Reddit reviews Age of Fracture

I've actually only read Exiting the Vampire Castle, and I (not surprisingly) find it really powerful, and not just because of the, well, context. I haven't read much Zizek and Adorno, to be honest. Once in awhile I try to dip into Zizek and it just doesn't work for me. He did a thing on trans issues, for example, which wasn't just offensive but that sort of offensive you get when you're trying to write in a clever and look-how-smart-I-am-way about a subject where you REALLY don't have any genuine knowledge. (I'm lobbing one over the plate with that remark, aren't I?)

As for the question about the U.S., it's really interesting, isn't it? We've always been an insanely individualistic people, and I think the absence of a strong left, lately, makes those impulses even stronger. I can't recommend "Age of Fracture" by the Princeton historian Daniel T. Rodgers enough on this stuff. From early on;

>Across the multiple fronts of ideational battle, from the speeches of presidents to books of social and cultural theory, conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.

Could anyone sum it up better than that? And while Rodgers believes that 9/11 temporarily slowed down or partially reversed this trend (which doesn't mean he supports, like, the foreign-policy response to it, of course), he thinks it then continued apace.