthew Arnold, writing in 1869 in a book called Culture and Anarchy, defined culture almost exactly this way: the pursuit of our total perfection, gained by getting to know the best that has been thought and said in the world. Arnold’s whole fear, in that book, was that a society that let go of that pursuit wouldn’t simply become culture-less. It would slide into anarchy — not the theatrical kind with flags and slogans, but the quieter kind, where everybody simply does as they like, with no shared standard left to appeal to. I think about that warning more often now than I ever expected to.

In academia, in a real intellectual conversation, there used to be a genuine excitement in sitting across from someone whose mastery let them put something on the table you hadn’t encountered before. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott had a lovely phrase for this — he called it the “conversation of mankind,” the ongoing exchange across generations and disciplines that civilization actually is, when it’s working. You could say that in its older usage, culture was tied to excellence, to the more refined expressions of what it means to be human. But somewhere along the way, the word went soft. It became a catch-all, an empty description for any shared habits or beliefs a group happened to hold, no matter how base.

Now watch what that emptying-out actually produces. We’ve reached a point where a political movement, its mirror-image on the opposite end of the spectrum, and the internal codes of a street gang all get elevated to the status of “culture.” None of them possess an ounce of the cultivated refinement the word used to demand. And I want to be precise about something here, because it matters. There is a real and remarkable American story in which a community that had been denied, shut out, and pushed to the margins for generations fought its way, decade after decade, into the full center of American life. It produced leaders in politics, science, medicine, the military, the arts, business — every field there is. That achievement is real, it is hard-won, and it deserves to be told straight, without asterisks. What doesn’t deserve that same reverence is something else entirely, something that spread across every racial and political line in this country: an outlaw aesthetic. Swagger without substance. Menace mistaken for authenticity. Total unaccountability, performed for an audience of strangers online, marketed back to an entire culture as though defiance were itself an achievement. MAGA has its own version of this. The most militant corners of the identitarian left have their own version. A street gang has its own version. Strip away the branding, the flags, the slogans, and you find the exact same psychological architecture underneath every one of them: raw tribal loyalty, performative grievance, and a steady, reliable diet of anger and contempt for anyone who won’t salute the flag you’ve chosen.

Civilized excellence, in other words, has been substantially replaced by a kind of collective, low-grade mass resentment. Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 1830s. He was a young French aristocrat, sent here to study American prisons, who ended up writing the single most penetrating book on American character anyone has ever produced. He admired something specific about this country’s individualism. He found it mature, unhurried, almost calm. He observed that the democratic promise of equality let Americans step away from the rigid social hierarchies still dominating Europe, freeing them to focus their energy on their families, their own ambitions, their own immediate circle of friends and neighbors. That was the gift of American individualism, as Tocqueville saw it. He also, in the very same pages, told us exactly how that gift curdles.

Tocqueville’s Warning

Image: Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville by Théodore Chassériau, 1850 (Public Domain)

Tocqueville’s more famous prediction — and it is genuinely eerie how well it has aged — was that American individualism would eventually isolate more and more citizens from the larger society around them. The danger, as he put it, was that a fierce enough individualism could quietly dissolve the sense of collective ethical responsibility and civic participation that any free society actually depends on to survive. Everyone told themselves the same comforting story: we are free to venture out. We have the freedom, the discipline, the education, the support to become whatever we choose to become. And for a great many people, that promise more or less held.

The trouble is that some people — not a huge number, but more than enough to matter — wanted everything. They wanted to make absolutely certain no one remained unaware of their significance, measured out in achievements, possessions, celebrity, and raw power. They became, in effect, a culture unto themselves: a small, glittering, elite class that functioned exactly like the aristocratic societies of Europe Tocqueville thought Americans had finally escaped. A new aristocracy took root here after all. And — this is the part that should stop you — everyone else wanted in.

What that class built was wonderful, for them. It was considerably less wonderful for everyone standing outside the velvet rope. When the darker side of individualism goes unchecked, it detaches citizens from one another, one quiet withdrawal at a time. Michel Foucault, in his late lectures on what he called the birth of biopolitics, described the rise of what he named homo economicus. This is a version of the human being reimagined as a small, self-interested enterprise, endlessly calculating its own advantage, increasingly stripped of the older bonds of mutual obligation that used to hold communities together. Foucault wasn’t cheering that transformation on; he was diagnosing it. But diagnosis aside, it’s a remarkably accurate sketch of the citizen late-stage American individualism has actually produced: a small enterprise of one, fluent in self-promotion, increasingly illiterate in the language of obligation to anyone outside the enterprise.

