By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — America, that shining city upon a hill, seems ever more like a half-lit town upon a hummock.

It feels to many of its people less a problem of structures and numbers, grave and real as they are, than a challenge of spirit. The future has become something to fear. To change one’s destiny seems — and statistically is — crushingly hard. The political system America once commended to the world no longer appears to work in its own backyard. Old habits and new realities mingle uneasily: should we shop as frenziedly as the television asks us to this Christmas, or rather save like the Chinese?

It was in a moment much like this, in the middle part of the 19th century, that the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville decided to have himself an American adventure. The difference is that, back then, America was the India/China/Brazil of its time, and Europe was playing the role of 2011 America. Tocqueville saw himself fast becoming a citizen of the past, and so went to see about the onrushing future.

So bleak is the news from the United States that it is easy to forget the American magic that Tocqueville found and so masterfully distilled in prose. But his account of that magic is vitally important, for it is surely more than the U.S. economy that needs fixing. The culture appears to have lost its mojo, its churning energy. Tocqueville, perhaps, offers clues to how to bring it back.

He observed a lived practice of equality in the United States that struck him as fundamentally different from European mores (excluding — and it was a giant exclusion — American slaves, whose realities he all but ignored). But if today Americans have divided into rival camps that speak of equality, on one hand, and self-reliance, on the other, Tocqueville found that the two ideas worked well together in the American experience, even reinforced each other.

“As social equality spreads there are more and more people who, though neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained to keep enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs,” he wrote. “Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody.”

Tocqueville admired the resulting values of middleness: a society defined by the needs and aspirations of the people in the middle, not by the overwhelming demands of the vast poor, nor by the gilded ambitions of the rich. Government was limited, local, even intimate, because it was neither hijacked from above by the aristocrats nor from below by the needy, appetitive mob.

Today, for all the partisanship in American life, there is a near-consensus on the idea that a president “creates jobs.” At a recent Republican presidential debate, the candidates were asked to enumerate how many jobs they would create. (Some demurred; Mitt Romney, private sector man that he is, gave the precise figure of 11.5 million in one term — or 7,900 jobs per day.)

Especially because it comes from the party more suspicious of government activity, Tocqueville would have found this notion of “creating jobs” quite astonishing. The American that he encountered “trusts fearlessly in his own powers, which seem to him sufficient for everything,” he wrote. “Suppose that an individual thinks of some enterprise, and that enterprise has a direct bearing on the welfare of society; it does not come into his head to appeal to public authority for its help.”

But the spirit of free enterprise he admired was less about too-big-to-fail outfits than about small ones: bakers and butchers and tillers of the soil. Because these enterprises were small and self-contained, they rose when they deserved to rise and fell, similarly, on merit. This peculiarly American churning impressed Tocqueville greatly.

That churning had important social consequences. It was connected, Tocqueville thought, to the American sense of possibility: in a society in flux, when “castes disappear and classes are brought together,” he wrote, “the human mind imagines the possibility of an ideal but always fugitive perfection.” Here, again, equality had contradictory features: because humans could become anything, in theory, they aspired to greatness. They believed in their “indefinite perfectibility.”

That faith in perfectibility appears to have retreated in American life. It lives on in weight-loss programs and self-help books — or, more seriously, in a more open devotion to religion than commonly found in overwhelmingly secular Europe. But the belief that you might die in a markedly better existence than the one you came into is fading. And for good reason: a study published last year by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that Americans now experience lower social mobility than prevails in almost any other rich country.

In a churning society, Tocqueville observed — again heeding slaves not at all — “servants do not form a race apart, they have no customs, prejudices or mores peculiar to themselves.” But in America today waiting tables is becoming more of a lifelong occupation and less of a side gig for college students; tattoos are becoming de rigueur for a class of Americans who know they have little chance of climbing into a world where those tattoos could pose a problem; the 1 percent and the 99 percent glare angrily at each other. Few in either camp feel any realistic prospect of crossing over to that other side.

A Tocquevillean reading of today’s America, then, may venture beyond the observation that it is stagnating. It might go so far as to say that it is calcifying, that it risks becoming a society of castes. In such a society, Tocqueville wrote, speaking of his Europe, “everyone thinks that he can see the ultimate limits of human endeavor quite close in front of him, and no one attempts to fight against an inevitable fate.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Buddy Roemer — as long a long shot for the American presidency as you’ll find — was talking about the country’s condition the other day when he stumbled upon a metaphor he liked.

“The powerful among us are doing quite well,” he said. “It might be like a plantation mentality, where those in the big house are doing pretty well, and they don’t see a necessity to have irrigation put in. They don’t see a necessity to rotate crops. They don’t see a necessity to fertilize over the winter.”

If you can’t remember a Republican presidential candidate besides this one comparing the wealthy to slave owners and railing against inequality, it is because they generally don’t. And you may not have heard from Mr. Roemer himself. An ex-governor of Louisiana and an ex-congressman, he is excluded from nationally televised debates in the United States, owing to a mere percentage point or so of support in polls.

Lurking in the shadows of a volatile Republican race, Mr. Roemer has styled himself as that least likely of political creatures: a Republican Southerner who endorses and seeks the votes of both the leftist Occupy movement, which he has visited, and the rightist Tea Party movement — even if neither endorses him in turn.

