DYSFUNCTIONING AMERICA

William Egginton, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) (Egginton "argues that we are in danger of losing our civic culture. Instead of a forum for engaging in debate and achieving compromise, our public sphere has devolved into a blood sport in which scoring point for the home team seems preferable to improving the state of the nation. A strong civic culture depends on having a society whose members are not only individuals set on improving their lots, but also citizens who see their political interests as rooted in the commonwealth they share with their fellows. But since the 1970s, Americans have become increasingly isolated from the national community. As the right advanced an agenda of unfettered individualism and the left made crucial gains in defending minority rights, what was lost was the very idea of a commonwealth which individuals and groups can adjudicate their differences. Id. at 12. Such books (and essays) address (and remind me of) one of the saddest aspects of much of higher education in America today: that it, paradoxically, shrinks the mind rather than expands it.).