Layer onto that a second, related development. A number of the leading voices of postmodern thought — Foucault among them, though he’s often cruder in translation than he was on the page — argued that what we call “truth” is inseparable from power. A society doesn’t discover truth, in this view, so much as manufacture a “regime of truth,” policed by whoever currently holds the institutional keys. Nietzsche had gotten there earlier, scribbling in his notebooks that there are no facts, only interpretations — a line he never actually published, but one his intellectual heirs ran with for the rest of the twentieth century. Deconstructionism, built partly on those foundations, now runs largely unchallenged through university humanities departments and a great many activist organizations across the political spectrum. And the isolation Tocqueville warned about only accelerates the damage. As authentic civic discourse keeps shrinking, people left and right, religious and secular, conservative and progressive, all grow more powerless before an increasingly centralized institutional authority — even while they’re busy fighting each other over which tribe gets to hold the flag.

Tocqueville had a name for the mechanism this eventually produces. He called it, roughly translated, a form of soft despotism — a government that doesn’t rule through terror or the sword, but through what he called “a network of small, complicated rules.” An authority that covers the surface of society with a web of minor regulations, intricate and uniform, through which even the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot break through to rise above the crowd. Americans, in this arrangement, willingly hand over their independence to a government that promises to look after their welfare and then routinely fails to. They’re left, all the while, with the comfortable illusion that they remain personally free. It’s one of history’s genuine ironies that a friendship this destructive — between a citizenry and a government it keeps re-electing to disappoint it — could gradually, over four decades, prepare an entire population for an authoritarian arrangement it would never have accepted if you’d described it to them plainly on day one.

The late political theorist Sheldon Wolin, who taught at Berkeley and Princeton, coined a term in 2008 that sits almost perfectly on top of Tocqueville’s warning: inverted totalitarianism. Classical totalitarianism, the twentieth-century kind, ruled through terror, a single charismatic leader, and constant, exhausting mobilization of the population. Wolin’s inverted version runs in nearly the opposite direction. Politics stays formally democratic. Elections happen on schedule. And yet the deeper power — the power that actually shapes people’s economic and technological reality — sits with a managerial and corporate class that stays comfortably insulated from the whole exercise. Citizens don’t get mobilized into constant fervor. They get gently, systematically demobilized into apathy, kept just anxious enough about their own economic footing that they have neither the time nor the appetite left over for real civic engagement. Tocqueville called the communal bonds of civic responsibility the actual strength of popular democracy. Those bonds have been substantially worn away. What’s left behind is a citizenry increasingly incapable of resisting the concentration of power in Washington by either party, because both parties, at the level that matters, answer to the same handful of institutional interests.

When Every Feeling Becomes a Fact

The relativism sitting underneath all of this — the idea that nothing is universally, externally true — has become one of the defining traits of modern American individualism. Truth, in this framework, isn’t discovered outside yourself; it’s manufactured on the inside, psychologically, individually. Morality collapses into a purely private inner experience. Whatever genuinely helps a person flourish, by that same person’s own private definition of flourishing, is treated as good, full stop, regardless of what it costs anyone standing nearby.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre spent a good part of his career diagnosing exactly this collapse, especially in his 1981 book After Virtue. MacIntyre argued that modern moral language has been quietly hollowed into what he called emotivism. It’s the theory, functioning almost invisibly beneath the surface of ordinary conversation, that a moral claim is nothing more than an expression of personal preference or feeling, dressed up in the grammar of objective argument. “I believe X is wrong” has quietly become indistinguishable, in practice, from “I don’t like X.” Which means two people can no longer actually disagree about ethics in any way reason could ever resolve, because there’s no shared standard left to appeal past their competing feelings. That is not a small loss. It’s the loss of the entire mechanism a free, pluralistic society needs to argue its way to anything resembling a common answer.

It should be obvious that this view carries enormous philosophical, psychological, and social problems. Something can feel deeply meaningful to the person experiencing it and nevertheless be extraordinarily disruptive, even destructive, to everyone around them. Immediate psychological gratification is routinely at odds with any larger social good. People act, again and again, in ways that serve themselves while trampling the rights and needs of somebody else. And a culture with no shared external reference point has surrendered its main tool for saying so out loud. Declining physical and mental health, deepening social isolation, an eroding capacity to tell justice from injustice, a widespread loss of meaning and purpose, and a population’s unhealthy dependence on digital platforms are not separate crises. They are symptoms of the same underlying collapse, and they happen to be extremely profitable for the institutions built on top of them.