In fact, he sees them as part of the same cause: “They both smell something,” he said by telephone this week. “They phrase it differently.”

He has built his campaign around what he believes they smell. It is a theory that is unlikely to win him the presidency but is a useful observation from an ex-insider: that money — which made America what it is, and underwrote its greatness — now threatens to suffocate its democracy, and thus to accelerate a fall.

“My prediction for this political system, which is run by special interests who are profiting like they never have before, is that change will be minor, it will be temporary, it will not be profound, it will not be reform, and it will not deal with the real issues,” said Mr. Roemer, 68, who studied at Harvard College and Harvard Business School, spent more than a decade in politics and is the leader of a small bank today.

Of course, a man who seeks to keep money out of politics is likely to struggle to raise money. Mr. Roemer has forsworn all campaign contributions larger than $100, a figure he says he chose because he assumed that was what any citizen could afford. His rivals accept checks for up to 25 times more.

When explaining this position, he reached for another metaphor, inspired by decades of living with disease. “As a diabetic, you are what you eat,” he said. “And as a candidate, you are where you get your money.”

Keeping big money away is just one facet of Mr. Roemer’s omnidirectional heresy. He has also proposed something that has never actually existed in America: a unity government to pull the country back from the brink.

He said that, if elected, his vice president would be from a different party — he pointed to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat-turned-independent, as one possibility. He also proposed a cabinet that would be “reflective of America and of both parties,” going beyond the token one or two rival-party appointments now current practice.

Though some of his views are anathema to Democrats — for instance, his opposition to abortion rights — he said that he would not make those issues priorities. His heterogeneous team would focus, first, on campaign finance reform to purge money from politics and, second, on jobs, including by pressing to narrow America’s trade deficit with China.

As his odds among Republicans flicker, Mr. Roemer is working toward a perhaps more classic third-party bid, under the banner of a group called Americans Elect, which is seeking to crowdsource a presidential ticket over the Internet.

In conversation, he seems most interested not in winning, but in having said what he needed to say before it was too late.

What the country needs, in his telling, is to move beyond the argument about big government versus small. It needs to focus on how to create “government that works,” he said, to keep pace with technological and geopolitical change.

“By its nature, it is dangerous,” he said of government, “so we must have it as small as possible. But in a world this dangerous, government needs to work. It needs to be adequate to the task. It needs to be focused and flexible to that task. And we’re not there yet. I mean, we’re still arguing over size, and we must get beyond that.”

At one point, he stopped to find a quote from a book. “In ingenuity, in skill, in energy, we are inferior to none,” it went. “Our national character, the free institutions under which we live, the liberty of thought and action, an unshackled press, spreading the knowledge of every discovery and of every advance in science, combine with our natural and physical advantages to place us at the head of those nations which profit by the free interchange of their products.”

“Robert Peel gave that speech in 1846 on the floor of the House of Commons,” Mr. Roemer said. “Britain had already started its decline, and accelerated thereafter. I see our nation exactly the same way.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL — “Now it’s our turn.”

This phrase spilled from the mouths of young Brazilians again and again this week. Their country pulses today. Pick your indicator: Soaring economic growth. Booming sales of yachts and luxury apartments and Louis Vuitton handbags to the rich. The fact of more cellphone subscriptions in Brazil than there are Brazilians. The billions garnered from exporting commodities to China. Deep reserves of oil.

And, most strikingly, perhaps, a decline in the country’s gaping inequality.

The ebullient mood is captured by a local advertisement for Johnnie Walker whisky that has attracted more than 600,000 views on YouTube in six weeks. It shows the mountains of Rio de Janeiro turning into a hulking colossus. “The giant is no longer asleep,” it says. “Keep walking, Brazil.”

It was not always this way. Well into the 2000s, Brazil was living through its own version of the economic crisis that the West now confronts: debt, runaway inflation, chronic joblessness.

In those days, the West had a lot of advice for Brazil. So this week, in very different times, I went around asking Brazilians what advice they might have for the ailing economies of the West.

The answer that emerged is simple enough to utter and harder to achieve: in order to thrive again, Brazil had to depoliticize the quest for a better economy. Leaders had to move beyond their ideologies. Facts had to become more important than principles. And a kind of pragmatic right-left consensus had to emerge — namely, that both a bustling market and an active government are essential to durable economic growth.

“It’s becoming a kind of pact that we have to be pragmatic, or else we’ll return to a time that nobody wants to return to,” said Marcos Oliveira de Carvalho, the founder of Neoprospecta, a Brazilian biotechnology startup.

To put it another way, Brazil made political economy less sacred. It is something that the worst-hit economies in the West might ponder.

For Brazilians, nothing more clearly telegraphed the new politics than the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served from 2002 until he stepped down last year. President Lula, as everyone calls him here, was a union leader who made his name fighting against the savage free market — until, as president, he did an about-face: building on the legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Enrique Cardoso, to push pro-business policies and an ambitious agenda focused on the poor.

As many Brazilians tell it, Mr. da Silva’s personal transformation was both a spur to and metaphor for the country’s embrace of capitalism. “Only a president who was a working man could bring the market to Brazil,” said the Rev. Marcelo Fernandes de Aquino, a Jesuit priest and scholar who runs the University of the Sinos Valley in southern Brazil.

