Wholesale No. 36

The prospect of bringing human history in for a top-down rehab has always been irresistible to earnestly striving Americans. What is it about the project of dramatically upgrading the quality of our species-being that is so quintessentially American—and why is it so reliably doomed to the most disastrous kind of failure in the execution stage? From Eli Whitney to Elon Musk, Americans have envisioned history as merely the raw material that our restlessly tinkering visionaries employ to deliver the same basic goods in faster, cheaper, more streamlined fashion. In Baffler No. 36, “A Crack in Everything,” we take a more sober look at this amnesiac, binge-drinking approach to social improvement as we imagine it to be foreordained in these United States.