America as an Aberration

An end of the year discussion of "American Exceptionalism" ...

This is not a letter for those who buy into the Fox News version of our history. America is exceptional for one and only one reason: our geography. We won the lotto with our two oceans and secure land borders and then throw in an outrageous amount of arable land and endless resources, and you have the golden ticket. How we secured this bounty, how we have treated it and its original inhabitants and the attitudes, exploitation and violence we brought with it is another story. It is a story of Empire shared by all of history’s many versions. We have dressed it up with myth and folklore. Like most empires, we did represent and create, within our secure borders and ever-expanding influence and control, progress in many ways … maybe more than most. However, Greg Grandons’s The End of Myth presents a nation that was and remains as brutal in its imperial (both domestic and abroad) designs as it is culturally liberating and politically revolutionary.

Grandon’s book is very familiar and thematically pedantic and redundant in places. I skimmed much of it after spending a lot of time on the first third. What triggered this long response was how much of what I taught in my twenty years of teaching American History is echoed in Grandon’s polemic. I like to think I introduced such material in a more measured fashion being myself more centrist than this noted Yale historian. Regardless, something was tapped and the following are a series of ways of looking at our history from a much less flattering, but I believe more honest perspective. The net is that much of the ugly roar of the present has deeper roots in our past than you might imagine and knowing that can bring the modest comfort that we can endure.

WAR

America has been at war in one shape or another for over 80% of its declared founding in 1776. Most Americans of all ranks might list our wars as: The American Revolution … the Civil War … WWI … WWII … the Cold War as represented by Korea & Vietnam … Afghanistan & Iraq. Right there you have 64 years or 25% of our 250-year history (since 1776). Let’s add the lesser-known War of 1812, the Mexican War, The Spanish American and the long insurrection in the Philippines and now you are up to 78 years or close to 1/3 of our history. If one the considers our violent domestic wars with Native Americans beginning (charitably) with Tippecanoe in 1811 and running near non-stop until Wounded Knee in 1890 the number gets closer to 70% of our history. Finally, toss in our long history of military intervention in Latin and Central America (including Mexico) and you are around 80%. The actual number leaves of plenty of room for argument; however, war as part of what defines us is right there with other vices like racism and nativism along with our many virtues.

Why war? This is the subject of something much beyond the scope of this letter. With this as my apology for jumping in the deep end of history, let me take a shot at a brief and simplified answer.

1. We were founded and formed as 13 very different colonies who did not trust or like each other and only came together based on a shared antipathy of the British and a shared desire to acquire and expand. While these fault lines were revealed most obviously in the Civil War, its seeds were there at the beginning in the American Revolution and then two very unpopular and sectionally divisive wars: War of 1812 and the incredibly violent War with Mexico. In both cases, a serious effort at secession by an aggrieved minority foreshadowed the events of the Civil War. To this day, Texas would like to secede, and diverse and blue California remains an obscene word to many. We were founded in an incendiary environment of distrust of each other and of central authority and remain very much that way. We have conflict imbedded in our DNA.

2. Though there were organized and vocal resistance to all the conflicts listed above (with an exception to the “good” war – WWII), in each one, even Vietnam and Iraq, the majority of Americans supported the war. We almost committed national suicide by triggering the War of 1812 against the British Empire. The reemergence of Napoleon saved our ass. We started the war with Mexico and committed atrocities to rival anything we have done in any other conflict. The atrocities were celebrated and launched Zachary Taylor to his doomed Presidency. We helped introduce to the world concentration camps and widespread torture (e.g. waterboarding) in the ten-year horror show in the Philippines. From intentionally and meticulously planning a firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people in one night to our triggering the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the genocidal slaughter of two million Cambodians thanks to our “secret” invasion during the Vietnam War, we have accepted and often celebrated our many wars and the sufferings that come with them. The fact is that war unifies this genetically fractious country of ours. It gives us an enemy outside of ourselves to focus on and binds us with the steroidal rush of power, fear and anger.