Today Brazil is simultaneously pursuing what might seem to be contradictory revolutions. At one level, it is unshackling the market and working to give companies the incentives they need to grow and hire and profit. At the same time, it is taking poverty head-on, clinging to labor laws that are inefficient but provide some cushioning to the poor, pumping welfare money into poorer regions. The numbers tell the story: the economy grew at more than 7 percent last year, but, unlike many of its fast-growing rivals, Brazil is narrowing its famously wide (and violent) gap between rich and poor.

As Father de Aquino likes to say, “Brazil is building a market economy, socially oriented toward the common good.”

João Carlos Ferraz, vice president of the country’s national development bank, known as BNDES, said in an interview that the public and private sectors had come to a kind of consensus on a “triangle” of progress: “stability, investment and economic inclusion.” The government works to make business’s life easier by keeping inflation down and trimming regulation. Business is expected in turn to invest heavily and focus on creating jobs in Brazil, not in China or France. There is an acceptance on its part that the “lone rider” vision of prospering in isolation is an illusion, he added. “You need the engagement of a society.”

A 25-year-old entrepreneur who runs an online video platform, from a base in the city of Belo Horizonte, put it more tangibly. Even as the left has embraced capitalism, Rodrigo Paolucci said, a new generation of entrepreneurs has come to accept that “in order to grow, we need to solve the equality problem.”

He is not a bleeding heart. He’s just practical. “You can’t be a great country and a big economy if you have 20 million people doing jobs and the rest being sustained by the 20 million,” he said. And, he figures that those other 170 million or so Brazilians are a potential market for his online videos, and making them successful will make him successful.

In this pragmatism, Brazil is, of course, not alone. The rise of the pragmatists is a quiet subtext of the emergence of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC economies. It was China, after all, that allowed itself to become a capitalist success story, while retaining so much of the Communist system. It was a bespectacled Indian economist named Manmohan Singh, now prime minister, who worked faithfully for his country’s socialist regime until new facts turned him into a champion of market reforms.

Countries in the West might learn something from these crisis-inspired turnabouts. When the going got treacherous in Brazil, India and China, neither the market nor the state was treated as an untouchable end in itself. Each came to be seen as a means to something greater — to a society that thrives.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — When the Earth was discovered to orbit the sun, it was a world in crisis to those invested in the idea that things revolve around us. At the moment in history when power began to flow from kings to the people, it was a world in crisis if you were sitting in a royal court.

But these were not crises so much as paradigm shifts. They were passages from one system, and total way of seeing, to another. And once the new paradigm came, people got over it and went on with making their lives amid new realities.

And so we must ask about the present worldwide blues: What if all this is not, as we keep calling it, a crisis? What if this is a choppy but unavoidable transition between one paradigm — one coherent ball of ideas, power structures, economic theories, values, behaviors — and another?

This thought has stirred of late in moving back and forth between two very different worlds. The first is the world in self-declared crisis, racked by downgrades and bailouts, foreclosures and protests, by polarization and widening inequity, by anxieties that children will be worse off than parents and the future less glorious than the past.

In many places, this narrative indeed feels frightfully true. On the other hand, one also has the privilege of encountering a diffuse global community of naysayers, who refuse this story of crisis and are busily inventing the paradigm they believe we will inhabit before long.

These builders speak about “the crisis” very differently. They see not the end of things — of capitalism, of the West, of the middle class, of liberty — but rather a turning: a comfortable old rug of understandings pulled out from beneath our feet, without convincing understandings to replace it. So here, to make you feel better, are two aspects, among many, of the new paradigm they are weaving.

The first is a shift in the nature of power and influence. It goes by many names and takes many forms. It is open-source software and encyclopedias written by crowds and revolutions seeded on Internet portals. It is the idea of the United States “leading from behind” in Libya rather than fiercely commanding. It is newspapers linking to other newspapers on their Web sites rather than walling everything in. It is Kickstarter, Meetup and Ushahidi and any number of other platforms that allow disparate, diffuse strangers to marshal the kind of influence that once only centralized institutions could.

If you’re stuck in the old paradigm, these developments could seem like a crisis. You might fret that no one is reading encyclopedias anymore. Or that these kids who resist newspapers are so ignorant. Or that your nation used to lead from the front and now lurks in the back. Or that the government should be “creating” jobs but isn’t.

The builders would ask you to step back, because the “who” and “how” of influence have changed, and it may require many of us to adapt to new roles. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, a political science professor at Princeton University and former U.S. State Department official, puts it, the leader must now become a catalyst, the diplomat a connector and the public-relations agent a convener.

Media outlets might rethink themselves as curators of complex reality rather than purveyors of wholly produced scoops — much as the Al Jazeera English program “The Stream” does, inviting viewers and social-media users to help craft its topics and ask questions of its guests, then reading their feedback live on the air.

Embassies might refocus from addressing governments to addressing local people and institutions directly. Americans might learn to appreciate led-from-behind, drone-enhanced, coalitional wars that provide fewer heroic thrills but also cost less in blood and treasure. Citizens might find ways to increase employment without the government’s help, as the new Starbucks initiative, Create Jobs for USA, is asking them to do with $5 donations to fund small-business loans.