Nowhere has the collision between subjective feeling and objective evidence played out more visibly, or more consequentially, than in the debate over pediatric gender medicine. In April of 2024, Dr. Hilary Cass — a pediatrician commissioned by England’s own National Health Service, not a partisan of any stripe — delivered a four-year independent review of the evidence behind puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender-dysphoric youth. Her conclusion was not that any particular belief about gender was a lie. Her conclusion was narrower, and in a way more damning: the underlying research base was simply too weak to support the confidence with which these interventions had been offered to families. The rationale for early puberty suppression, she found, remained unclear. The evidence for its psychological benefit was thin. Its effects on the developing brain, and on later sexual and psychological development, were largely unknown. And clinicians could not reliably predict which young people’s sense of their own gender identity would persist into adulthood and which would not. Her recommendation was not prohibition. It was “extreme caution” — full multidisciplinary review, careful long-term research, an approach built on evidence rather than advocacy in either direction.

That same collision — feeling asked to override evidence and fairness both — shows up in two other places people argue about constantly. The first is sports. In 2022, Lia Thomas, competing for the University of Pennsylvania, became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I women’s swimming title, in the 500-yard freestyle. Female competitors who had trained their whole lives for that pool finished behind someone who had gone through male puberty. In 2025, Penn itself settled a federal civil-rights case by revoking those records and restoring the displaced titles to the women who’d actually earned them. That settlement followed, rather than preceded, a wave of policy reversals across the sport: World Aquatics barred transgender women who had gone through male puberty from elite women’s competition in 2022, World Athletics followed in 2023, and by 2025 both the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee had restricted Olympic women’s events the same way. Whatever else is true about fairness and inclusion, an entire generation of governing bodies looked at the actual evidence on strength, speed, and lung capacity, and concluded the current arrangement wasn’t fair to female athletes. That’s not bigotry. That’s a body of sports scientists updating a policy once the data came in.

The second place is prisons, and here the evidence is harder to look away from because the cost is to real, named people. In Scotland, a person named Isla Bryson was convicted in January 2023 of two rapes committed years earlier, before transitioning, while still presenting as a man. Despite that conviction, Bryson was initially assigned to Scotland’s only women’s prison. The backlash was immediate and came from across the political spectrum, including Scotland’s own First Minister, and Bryson was moved to a men’s facility the same day. Within the year, both Scotland and England reversed course, adopting rules that keep transgender women convicted of violent or sexual offenses out of women’s prisons except in genuinely exceptional, individually reviewed cases. In New Jersey, a transgender inmate named Demi Minor was transferred into Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in 2020 under the state’s gender-identity housing policy. A former inmate, Lauren Mitchell, filed suit in 2024 alleging she was sexually assaulted by Minor on three separate occasions after repeatedly asking, and being denied, reassignment away from her. New Jersey tightened its own policy in 2022 to require a case-by-case safety review before any such placement. California took the opposite path in 2020 with SB 132, allowing incarcerated people to be housed by gender identity on request; hundreds have requested transfers, a group of female inmates sued over safety concerns, and a federal court dismissed that challenge in 2024, leaving the policy in place. A policy built entirely on affirming one person’s stated identity, with no room left for assessing risk to somebody else in the room, is not a policy. It’s a wish, and wishes are a poor substitute for evidence when the people bearing the risk didn’t get a vote.

When a society decides that a felt, subjective truth is automatically entitled to override the slower, harder work of evidence and shared risk, the people who pay the actual price are rarely the adults arguing about it in the abstract. In the cases above, it was children given treatment ahead of the evidence, female athletes displaced from podiums they’d earned, and female inmates housed with people the state’s own courts and legislatures eventually agreed needed a harder look first.

