The good news is obvious. The menu expanded dramatically. Voices once excluded could finally speak. Niche tastes found audiences. Curiosity no longer required permission. If you wanted depth, strangeness, humor, outrage, comfort, or beauty, you could find it—instantly.
But the tradeoff was subtle and only became clear over time. A shared culture does not fragment all at once; it thins, then stretches, then quietly dissolves. When everyone draws from a different information stream, agreement becomes harder—not just about policy, but about meaning. Not only what we should do, but what kind of country we think we live in, what stories count as real, and which events are worth noticing at all.
What felt like liberation at the level of individual choice became disorientation at the level of collective identity.
This is not because Americans suddenly became less reasonable or less patriotic. It is because coherence is an emergent property. It depends on overlap—on common reference points, shared facts, and cultural touchstones that allow disagreement to occur within some mutually intelligible frame. As those overlaps shrink, disagreement stops being a conversation and becomes parallel monologues.
Lewis Carroll anticipated this sensation better than most political theorists ever could. We have wandered, collectively, into a kind of Wonderland—one where nonsense is offered as poetry, where confidence substitutes for meaning, and where everyone seems to be talking, but no one quite appears to be talking to anyone else. Like Alice at the tea party, we sense that a conversation is underway, yet we “can’t quite follow it,” because the rules keep changing and the participants seem to be answering questions no one else asked.
Rabbit holes are, in themselves, a wonderful thing. Curiosity is not the enemy. Exploration is not the problem. The problem arises when a society becomes all rabbit holes and no common ground—when every individual experience is rich, but the collective story grows thin.
The information economy did not merely give us more facts. It gave us more realities. And while that abundance made personal freedom easier to exercise, it made social agreement far harder to maintain. We gained choice faster than we developed new institutions, norms, or habits capable of helping us choose together.
In that sense, our cultural confusion is not a failure of values so much as a consequence of success: a society suddenly able to generate meaning faster than it can coordinate it. Wonderland is dazzling. It is also exhausting. And sooner or later, every Alice begins to ask not just what else is there to see, but how do we find our way back to something shared?
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And the real punchline—the one we keep circling without fully naming—is that we are, and will remain, multicultural.
Whatever version of America we define next cannot be built by wishing that fact away. It has to begin with it. People realizing their potential will pursue happiness along radically different paths and, in the process, become very different people. That is not a failure of cohesion; it is the condition of freedom.
Some Americans will remain squares. Others will always be beatniks. Some will describe themselves as products of culture—of learning, environment, and choice. Others will insist that genes, heritage, and destiny loom larger. These differences are not aberrations to be solved. They are permanent features of a society that places liberty at its center.
Specialization, after all, was never only about the factory floor. Adam Smith gave us the image of one man drawing out the wire and another sharpening it, but specialization has long since escaped the bounds of production. We now specialize in lifestyles, sensibilities, identities, communities, and values. We choose different sources of meaning, beauty, obligation, and belonging. And that divergence is not going away.
What this means is something both humbling and hopeful: we will never be the same as one another—and that shared experience of distinctness may be one of the most universal things about us. To feel uniquely oneself, to sense that no one else quite occupies the same vantage point in the world, is an experience nearly everyone recognizes.
If there is a foundation on which a modern American identity can be rebuilt, it is not sameness but mutual recognition across difference—an acceptance that creativity, productivity, and vitality emerge not from enforced uniformity, but from coordination among people who are unlike one another in meaningful ways.
A country that can hold that idea—one that treats diversity of paths not as a threat but as a resource—has the potential to be endlessly adaptive. Not tidy. Not tranquil. But fascinating, creative, and wildly productive.
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