A second shift involves the desertion of the traditional divisions between public and private, the collective and the market.

We still live with language and institutions and rules derived from a world in which people are either doing good or doing well, either solving collective problems or merely pursuing a buck. But already in our midst is a parallel universe, with very different rules, that can be called the impact economy.

As publics around the world argue about the 99 percent and the 1, the impact economy is breaking the trade-off, applying the 1 percent’s methods to the 99 percent’s needs.

It encompasses entrepreneurs in the developing world who obsess over making things like heart surgery, cellphone service and insurance vastly cheaper, so as to make them available to billions, not mere millions.

It includes public-private partnerships as well as investors like the Omidyar Network that are strangely agnostic between earning financial returns and not — pumping money into businesses and charities alike in pursuit of better societies.

It even includes some of the world’s largest corporations, from PepsiCo to Levi Strauss, which have come to recognize the force they exert on the planet’s people and resources and are engaged in unilateral social policy to improve their net effect.

It involves an emerging global cadre of talent who spend careers bouncing among the social, private and public sectors, applying the methods of each to problems in the others, refusing to accept that one of them holds all truth.

Today this impact economy is especially vital outside the West, where the lines between banker types and Occupy types are these days creatively blurred.

As Erik Hersman, a son of American missionaries to Sudan who now runs a startup incubator in Kenya, says: “Instead of thinking of Africa as a place that needs to be more like us, we should think about how we need to be more like Africa.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMDEN, MAINE — In an influential essay in 1966, the sociologist Alex Inkeles heralded the arrival of a new human type: the modern. She was what emerged as traditional societies moved into the cities, adopted new technologies, built market economies. And, to a great extent, she had more in common with moderns elsewhere in the world than with the tradition-bound in her own country.

Several qualities distinguished the modern. Among them: She was open to change and accepted it as the settled way of things. She had a plethora of opinions, which she sculpted on her own instead of deriving them from her landlord’s or husband’s or parents’. She focused more on the present and future than on the past. She tended to believe in distributive justice, in the dignity and trustworthiness (for the most part) of other humans, and in the power of science and technology to explain and order our lives. She conceived of herself as shaping the world rather than being shaped by it.

But this modern was also coldly alone. That was what made her life more exhilarating and free. But in the end, as the family, clan and village surrendered their former powers over her, the modern was left with only herself.

Today this bargain of modernity is well-entrenched in the West. And now a few billion newcomers are scrambling to replicate it in Asia, Africa and beyond. That is understandable, because this vision of modernity is indeed so freeing and has brought so much to so many.

But when you travel through the developing world today, especially through its most briskly growing parts, you pick up a worry about these societies replicating not just the best but also the worst parts of modernity, Western-style.

To commend “development” to China or Nigeria or Brazil today is to commend a complex of new institutions and ways with extraordinary benefits and, we now know, potentially deep pitfalls.

We know that what begins with cutting poverty will, if the model isn’t changed, end with an addiction to material things — things that cannot sustainably be squeezed from the earth, things that crowd out relationships and people.

We know that what begins with the liberation of women can, likewise, end in high divorce rates and households without fathers and a fraying of the family.

We know that what begins with giving the young voice, with telling them they can be what they wish to be, can end with children who abandon their parents in their final years and forget all that was given.

Of course, it will end in these ways only if nothing is changed, if we treat the experience of the West as a model rather than as a set of experiments.

For the tradition-bound world, this Me-centric modernity is an overwhelming temptation. And yet it is the Indias and Chinas and Nigerias of the world that have a chance to reimagine it as they make their own modernity. And as they do, they would do well to observe that, even here in the West, there are attempts under way to make community an essential part of what it means to be modern — though community of a fresh kind: a smarter, lighter We.

You see it in the various people working on a “new capitalism”: companies like SnapGoods that use new technologies to let people do what their great-grandparents once did — borrow things rather than buy them for short-term needs; the multiheaded movement toward local, sustainable, ethically derived food, which seeks to use money to connect people to the community rather than alienate them from it; the explosion of social enterprise, which uses the means of business to pursue the ends of civic purpose.

You see it in government, in the idea — perhaps most famously adopted in Porto Alegre, Brazil — of participatory community budgeting. It is an attempt to move beyond a consumer understanding of democracy — a government that exists to give me what I want, while I get on with my life — and to a more We-centric worldview in which good governance becomes a responsibility more than an entitlement.

Culturally, you see it in the popularity of Internet dating sites like Match.com, which are more traditional than they seem, encouraging a careful filtration of traits in possible mates that is impossible at the neighborhood bar.

It is visible, too, in the popularity of the Chinese-American author Amy Chua’s book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” In it she argues for a revived but slimmed-down We culture, in which families are not federations of individuals but rather collective ventures invested in one another’s success and willing to sacrifice to that end. In large part because of the recession, many families in America are having to live in this way, according to recent census data: young adults are moving back with parents after college, and a growing number of households now have more than two adults, sharing a roof and pooling risk much as in traditional societies.

Whether in the West or in the traditional societies now remaking themselves, no one can question the merits of so much that comes with the changed human personality that Mr. Inkeles described. The modern man or woman belongs to a modern world that is fairer and freer, less violent and more rational than what came before it.