Borders and the Limits of Compassion

A parallel version of the same collision is playing out over immigration, where the instinct to treat compassion as an unlimited, unconditional feeling — rather than a policy that has to be built, deliberately, with actual standards attached — has produced consequences that the people who designed the policy rarely have to live with themselves. No country on earth, including the most generous and humane ones, admits people with literally no vetting, no health screening, no assessment of their capacity to support themselves or contribute to the society they’re entering. Japan doesn’t. Most of the nations of the European Union, whatever their public rhetoric, don’t in practice either. And the places that came closest to trying it — a handful of Western European countries that opened their doors furthest and fastest over the past decade — are the same places now having the most painful public reckonings with the results. Sweden’s own prime minister called in the country’s military in 2023 to help contain a wave of gang shootings and bombings that the government itself linked to a genuine failure of integration policy over the preceding two decades. To Sweden’s credit, its homicide rate came back down again by 2024 — evidence that these problems are neither permanent nor unfixable when a government actually confronts them honestly. France, Germany, and Britain have each had their own version of this reckoning in recent years, and the honest answer to “did some of these countries make real mistakes in how fast and how unconditionally they opened their doors” is yes, they did.

America has had its own version of this argument, and the flashpoint that made national news was a set of apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. Denver’s metro area took in more than 40,000 Venezuelan migrants over about two years, and by 2024, Aurora police had confirmed real activity by Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, arresting ten of its members in the city. A video of armed men in an apartment stairwell went viral and, in the middle of a presidential campaign, turned into a national story about gangs “taking over” American apartment buildings. However, the full picture is messier than the viral version. Aurora’s own police chief said publicly that there was no evidence any single complex had actually been “taken over,” and residents of the building at the center of the story held a press conference insisting they were ordinary working families, not gang members. Some of the underlying complaints — rats, bed bugs, broken heat — look at least as much like a landlord neglecting a building as a gang running one. Both things can be true at once: a real, violent, transnational gang did establish a foothold in an American city with a large, recent migrant population, and a specific viral claim about a specific building got well ahead of what investigators could actually confirm.

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Alleged members of Tren de Aragua in Aurora, Colorado (2024) (Public Domain)

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None of that is an argument against immigration because a nation of immigrants owes an enormous debt to the people who have come here, worked, built families, and made this country stronger for having them. It is an argument against the specific idea that compassion has no obligation to be paired with judgment — that wanting the best for people arriving at your border, and wanting a functioning, safe, self-governing society for the people already inside it, are somehow in conflict rather than both being expressions of the same underlying decency. There is a real and important debate happening right now in this country about vetting standards, about who bears responsibility when the system fails, and about why some of the loudest advocates for the most unconditional version of this policy are, not infrequently, the same people least exposed to its downside. That debate deserves to be had honestly, on the actual facts of specific failures and specific successes, rather than being settled in advance by whichever side is more willing to accuse the other of bad faith.

The Cult of the Self and the Politics of Distraction

All of this — the relativism, the isolation, the tribalism dressed up as culture — feeds directly into the account Wolin gave us of a democracy that is inverted rather than abolished. Americans keep showing up to vote, and at the very same time, keep drifting further from any real sense that the vote changes much of anything that matters. The endless arguments over stolen elections, on both sides of that particular argument over the years, function as something close to a red herring. The deeper truth is uglier and less conspiratorial: political participation itself has become closer to a ritualized pageant than a genuine mechanism of self-government. We keep choosing candidates. The far larger, far more consequential economic and technological institutions that actually run daily life stay comfortably insulated from whatever those candidates promised on the way in.

Our present danger, then, may be considerably less about an authoritarian government seizing our freedoms outright, and considerably more about an already-isolated population of mutually distrustful citizens, splintered into a multitude of warring tribes, gradually losing the basic civic muscle required to govern themselves at all. The social psychologist Eric Hoffer wrote a small, sharp book in 1951 called The True Believer, built on a single, uncomfortable observation. A person without a genuinely compelling reason to be alive will often go looking for a mass movement instead — a cult, a cause, a tribe, a fraternity of grievance — because the movement is generous enough to do all the thinking, all the meaning-making, all the identity-construction on that person’s behalf. Hoffer wasn’t writing about the political left or the political right specifically. He was writing about the exact psychological vacancy that any sufficiently confident movement, of any ideology, is happy to fill. He’d have recognized instantly the frightened, indignant, perfectly certain true believer standing on every side of nearly every argument happening in this country right now. The specific ideology is almost beside the point. It’s the vacancy that’s doing the real work, and it functions on every point of the political compass, not just the ones we’re each personally inclined to blame.

Today’s version of a fool’s hypothesis doesn’t need to survive rigorous scrutiny to become accepted as settled fact. It mostly just needs enough institutional and cultural power behind it, and enough people too exhausted or too intimidated to ask whether the emperor is, in fact, wearing any clothes. That is Wolin’s inverted totalitarianism operating exactly as designed: not through force, but through a kind of managed exhaustion, an Orwellian outsourcing of thought that asks remarkably little of citizens except that they keep choosing a side and stay there.

