"Incurable American Excess"

"Americans, who dwell in a vast country, sparsely populated by European standards, are hardwired to the notion of individual self-reliance. Europeans, with two 20th-century experiences of cataclysmic societal fracture, are bound to the idea of social solidarity as prudent safeguard and guarantor of human decency. The French see the state as a noble idea and embodiment of citizens’ rights. Americans tend to see the state as a predator on those rights. The French ennoble the dutiful public servant. Americans ennoble the disruptive entrepreneur...

In his intriguing new book, “The United States of Excess,” Robert Paarlberg, a political scientist, cites the 2011 Pew survey as he grapples with these divergent cultures. His focus is on American overconsumption of fuel and food. Why, he asks, is the United States an “outlier” in greenhouse gas emissions and obesity, and what, if anything, will it do about it?...

A resource-rich, spacious nation, mistrustful of government authority, persuaded that responsibility is individual rather than collective, optimistic about the capacity of science and technology to resolve any problem, and living in a polarized political system paralyzed by its “multiple veto points,” tends toward “a scrambling form of adaptation” rather than “effective mitigation...

Individualism trumps all — and innovation, it is somehow believed, will save the country from individualism’s ravages. Paarlberg notes that: “Americans eat alone while at work, alone while commuting to work in the car, alone at the food court while shopping, alone at home while watching TV, and alone in front of the refrigerator both before and after normal mealtime.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/07/opinion/roger-cohen-incurable-american-excess.html?_r=0


oooh, where are all my socialists, I want to read this and develop a set of slightly unrealistic ideals for a more collectively responsible American society.

For a while now, I've been thinking about what might happen if we were to shift the political rhetoric from the central/precious/sacred unit being the family, to that unit being the community. What if we protected an American's right to provide safety to their communities and assumed that Americans were looking to enter stable and secure communities? What if we weren't concerned so much about how nice our family-homes were, but how nice our neighborhoods were? What if we recognized as our property not just the borders of the land we own (in the sort of American Dream white-picket-fence image) but the sidewalks we walk on and the roads we drive on and the 

I just find the focus on the family kind of reductive, and enabling of a lot of selfishness, almost encouraging tragedies of the commons.