Yet those in the vanguard of change in India and China and elsewhere seem to sense that someone else’s modernity should not be swallowed whole. The challenge for today’s modernizers is to match the gains of the Me-centric society while somehow preserving the sense of community that development can so easily erode: restoring the sense, which came so naturally to our ancestors, that we exist for each other, and that to be free and unanchored, self-making and self-protecting, can also be profoundly lonely.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

LAGOS — On the 51st anniversary of Nigeria’s independence a week ago, the sky over Lagos was dimly silver, rain was pattering on a million tin roofs, and the country felt itself to be in something of a funk.

“No cause for celebration 51 years after,” proclaimed the front page of The Punch, an English-language daily newspaper, on Monday, channeling statements by opposition parties. Below, unbolded and in smaller font, was the ruling government’s rejoinder: “We have every reason to celebrate.”

But that rejoinder was overwhelmed by the government’s own actions on Independence Day. Instead of the parade customarily held in Eagle Square in the capital, Abuja, President Goodluck Jonathan chose to remain in his presidential villa, where he was photographed cutting a green and white cake to mark the occasion.

The reason for the change was open threats of attack by militants who recently bombed the office of the United Nations in Abuja. But many Nigerians read more deeply into Mr. Jonathan’s retreat, whether fairly or not. It was for them a sign of the times: a nation that thinks of itself as Africa’s heart, that sees a place for itself in a family of nations dominated less and less by the West, nonetheless lacks the basic security to throw itself a birthday party.

The tension between the country’s bright ambitions and dimmer reality is everywhere in Lagos. In the newspapers, the articles seem to say one thing, and the ads another.

Among the recent headlines: “Bad Roads Sink Residents in Depression.” “How Africans Underdevelop Africa.” “Living in Squalor, Decay and Despair.” “Nigeria has missed opportunities; only urgent rebirth will save it.”

But right beside those headlines were ads that spoke in the confident and airy language of globalism, as if to melt anxieties away. “Your smart life without limits,” a Samsung ad declared. Or: “Enjoy the newly refined Chevalier Brandy, distilled for those who can discern the real brandy taste.” Even a pasta ad could not resist, urging Nigerians to “be outstanding.”

The disconnect tells us something about what modernity has come to mean in metropolises like Lagos: a simultaneous pursuit of basic civilization, on the one hand, and of the latest and finest the world can give, on the other.

Development, progress, growth — call it what you will — is a lumpy, misshapen thing in Lagos. Towering five-star hotels have extensive wine lists, the wealthy carry very expensive cellphones, and late-model Mercedes sedans prowl the streets. But for many, the rudiments of a decent life are not yet in place. Ordinary people have little confidence that they will not be attacked by robbers when they venture out of the house. Round-the-clock electricity remains elusive. Corruption gums up everything.

The prosperous have their ways around these burdens. Today they are as much a part of a global conversation as a Nigerian one, thanks to their technologies. The pockmarked, flooded roads beneath their feet toss them up and down inside their cars, but on their phones and iPads they can be somewhere else. The Lagos elite, I found, have more interest in, and knowledge about, the latest twists and turns of the U.S. presidential race than many Americans. One way to escape the afflictions of your own place is to preoccupy yourself with another’s.

As with Mumbai and São Paulo and other such cities, Lagos’s expectations are now inspired by a life thousands of miles away, while its realities are a product of its own tortuous road to progress. The gap between what is wanted and what can be had grows wider hour by hour.

But it is also possible to see why the language and rituals of globalism are so appealing to a place like this. It is easy to behave in a manner widely accepted as “global.” It is easier, surely, than building a society from the ground up.

The seduction of globalism is how easy it is for a country to become modern-seeming. The peril of globalism is that it can conceal dysfunction behind a charming veneer, and can, in that sense, become a substitute for real progress.

It is easier than it looks to bring a spa to Nigeria and harder than it looks to build an electricity grid. So Lagos has therapists offering Indonesian, Thai, Swedish and Hawaiian massages, but it does not have 24-hour power. It has the latest cellphone technology, but life expectancy has yet to climb above 50. It has cars in abundance, but it forgot to build the roads. It has sushi that is perfectly safe, but it still struggles to eradicate polio.

Years from now, when we look back on this phase of globalization, we may realize how selectively so many countries absorbed the lessons of an influential few. Certain aspects of modernity are easily copied — the frenetic materialism, the culture of consumption, the language of aspiration and endless upwardness. But it is much harder to learn the most necessary lessons: how to build a firm and independent court system, how to stop the leakage of state spending, how to make everyday life a little more bearable each year.

One day in Lagos, we visited the beach. Outside the car was a man with a huge cart blanketed by mobile phone accessories. And, in a poor and difficult country, that cart suggested a kind of progress.

Then we walked some steps toward the beach, and a man with no official position told us, with menacing generosity, that he would allow us access to the sands for a fee. There was some negotiation, and someone paid him. We took a look at the water, but we didn’t stay long.

For now, it felt like his beach, not ours and not even fully Nigeria’s.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Amazon.com, the books-to-diapers-to-machetes Internet superstore, is a perfect snapshot of the American Dream, circa 2011.

