Oscar Hammerstein II, for his 1943 play Oklahoma, wrote a song entitled The Farmer and the Cowman. A quick excerpt from the lyrics:
Andrew:
I’d like to say a word for the farmer,
He come out west and made a lot of changes
Will:
He come out west and built a lot of fences.
Curly:
And built 'em right acrost our cattle ranges!
Eventually, the song refrains:
Territory folks should stick together,
Territory folks should all be pals.
Cowboys dance with farmer's daughters,
Farmers dance with the ranchers' gals.
Hammerstein could certainly not have known that his witty jingle, describing the feud between cowhands and farmers in pre-statehood Oklahoma, would easily relate to the deep divides in American society in the 2020s.
America is a country divided between the cultural myth of the cowboy who wants the freedom to roam — the freedom of individuality — and the farmer, a settler who realizes that only through community can the future of the society be safeguarded. Just think about the 2016 presidential election, which brought these divides to a head. There was Hillary, Clinton the author of “It Takes A Village,” and Donald Trump, the independent real estate developer who saw rules in the same way that Hammerstein’s cowman did, as existing only to fence him in.
The cowboy myth has often given the United States an exceptional advantage, and there is no better example of this than the development of the country’s high-tech industry.
Because of the perceived limited role of government in the United States versus that of other countries, two related concepts — creative disruption, observed by the Austrian economist Joseph Shumpeter, and disruptive innovation, by the Harvard professor Clayton Christensen — could essentially merge in the United States and allow tech companies to invent new ways of doing things without worrying that the government would interfere to protect established workers or industries that might be disrupted in the process. As an example, it would be very strange within American culture if the government protected printing houses against electronic readers or research librarians against Google.
Shumpeter’s creative disruption outlines how economic progress is not gradual or peaceful but rather disjointed and possibly unpleasant. Whenever an entrepreneur disrupts an existing industry, it is likely that existing workers, businesses, or even entire sectors can be temporarily thrown into disarray. Christensen’s idea of disruptive innovation refers to an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market-leading firms and products.
Neither Schumpeter’s nor Christensen’s concepts are illogical, but in the United States, by tradition and by law, these concepts are given free rein. By comparison, in Europe, the sovereign (government) generally sees as its right and its duty the protection of its “vassals” from destruction, maintaining balance within society.
With basically no limits on how disruptive innovation migrates through the marketplace, America’s most innovative companies have a built-in incubator and test market of 326 million people for their products. And because of the merger between technology and globalization, products that are successfully test-driven in the American marketplace can immediately go viral around the globe.
This philosophical heritage, however, has a disquieting downside. Simply put, when there is a crisis within America—whether it is because of globalization, or the combination of automation and artificial intelligence, or a global pandemic—there is no automatic government response to try to ameliorate these problems. There is no village. Instead the response is caught in a no man’s land between the farmer and the cowman. Contrary to Hammerstein’s lyrics, the cowman does not dance with the farmer’s daughter. Instead the problems fester and grow, caught up in endless political and philosophical debate.
One would have thought that Franklin D. Roosevelt had resolved this issue during the Great Depression. Now, ironically, the same cowboy-culture innovations that have made America the place to be in the new world of technology are easily employed to create havoc and disunity. They are often used to protect the cowman culture even when that culture has overreached, and even when its actions have become extremely detrimental to the society as a whole.
The problem goes beyond domestic issues. For America’s bifurcated political culture, it was easy to be a world leader when issues could be filtered through a good guy versus bad guy lens. But can America be a global leader today when a significant portion of its society sees today’s global issues – pandemics, global warming, economic contagion — as individual issues? Is America right now its own worst enemy?
Edward Goldberg is an assistant professor at New York University Center for Global Affairs where he teaches International Political Economy. He is the author of “Why Globalization Works for America: How Nationalist Trade Policies Are Destroying Our Country”which was just published by Potomac Books. Previously he wrote “The Joint Ventured Nation: Why America Needs A New Foreign Policy.” The views expressed are the author's own.