America’s Discord Looks Like a Job for the Superego

But the most useful lesson of this election season has to do with something subtler: The results may suggest a kind of embarrassment starting to spread in the American civic mind. It’s an awakening suspicion that this mess is what the country deserves and is its responsibility to fix. There’s something to be said for embarrassment—even for shame.

This self-discomfort is connected to the way people in the 21st century experience history. It has been borne in on Americans for a couple of years now that so much of the spectacle unfolding before them is somehow instantly archaic. It is, as it were, junk. The Barnum & Bailey of

Donald Trump,

the Alice in Wonderland of

Joe Biden,

the doctrinaire be-nice-or-else of the canceling woke, the paramilitary fruitcakes loose in the land, the decadent gender obsessions, the assault rifles, the politics of germs, the recreational looting, the law that turns felons loose, pandemic homelessness, the trillions in debt that means nothing, the wide-open border and the sanctimony—all of this dreary cultural programming begins to seem threadbare, obsolete, ridiculous.

The pageant of our world gets old before our eyes. And yet we seem to be bound to the wheel of this nonsense, doomed to repeat it. America needs a new team of writers.

If I behold Mr. Trump now, I see a portly silhouette from another era of history altogether, a figure like

Grover Cleveland

or

Chester A. Arthur.

Once, American intellectuals spoke of seeking a “usable past.” America today is glumly in search of a viable present. A new present—please. Why are Americans stuck with these absurdities? They suspect they can do better. They dimly remember that they once did.

Whatever its tragedies and horrors (there were many), the 20th century seemed real. No one is sure about the 21st, which goes in for hysteria and hallucination. Is history on drugs? Is it a kind of professional wrestling, a mere performance, a fake?

The human brain has acquired new instruments—auxiliary electronics that are hooked into algorithms organized, with ulterior purpose, in some sinister way. Smartphones and social media have become universal. So now, in the scheme of 21st-century psycho-politics, hysteria and hallucination are the meat and potatoes of the public mind. The customary human madness has been digitally augmented.

It’s hard to run a sane civilization under these conditions, but people adapt. All rapid change makes the world unreal for a time. In the early 19th century, at the start of the age of steam, people believed that traveling on a railroad train at speeds greater than 15 miles an hour would cause insanity. As the train went faster, women’s uteruses would fly away. It’s possible that the midterms are a signal of the country working out an accommodation with the new physics and metaphysics.

Freud’s model may still be useful. Think of the condition, in the year 2022, of the American id, ego and superego. Ask which one of them dominates the other two—which of them has power in the land.

It’s still the worst of the bunch: the ignoble id—the old rock star, the wreck of the ’60s, still smelly and pornographic, except that in the 21st century the frolics of its youth (untrammeled sex, recreational drugs, radical politics) have hardened into plagues of mass pornography, killer drugs and political divisions that are bitter, Balkan, inveterate. The American id, which the young once thought charming, is now old, corrupt and horrible.

The American ego, in the meantime, is battered and bruised and drenched in guilt, having long since been persuaded that, whatever its earlier pretensions, the country in its essence is a wicked fraud.

That leaves the superego—the all-but-abandoned house of religion, education, ideals and character. That’s where the rebuilding will be done, if at all. It’s to the superego that the dawning sense of American embarrassment should retreat and set up shop. I like to think that the estimable

Ben Sasse,

who is resigning his U.S. Senate seat to become president of the University of Florida, has some such calculation in mind.

Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism,” forthcoming in January.