It grows by the hour, fueled by a relentless optimism that has made America America. First it sold books. Then it realized that buying printed words in bulk, sorting and shipping them was a transferable skill. It has since applied it to anything you could want.

In 2011, for example, I have bought the following from Amazon: a hard drive, an electric shaver, a Bluetooth headset, a coffee machine and some filters, a multivoltage adapter, four light bulbs, a rubber raft (don’t ask), a chalkboard eraser, an ice cream maker, a flash drive, roller-ball pen replacements, a wireless router, a music speaker, a pair of jeans and a shoe rack — and, oh yeah, some books. (Disclosure: A book and a long-form article I have written are sold on Amazon.)

Buying these things the traditional way would have meant driving around to many different stores and paying as much as twice the price for certain items. What’s more, Amazon knows me. It’s like family. It knows where I live, what I like, my credit card number. (Which, come to think of it, makes it closer than family.)

In a moment rife with talk of American decline, my Amazon experiences provide fleeting mood boosts. They remind me that, for now at least, this remains the most innovative society on earth.

And then my bubble burst.

Thanks to a methodical and haunting piece of journalism in The Morning Call, a newspaper published in Allentown, Pennsylvania, I now know why the boxes reach me so fast and the prices are so low. And what the story revealed about Amazon could be said of the country, too: that on the road to high and glorious things, it somehow let go of decency.

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

The image of one man stuck with me. He was a temp in his 50s, one of the older “pickers” in his group, charged with fishing items out of storage bins and delivering them to the packers who box shipments. He walked at least 13 miles, or 20 kilometers, a day across the warehouse floor, by his estimate.

His assigned rate was 120 items an hour, or one item every 30 seconds. But it was hard to move fast enough between one row and the next, and hard for him to read the titles on certain items in the lowest bins. The man would get on his hands and knees to rummage through the lowest bins, and sometimes found it easier to crawl across the warehouse to the next bin rather than stand and dip again. He estimated plunging onto his hands and knees 250 to 300 times a day. After seven months, he, too, was terminated.

In a statement this week, Amazon acknowledged the complaints and said that it was working to address them, including by installing air-conditioners.

The prevailing American story line right now is seething anger at politicians: that they’re corrupt, or heartless, or socialist, or dumb. But the Amazon story, and many other recent developments, suggest that the problem is significantly deeper.

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

It takes some effort these days to remember that the United States is still one nation.

It doesn’t feel like one nation when a company like Amazon, with such resources to its name, treats vulnerable people so badly just because it can. Or when members of a presidential debate audience cheer for a hypothetical 30-year-old man to die because he lacks health insurance. Or when schoolteachers in Chicago cling to their union perks and resist an effort to lengthen the hours of instruction for children that the system is failing. Or when an activist publicly labels the U.S. military, recently made safe for open homosexuals, a “San Francisco military.” Or when most of the television pundits go on with prefabricated scripts to eviscerate their rivals, instead of doing us the honor of actually thinking.

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue, falls away.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Let us begin by confessing that, if Sarah Palin surfaced to say something intelligent and wise and fresh about the present American condition, many of us would fail to hear it.

That is not how we’re primed to see Ms. Palin. A pugnacious Tea Partyer? Sure. A woman of the people? Yup. A Mama Grizzly? You betcha.

But something curious happened when Ms. Palin strode onto the stage last weekend at a Tea Party event in Indianola, Iowa. Along with her familiar and predictable swipes at President Barack Obama and the “far left,” she delivered a devastating indictment of the entire U.S. political establishment — left, right and center — and pointed toward a way of transcending the presently unbridgeable political divide.

The next day, the “lamestream” media, as she calls it, played into her fantasy of it by ignoring the ideas she unfurled and dwelling almost entirely on the will-she-won’t-she question of her presidential ambitions.

So here is something I never thought I would write: a column about Sarah Palin’s ideas.

There was plenty of the usual Palin schtick — words that make clear that she is not speaking to everyone but to a particular strain of American: “The working men and women of this country, you got up off your couch, you came down from the deer stand, you came out of the duck blind, you got off the John Deere, and we took to the streets, and we took to the town halls, and we ended up at the ballot box.”

But when her throat was cleared at last, Ms. Palin had something considerably more substantive to say.

She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private).

In supporting her first point, about the permanent political class, she attacked both parties’ tendency to talk of spending cuts while spending more and more; to stoke public anxiety about a credit downgrade, but take a vacation anyway; to arrive in Washington of modest means and then somehow ride the gravy train to fabulous wealth. She observed that 7 of the 10 wealthiest counties in the United States happen to be suburbs of the nation’s capital.

Her second point, about money in politics, helped to explain the first. The permanent class stays in power because it positions itself between two deep troughs: the money spent by the government and the money spent by big companies to secure decisions from government that help them make more money.

“Do you want to know why nothing ever really gets done?” she said, referring to politicians. “It’s because there’s nothing in it for them. They’ve got a lot of mouths to feed — a lot of corporate lobbyists and a lot of special interests that are counting on them to keep the good times and the money rolling along.”

Because her party has agitated for the wholesale deregulation of money in politics and the unshackling of lobbyists, these will be heard in some quarters as sacrilegious words.