American Exceptionalism Abroad

Turn that same lens outward, onto how this country behaves in the world, and the pattern only sharpens. Other nations are watching America’s internal decline in real time — in its politics, its universities, its culture, its cities. And yet much of the same world still finds American entertainment, music, and technology genuinely, powerfully attractive. Foreigners can love America as an idea while thoroughly distrusting Washington as an actor, and those two feelings coexist far more easily than we tend to assume.

Pew Research’s own Global Attitudes survey, published in June of 2025, found America’s international image had declined sharply across a wide range of allied nations. Confidence in American leadership fell to some of the lowest levels the survey has recorded in the two decades it has been tracking the question. Many nations with rich, ancient cultures and histories of their own — across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East — carry long institutional memories of being treated as junior partners, or worse, by Western powers generally, and by the United States in particular since it stepped into the role Europe’s old colonial empires once occupied. When American officials lecture other governments about democracy or human rights while simultaneously funding alliances with authoritarian regimes, imposing tariffs and sanctions plenty of legal scholars consider dubious under international law, or backing military interventions and regime changes abroad, that message rarely lands as principle. It lands, more often, as a newer, more sophisticated version of the same old paternalism Tocqueville worried about at home, now exported.

This is not a rejection, on the part of most of the world, of democracy or human rights as ideas. It is a rejection of the specific American claim to be the sole, final judge of whether any other nation has become sufficiently democratic, or civilized, in America’s own preferred image of itself. Samuel Huntington saw a version of this coming back in 1996, in The Clash of Civilizations, when he argued that the post–Cold War world wouldn’t organize itself primarily around ideology, the way the twentieth century had. It would organize instead around older, deeper civilizational identities — Islamic, Confucian, Orthodox, Latin American, African, Western — each with its own internal logic and its own legitimate claim to sovereignty over how it wants to live. Huntington’s specific predictions have been argued over for thirty years, and reasonable scholars still dispute plenty of the details. But the broader shift he anticipated — away from a single American-led, rules-based order, and toward a genuinely multipolar world of competing civilizational blocs — has become considerably harder to dismiss with each passing year.

The clearest evidence of that shift sits in the growth of BRICS, the coalition that began as an informal grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. It has since expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, along with Indonesia as its first Southeast Asian member, with a further ring of partner nations lined up behind them. Together those countries now represent roughly half the world’s population, and a share of global economic output, measured by purchasing power, that has pulled ahead of the G7’s. Whatever one thinks of any individual member of that coalition — and several of them have their own serious human rights problems that deserve honest scrutiny, not a pass — the coalition’s existence reflects something real. A large and growing share of humanity no longer accepts, as simply given, that the American-led order gets to be the permanent, unquestioned final word on how the rest of the world should be governed.

A Muslim society, a Hindu society, an Orthodox Christian society, an Indigenous society: each understands its own religion and cultural history in ways that can differ enormously from how a secular Western liberal understands religion, as a private lifestyle preference tucked away from public life. In many Islamic-majority nations, for instance, religious law shapes family structure, ritual, and social obligation in ways woven into the fabric of daily life, not cordoned off into a private Sunday-morning compartment. Treating that difference as simple backwardness, rather than a different and internally coherent way of organizing a society, is itself a form of the very cultural imperialism America claims to have moved past. The deep irony here is that Tocqueville’s own observation — that American individualism is a genuine achievement, worth admiring — has curdled, on the world stage, into something considerably less admirable: an assumption that the individualist, secular, endlessly self-authored American self is simply the correct and final stage of human development, one every other civilization is obligated to arrive at eventually, whether it asked to or not.

That, in the end, is the throughline connecting everything in our conversation. The individualism Tocqueville watched take root here in the 1830s, and clearly admired, was never destined to stay a private virtue. It was always going to metastasize outward. First into a domestic culture that mistook tribal loyalty for genuine belonging. Then into a relativism that mistook private feeling for public truth. And finally into a foreign policy that mistook one nation’s particular self-understanding for a universal law binding on everyone else. What was once a prize-worthy American trait, exactly as Tocqueville first found it, has traveled a long way from where he left it. It’s no longer simply individualism. At this point, it has become something closer to pathology.

So let’s be honest, we need a real cultural understanding of what’s best and worst in every civilization, including our own, and an honest answer to the question this essay keeps circling: whether a people this fractured still has what it takes to build something resembling a village again.

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Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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