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As far back as the Neolithic, the rhythms of life in city and country have led to vastly divergent attitudes, anxieties, and aspirations. But what happens when new technologies of communication and commerce begin applying these sets of characteristics not to entire communities, but to individual consumers? Jackson @Gracecthdralprk returns to Gladio Free Europe to discuss a typology of American life, examining two new and rival tribes currently coming into form. Shaped by recent capitalistic trends in education, land use, and advertising, these two sets of citizens are the urbane and self-critical “America A” and the exurban and self-satisfied “America B.”
The hosts of Gladio Free Europe developed this concept across the last several years, and Jackson had just come out with a riveting essay on just what these categories are, and how their nuance can lead to more thoughtful analysis of the United States.
America A, derived from the logic of the city, is a mindset and values system that purports to celebrate openness to experience, purity of thought and deed, and education over ownership. These preoccupations can even be seen in many Americans who do not live in the city, but instead orient toward the anxieties of urban life. America B, the logic of the sprawling exurbs, emphasizes common sense, hard work, practicality, and material attainment over intellectual reward.
Both of these categories include Americans of all classes, all colors, and all political persuasions. Both are fundamentally bourgeois, deriving from different relations to capitalistic production. And both are fundamentally American, the modern expressions of tendencies reaching far back into this country’s history.
While these categories do not describe all Americans, they offer new means of understanding social division within the United States, and might help explain otherwise puzzling cultural trends and political developments. And though both of these tribes can be petty and petulant, hideously self-absorbed in light of the oppression and exploitation required to maintained their ravenous consumption, they each offer a persuasive vision of what the good life ought to entail.
Read Jackson's new piece on America A and America B, with an introduction by Liam: https://newmoralworld.substack.com/p/alphabet-america
