Do whatever you want

American individualism was once bounded by genuine community obligation. It has shed that obligation and kept the freedom. What remains is something the tradition's founders would not recognise.

This is the second in a series of reflections on America at 250. The first examined the country’s relationship with its own contradictions.

On September 13, 1922, a group of teenage boys in the Mulberry Bend neighbourhood of Manhattan began attacking men in the street. Not for their wallets or their watches. For their hats. Specifically, for their straw hats, which the rioters judged to be socially impermissible two days before the unofficial community deadline of September 15, after which straw was considered unseasonable and any man still wearing it was fair game for public ridicule and, apparently, physical assault. The riot lasted eight days. It spread to Harlem and across lower Manhattan. Men who tried to pass through the affected streets in their summer headwear had their hats snatched and stomped. Several were beaten badly enough to require medical attention. About a dozen teenagers were arrested. The newspapers had covered the tradition for years, running annual warnings that September 15 was approaching and that men should switch to felt.

This is not an endorsement of hat-related violence. It is a useful data point about something that has been lost in American life over the past century, namely the expectation, backed by genuine social pressure, that individual conduct exists within a framework of community obligation. The men of 1922 who were attacked for wearing the wrong hat were not being judged for their private beliefs or their personal choices in any deep sense. They were being held to a shared standard of public behaviour, however arbitrary that standard was, by a community that felt entitled to enforce it. The entitlement was expressed with a force that we would now consider absurd. But the underlying logic, that you owe something to the people around you in terms of how you present yourself and conduct yourself in shared space, has not obviously improved in its absence.

The Individualism That Was Always There

It would be easy to tell this as a simple decline narrative. Previously, Americans were bound together by shared norms and obligations, and now they are atomised individuals who answer to nothing and no one. This is not quite right, and it misses something important about where American individualism came from and what it was always capable of becoming.

The individualist tradition in America is genuinely old and deep. It predates the republic. The Puritan settlers of New England brought with them a theology in which the individual soul stood in direct relationship with God, unmediated by church hierarchy, responsible for its own salvation. The frontier, real and mythologised, generated a culture in which self-reliance was not just a virtue but a survival requirement. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting in the 1830s, noted with some alarm what he called individualism, a word he used in something close to its modern pejorative sense, the tendency of Americans to withdraw from public life into the small circle of family and friends and to regard the wider community with indifference. He saw it as a potential threat to democratic life, and he thought the America of his day was only kept from it by the habit of association, the extraordinary proliferation of civic organisations, religious congregations, local political bodies, and voluntary associations through which Americans connected themselves to something larger than their immediate interests.

What Tocqueville was describing was a tension, not a settled condition. The individualism was there from the beginning. So was the communal pressure that contained it. For most of American history, those two forces were in genuine competition, and the competition produced something liveable. The individualism gave Americans their energy, their mobility, their restlessness, their willingness to reinvent. The community obligation gave them their churches, their neighbourhood associations, their labour unions, their social clubs, their informal but real expectations about how one behaved in public. Neither side won entirely. The hat riot of 1922 was, in its way, a moment when the communal pressure asserted itself with unusual and unfortunate force. But the communal pressure was real.

When the Balance Shifted

The balance has shifted, gradually and then rapidly, over the past several decades, in favour of the individual and against the community. The shift has multiple causes and no single villain. The decline of institutional religion removed one of the primary structures through which community obligation was transmitted and enforced. Union membership, which had tied industrial workers to collective identity and collective action, has fallen from roughly 35 percent of the workforce in the mid-1950s to under 10 percent today. The physical design of American cities changed in ways that made accidental community encounter less likely: the suburb, the shopping mall, the drive-through, the private backyard, all represent architectural choices that reduce the frequency and intimacy of contact between people who have not chosen to be in each other’s company.

Social media accelerated what physical design had begun. The promise of the internet was that it would connect people across distance and difference. What it produced, at least in part, was a technology perfectly calibrated for the expression of individual identity without the friction of actual community. You can curate who you see, block who you disagree with, present a version of yourself that is never required to accommodate the reality of other people’s presence. The result is a culture in which self-expression has become a dominant value but self-expression in the specific mode of broadcast rather than dialogue, of performing rather than participating.

What has changed most visibly is the attitude toward shared public space and shared public obligation. The straw hat rioters of 1922 were, by any reasonable standard, behaving badly. But their underlying assumption, that public behaviour is subject to community standards and that individuals who violate those standards can expect a social response, was not wrong in principle. What has replaced it is something closer to the idea that public space is simply a collection of individuals each pursuing their own purposes, and that any expectation that those individuals adjust their behaviour for the benefit of the collective is an imposition on their freedom.