Ms. Palin’s third point was more striking still: in contrast to the sweeping paeans to capitalism and the free market delivered by the Republican presidential candidates whose ranks she has yet to join, she sought to make a distinction between good capitalists and bad ones. The good ones, in her telling, are those small businesses that take risks and sink and swim in the churning market; the bad ones are well-connected megacorporations that live off bailouts, dodge taxes and profit terrifically while creating no jobs.

Strangely, she was saying things that liberals might like, if not for Ms. Palin’s having said them.

“This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk,” she said of the crony variety. She added: “It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest — to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners — the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70 percent of the jobs in America.”

Is there a hint of a political breakthrough hiding in there?

The political conversation in the United States is paralyzed by a simplistic division of labor. Democrats protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big money and enhanced by government action. Republicans protect that portion of human flourishing that is threatened by big government and enhanced by the free market.

What is seldom said is that human flourishing is a complex and delicate thing, and that we needn’t choose whether government or the market jeopardizes it more, because both can threaten it at the same time.

Ms. Palin may be hinting at a new political alignment that would pit a vigorous localism against a kind of national-global institutionalism.

On one side would be those Americans who believe in the power of vast, well-developed institutions like Goldman Sachs, the Teamsters Union, General Electric, Google and the U.S. Department of Education to make the world better. On the other side would be people who believe that power, whether public or private, becomes corrupt and unresponsive the more remote and more anonymous it becomes; they would press to live in self-contained, self-governing enclaves that bear the burden of their own prosperity.

No one knows yet whether Ms. Palin will actually run for president. But she did just get more interesting.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The pictures remind the world of something. Mobs tearing down images of the dictator and feverishly stomping on his face. Men firing AK-47s into the air, having finished firing at other men. Screams of “Thank you, NATO” mingling with shouts of “Allahu akbar.” It thrills us, but it also makes us remember.

The West is good at doing what seems nearly done in Libya, and what was quite easily done in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere: the bombing and the breaking. Now comes the burden of rebuilding/transforming/saving a soul-crushed country — and the question of whether even to try.

Answering this delicate question poses the further question of whether an era of influence is ending for the West, to be replaced by something less familiar: modesty.

“There are no more Marshall Plan moments,” said Rory Stewart, a British author and member of Parliament whose résumé includes stints as a soldier, a deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces and a leader of a charity to renew Afghanistan.

Watching Libya today, Mr. Stewart remembers things: that “every gangster, tribal chief, Islamist politician” will try to seize money and power in the vacuum left by Muammar el-Qaddafi; that horrific images of thieving and vengeance may come; that Western powers will face great pressure to do something, anything; that, if they do, they may suddenly become occupiers; that they will crowd out Libyan capacity, misunderstand its culture, be loathed and yet unable to leave.

Mr. Stewart, whose latest book is titled “Can Intervention Work?,” now advocates “intelligent, limited missions,” of the kind pursued in the Balkans, over sweeping campaigns to reimagine whole nations: “It involves admitting that our power, our knowledge, our legitimacy are limited.”

Many of the people I addressed this week, seeking guidance for Libya’s next phase, talked like this. Nearly 10 years after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan began, the faith in the ability of the great powers to remake faraway lands has all but evaporated.

“All real change comes from within,” Celso Amorim, the Brazilian defense minister, said in an e-mail.

“It is not easy to show the road without sounding arrogant or patronizing,” he added. And if advice is shared, it must be by pull, not push: “There are no lessons to be taught (since each country has to see for itself what is the best way), but there may be lessons to be learned, by looking at other nations’ experience and trying to understand their mistakes and their achievements.”

I asked Paul Collier, an Oxford economist and author of “The Bottom Billion,” what Libya might learn. He offered a litany of what he called “downloadable” models:

Build transparency throughout the entire public spending chain, so as to attract good politicians and repel bad ones. Spend some oil wealth (assuming halted oil shipments soon resume) on “quick wins for ordinary people” — public works jobs, health care, pensions. Build politics from the bottom up, focusing on the local, letting national politicians emerge.

Mr. Collier added that a “self-disciplined” West could support these endeavors with limited advice in key domains involving technology more than ideology — building transparent audit systems, for example, or training a hybrid police-military force for Libya.

There can be such a thing as too much help. Ashraf Ghani, chairman of Transition Commission in Afghanistan and a former finance minister there, said of Libya: “They will be faced with swarms of NGOs, contractors, development, security and information technology organizations and consultants. Acquiring the capability to differentiate between wheat and chaff in this arena is going to be critical.”

If the West’s modest role still feels ungainly, it is perhaps because of the Marshall Plan, which Mr. Ghani described as “an act of exceptional statecraft and political imagination.” Its extraordinary success in Europe, along with rebuilding in Japan, has ever since tempted the Western powers with the notion that the experience could be repeated. It never really has been.

“Today it is no longer possible for the West to implement regime change and regime building around the world,” said Daron Acemoglu, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of the forthcoming book “Why Nations Fail.” He gave two reasons: nation-building like that done in Germany and Japan requires resources and commitment the West now lacks; and the countries that most require such work today, many in the Arab/Muslim world, don’t trust the West.

