Washington Post Book Review - Losing Our Way

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The Washington Post – 10/31/2014

Book review: ‘Losing Our Way,’ a portrait of America, by Bob Herbert

Review by Alec MacGillis -- a senior editor at the New Republic and the author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell.”

A few days ago, I had one of my MARC moments. The commuter train from Baltimore to Washington slowed just outside the Beltway, wheezing along as if it were dragging the 1st Armored Division. The German tourists behind me looked bewildered at our sorry pace. Eventually, the scratchy intercom informed us that a train in front of us was having difficulties. Somnolent conductors gave a shrug when I asked if matters would improve, so at the final pre-Washington stop at New Carrollton, I decided to switch to the Metro and invited the Germans to follow me. Of course, as we crossed from one track to the other, we found the escalator busted.

Bob Herbert would have a ready explanation for this all-too-quotidian snapshot: Everything is broken. In “Losing Our Way,” the former New York Times columnist has made use of his liberation from twice-weekly deadlines to produce a wide-angled appraisal of an America in decline. For Herbert, just about everywhere one looks these days, one finds evidence of national aimlessness and entropy.

He sees it in the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, in the morass of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in our anemic recovery from the Great Recession. “As I traveled the country . . . I couldn’t help but notice that something fundamental in the very character of the United States had shifted,” he writes. “There was a sense of powerlessness and resignation among ordinary people that I hadn’t been used to seeing. The country seemed demoralized.” His goal is to “show what really happened, how we got into such a deep fix, and how we can get out of it. Like a print in an old-fashioned darkroom, a clearer portrait of America will emerge.”

In this task, Herbert joins a burgeoning tribe — the liberal diagnosticians of national decline. There are the political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, who with “Winner-Take-All Politics” (2010) sought to explain how specific actions taken in Washington starting in the mid-1970s led to today’s gaping income inequality. There are the economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, who in “The Price of Inequality” (2012) argues that things will only get worse as inequality depresses growth. There are the journalists such as George Packer, who in “The Unwinding” (2013) tells the story of the nation’s fraying through the lives of a handful of Americans.

Herbert offers an amalgam of these approaches, mixing explanatory passages on infrastructure decay, joblessness and other contemporary woes with narrative interludes to illuminate said woes. He introduces us to Mercedes Gorden, who miraculously survived her Ford Escort’s plunge off I-35 into the Mississippi River but was left so disfigured by an array of severe injuries that she half-expected her fiance to break off their engagement (in fact, he cared for her diligently). In the book’s most powerful section, Herbert introduces us to Dan Berschinski, who as a 24-year-old Army lieutenant lost both his legs to an IED in Afghanistan in 2009 and somehow learned how to walk on his prosthetics, maintaining inconceivably high spirits throughout.

So compelling are some of Herbert’s characters that one wishes he had spent more time with them. (Or even had focused his book entirely on the plight of returning veterans, who clearly provoke the most passion from him.) We get only fleeting glimpses of the formerly middle-class couple in suburban New Jersey who spent an entire summer without gas or electricity, or the man in suburban Atlanta who went from being a Pfizer sales rep making $150,000 to running the Jumbotron at Falcons games while his wife went to work as a school lunch lady with a hairnet and black non-skid shoes to avoid slipping in the dish room.

Meanwhile, Herbert’s explanatory passages are not nearly as gripping. Cliches and repetition abound. In his chapter on the jobs shortage, Herbert tells us that “the most terrible of all of America’s wounds is its chronic, insidious unemployment”; that “when Americans cannot find jobs at good wages, everything else falls apart”; that “the absence of work for those who want and need it is toxic in every imaginable way”; and that “something fundamental had gone haywire, and the loss of sufficient employment was at the heart of it.” Yes, got it the first time.

The problem lies partly in the book’s structure. As Herbert jumps from one realm to another — from our unpreparedness for Hurricane Sandy to the machinations of corporate education reformers and back to our war veterans — he never fully explains how he sees this patchwork being linked together. Yes, our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan left fewer resources for nation-building at home, but the two realms are not coterminous. Inequality and middle-class wage stagnation were worsening long before Dick Cheney set his eyes on Baghdad, and the wars would have been ruinous even if we had managed to avoid the financial crisis of 2008.

The one obvious connective thread among most of the ills described by the book is a partisan one: the tax cuts, wars and public disinvestments deplored by Herbert have been primarily the work of Republicans. Herbert’s as liberal as they come, but he makes the partisan point far less explicitly than he could, perhaps to keep the book from being branded as another lefty lament — he’s after something larger here, an attempt to capture an enervation that spans the political spectrum.

That’s an admirable ambition, but Herbert has trouble sustaining the claim that our quandary is so all-encompassing. He occasionally falls into the declinist’s trap of casting the past in overly nostalgic terms or failing to reckon with inconvenient historical facts (for instance, that some of the other bridge collapses he cites occurred in the glory days of the mid-20th century.) He leaves all but unmentioned areas of public life where we have made recent progress, such as the sharp drop in the rate of the uninsured as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Herbert closes on a just-barely-optimistic note, holding out hope for a “new citizens’ movement emerging and ultimately changing America’s cultural and economic landscape” in the model of the civil rights movement. Such a movement may arise, and his diagnosis may help rally some readers to the cause. But the masses will require a more cohesive call to action.