The consequences of this are visible in settings ranging from the trivial to the serious. Anyone who has flown on an American commercial airline in the past decade has encountered the specific texture of this cultural shift. There is a version of airline travel that older Americans still remember, or have been told about, in which passengers dressed for the occasion, treated cabin crew with a degree of deference, and maintained a shared understanding that the experience was communal and that communal experiences required certain adjustments of individual behaviour. That version of air travel was also, it must be acknowledged, expensive and exclusive in ways that made the social performance of respectability easier to maintain. The democratisation of air travel, which is an unambiguous good, brought onto planes a population that had not been socialised into the old norms, and the old norms were not replaced with new ones. What filled the vacuum was the logic of the individual consumer exercising their rights in a commercial transaction, which produces a very different set of expectations about what you owe the people seated within inches of you for the next five hours.

The Lowest Possible Denominator

The phrase “do whatever you want and don’t care about other people” is a rough description of the cultural endpoint of a process that began with something much more admirable. The ideal of individual freedom, at its best, was the freedom to become something: to escape the constraints of class and origin and inherited expectation, to make yourself through effort and intelligence and will. This is the individualism that produced generations of immigrants who built new lives in an unfamiliar country, that valorised self-reliance and self-invention, that gave America its peculiar energy and its genuine greatness.

What has survived of that tradition is largely the freedom part, stripped of the becoming part. The right to do whatever you want has expanded enormously. The expectation that you will use that freedom to build something, to contribute something, to participate in something larger than your immediate gratification, has contracted. What remains is closer to the freedom of the consumer than the freedom of the citizen. The right to choose between options someone else has provided, to express preferences, to be left alone. It is freedom as the absence of obligation rather than freedom as the capacity for self-creation.

Robert Putnam documented the collapse of American civic life in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, tracking the decline of the organisations and associations that Tocqueville had identified as the bulwark against the individualist tendency: the fraternal lodges, the civic clubs, the bowling leagues, the parent-teacher associations, the church choirs. Americans were, Putnam showed, doing more activities alone or in very small groups and fewer activities as members of organisations with broader social purposes. His data ran through the late 1990s. The two and a half decades since have continued and in some respects accelerated the trend he identified.

The political expression of this cultural shift is visible in the collapse of any rhetoric of shared sacrifice or collective obligation in American public life. The last major political moment in which an American president successfully asked citizens to accept a cost for the benefit of their community was probably the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, and even that moment was brief and quickly superseded by a politics of consumption and tax cuts rather than shared burden. The idea that citizenship involves obligations as well as rights, that living in a community means accepting constraints on individual behaviour for the benefit of the people you share it with, has become almost rhetorically unavailable in mainstream American politics. Any politician who suggests it is immediately accused of socialism, statism, or the violation of some fundamental American value.

This is the lowest possible denominator: not the freedom to become something extraordinary, but the freedom to be left alone, to be exempt from expectation, to treat every shared space and every communal institution as a backdrop for individual preference rather than a claim on individual responsibility. It is a long way from the frontier self-reliance that the individualist tradition idealises, because the frontier self-reliance was embedded in communities of mutual aid where people depended on each other in ways that created real obligations. The homesteaders who ploughed the Great Plains could not survive without their neighbours. Their individualism was genuine and it was also bounded by necessity into something that looked a great deal like community.

What Has Been Lost and What Remains

The hat rioters of 1922 were enforcing a norm that was, in retrospect, trivial and their methods were inexcusable. But the world they lived in was one in which the expectation that public behaviour would be regulated by community standards was so deeply assumed that it expressed itself through violence when violated. That world has gone and very few people would choose to return to it in its entirety. The conformism of early twentieth-century American life was oppressive in ways that fell hardest on those who were already marginalised: on racial minorities, on women, on anyone whose identity did not conform to the narrow standards of the dominant community. The liberation from that conformism was, in many respects, a genuine moral advance.

What the liberation did not come with was a replacement for the sense of mutual obligation that conformism, however oppressively, had also maintained. The question of what you owe the people around you, what adjustments of your individual preferences are required by the fact of living in a community, was answered in the old regime by the community itself, through norms and expectations and social pressure. The new regime answered it by saying that the individual decides. And the individual, exercising that freedom across a population of 340 million people with different values and different communities and different senses of what public space is for, has produced something that does not fully deserve to be called a community at all.

This is not nostalgia for the hat riots. It is an observation that the individualist tradition, which is genuinely one of the most powerful and productive cultural forces in human history, has arrived at a version of itself that its earlier practitioners would not recognise and would not admire. The self-made American of the nineteenth century was embedded in churches, in trade associations, in civic clubs, in neighbourhood life, in ways that created accountability to other people. The self-made American of the twenty-first century is more likely to be embedded primarily in a digital network of chosen affinities, optimised for self-expression and minimised for obligation, in ways that create accountability to almost no one.

At 250, America retains the vocabulary of individualism and has largely lost the communal counterweight that made it liveable. Whether it can recover that counterweight without recovering the conformist violence that sometimes enforced it is the central cultural question the country has not yet found a way to answer.