The End is Not Nigh

Shadi Hamid

How did our flag come to be seen as a liability, as something to be ashamed of? How did the mere expression of American pride become unfashionable among Democrats and progressives? There are a few possible reasons. Oikophobia tends to afflict those with the luxury of taking their own good fortune for granted. It requires some degree of privilege, and progressives on the whole enjoy significantly higher levels of educational attainment and the social status that comes along with it. Being disproportionately based in major cities, they’re also more likely to be familiar with other cultures and to have traveled abroad, producing a “grass is greener” effect. As Beckeld notes, progressives tend to emphasize universal values, which are made universal by detaching them from their historical or geographical context. Higher education is correlated with outside travel and exposure to foreign cultures to a remarkable degree. Only 7 percent of college graduates have never been outside the United States, compared with 37 percent of those with some college education or less. Lastly, oikophobia is in part a legitimate reaction to xenophobia, which tends to intensify during periods of insecurity or decline (and xenophobia itself can be a reaction to perceived oikophobia, with each magnifying the other).

Whatever the precise constellation of causes, American self-doubt is now an integral part of mainstream elite cultural production in universities, media, and film. The question of how a culture changes in this way is a difficult one. As the conservative author Michael Brendan Dougherty notes, culture has almost a mystical quality to it; its judgments are “so familiar that it exists like a voice in your head. And yet it is impossible to explain exactly how this happens. Or, as Scruton once put it, culture is a set of attitudes and activities whose value is “neither doubted nor understood.” For better of for worse, oiko