Not to mention that Germany and Japan were more homogeneous than the countries in question today, more broken after total defeats and thus more eager to reinvent themselves from top to bottom.

In the early 21st century, China may offer an example of what more restrained Western influence looks like. It antagonizes the West in so many ways and resists democracy’s march, but it is too big to invade and holds too much Western debt to even truly scold.

Fu Jun, executive dean of the School of Government at Peking University in Beijing, said in an e-mail that the West had shown the right kind of influence over China, working gently on it through mechanisms like the World Trade Organization, strategic dialogues, two-way trade and investment and people-to-people exchanges.

“Oftentimes when the West did not do well,” Mr. Fu said, “is when it became overly confident about turning what should be a facilitating hand into a bending hand.”

What affluent liberal democracies forget, Mr. Fu argued, is how meandering their own journeys were: “The West did not put up its own system overnight. It built markets and rule of law first, and then it gradually expanded political participation.”

Part of getting Libya right, then, may be letting it be. The West could find that difficult, too.

“There’s still this urge to get involved,” said Mr. Stewart, the British author, despite many failed involvements. “It’s almost impossible to say, ‘Yeah, that’s a horrible situation, but there may not be anything that we can do about it.”’

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — The American jobs that vanished don’t appear to be returning. The stock market is plunging. Seemingly everyone, from the guy at the corner bar to the U.S. Treasury Department, is in debt. The country’s credit rating just got knocked. Smart people on television are speaking of a looming “lost decade.”

Throughout history, for millions of people in less prosperous societies, the solution to such circumstances has been obvious: You sail away.

So could America, that great nation of immigrants, become in harder times a nation of emigrants? Could the metropolises of China one day have Americatowns?

Imagine a bustling one in the heart of Beijing. Local Chinese stream past, scratching their heads at those Americans who come just for money, never learning China’s language or customs, living in their own little world. The signs are all spelled out in Roman letters — even for local outfits like Zhongguo Jianshe Yinhang (China Construction Bank) and Hong Gao Liang (Red Sorghum, a fast food joint).

These American immigrants have strange manners, as the Chinese see it. They never share food, and they finish everything on their plates. They always ask locals they meet, “How many children do you have?” — even though the answer is always “one.” They are always inquiring about politics.

But they thrive. They put their energy, skills and family networks to work; they reap great success. They run burgers-and-fries joints, English-language academies, fitness centers and even an intercity transport service known as the Americatown bus.

In “The Warmth of Other Suns,” the author Isabel Wilkerson has written feelingly of “what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable — what the pilgrims did under the tyranny of British rule, what the Scotch-Irish did in Oklahoma when the land turned to dust, what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism, what the landless in Russia, Italy, China and elsewhere did when something better across the ocean called to them.”

Yes, she says, “They left.”

A considerable number of Americans already live and work around the world. But to meet them in Bangkok or Bogotá or Sydney is to encounter, for the most part, an educated elite that has emigrated out of choice — or members of the diaspora who straddle two lands. They usually had good options in America, but still chose to leave for the thrill, or a higher paycheck, or the chops of investing in a hot new market or renewal after divorce or other failure.

What has not happened is a pattern of working-class emigration out of America, as one sees out of Mexico or Ghana or Cambodia.

Until lately, the reasons for this were obvious enough.

“The calculation that most emigrants make is that they can do better in another country,” said Audrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a scholar of human migration. “For most Americans this is unimaginable. Most only speak English, rates of home ownership are high, and most do not have close ties to others in another country.”

And yet some variables in that calculation are changing. Driving from central Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, for example, you see an American heartland slowly emptying of opportunity: roads and bridges crumbling even without the recent spending cuts, once-confident businesses shuttered, “now hiring” signs eerily absent.

It is hard to escape the feeling of bygone opportunity when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that half of the 20 fastest-growing occupations in the nation involve caring for the sick, because of the surge of baby boomers into old age.

And yet it is true: It is hard to imagine Americans emulating, in reverse, those peasants from Sichuan Province in China who came and made restaurants in middle-of-nowhere American towns.

But if Americans ever became willing to leave en masse, one could imagine them owning foreign Burger King franchises or opening small restaurants to take their cuisine to the world, bringing sorely needed upgrades to the authenticity of barbecue ribs and coleslaw from Mumbai to Buenos Aires.

American emigrants might possess a special talent for salesmanship, working as real estate agents or car dealers to sell to the world products so closely associated with American liberty. Laid-off American factory workers might make terrific foremen in China and India, where entry-level labor is plentiful but the pool of potential managers is woefully thin.

To be sure, many developing countries are not easy to navigate. They can be corrupt. There is no modern history of people “becoming Chinese,” in the way that so many millions of people have become American. The wages, though rising, are lower than what most Americans would expect. Above all, in the American psyche, leaving has never meant overseas — in part because the United States offered many new frontiers of its own.

“This is such a big country that, for most of our history, emigrating has meant leaving one pressed-down section for another with more chances to get ahead,” said Ms. Wilkerson, whose book chronicles the northward migration of African-Americans in the 20th century.

“Emigrating out of one’s country is often a last-chance act of near desperation for poor and working people and takes a great deal of forethought and a near-total break from all that one has known,” she added. “I don’t see mass emigration on the basis of the current recession. It would take a great deal more than that.”