3. We are violent people who have developed an acceptance, even a taste for violence. We do not pass the most basic gun laws despite young shooters using automatic weapons to slaughter school children. Our films, our tv, our video games and our sports celebrate all forms of mindless violence. It feels that our sense of masculinity is forever lost in a miasma of violence. We are a product of a history of interminable war, exploitation and expansion that began with almost 300 years of slavery and found its most genocidal expression in the gradual “removal” of native peoples. One cursory look at the language of our politicians and spokespersons from the 19^th century reveals the unvarnished bigotry behind the violence. It took the Civil War to temporarily vanquish Jacksonianism and its openly expressed support of slavery and the extinguishing of the Native Americans and any Mexican that might get in the way of our “manifest destiny”. This Jacksonian mindset returned shortly thereafter with the rise of the KKK and legal segregation. It is a valve that can be turned on when politically expedient to rally against a real or perceived threats. Union organizers from the late 19^th century until FDR and the New Deal were shot and lynched, labeled as communists and anarchists. Leftists were jailed and deported during the Red Scare after WWI and property owning, tax paying Japanese Americans interned during WWII. It is a long and sobering list and is being played out once again. This legacy of Jackson’s America is a shoot first mindset that chooses hate and violence over deliberation and dialogue. It is the fatal temperamental flaw of The American Experiment and is most comfortable when at war.

COALTIONS (defined here as a shared but non-binding societal and political mindset)

A central theme of my teaching was that this country is, despite bursts of reform and world changing definitions of individualism, a deeply conservative place. While we have been an engine for much of the world’s efforts at free expression and commercial and financial innovation, we are also a vast country with deep reactionary instincts. As a percentage of our population, we attend church more regularly than any liberal democracy in the world – by a country mile. We are the world’s incubator for new Christian religions ranging from Mormonism to Pentecostalism – the two fastest growing faiths in the world. We go through “great awakenings” (evangelical outbursts) that reshape our lives and relationships. We have been in one since the Sixties and Seventies and are dealing with an organized effort to create a Christian Republic. Above God, however, is money.

Money is a very conservative God. It is attached to all types of property which is attached to individuals and certain entities. To violate that attachment is a purely radical act – some call it communism, the less informed include socialism. This country’s worship of property is assiduously defended by a constitution that for its first century interpreted slaves as property. As opposed to ALL of Western Europe, we have never had a politically threatening Communist or Socialist Party. Despite protestations from the right, we have a history of low tax rates, and we deeply distrust the government’s use of our funds. The last President to raise taxes was George H.W. Bush and he was tossed out of office for it after securing a near 80% approval rate after the First Gulf War. It is comically poetic that our dollar bills merge our most basic conservative impulses into “In God We Trust”.

The list of conservative pillars extends well beyond Religion and Money, but none come close to being as central. These include our civil rights as addressed in the Bill of Rights though each seem easily abused in the name of God or the Dollar. They include a long-standing distrust of central authority that used to extend to a reluctance to fund a viable standing army. Some of the crazy stuff that has come out of this conservative id include Prohibition, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Comstock Laws let alone all the laws required to keep segregation intact and to keep women from voting. Today we see the creation of ICE, mass deportations and extra-legal acts of Presidential authority at home and abroad. Prohibition produced the mob and structured corruption into the very fiber of much of American daily life. We only hope that today’s collection of looney tunes doesn’t taint and destroy so successfully. The following is a “scorecard” of Conservative America v. Reform America that, I confess, is purely of my own making.

Conservative Scorecard for Political Coalitions in America

1 Radical Reform to 10 Reactionary Conservatism

1776– 1828: the Founding Fathers … a foundational period that established both the direction of future political parties and many of the issues that continue to separate us to this day as a nation. SCORE: Not Applicable

1828 – 1860: The Age of Jackson … a pro-slavery Democratic Party in control of much of the government that came to be known as the “Slave Power”. Openly supported “removal” of natives of all stripes and pursued wars on all fronts. Represented 40% of the voters in the NORTH during the Civil War. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (9)

1860 – 1876: Rise of Republican Party … Lincoln’s party that sought the abolishment of slavery, the enfranchisement of African Americans and eventually sold out to money and the social “security” of segregation. Laid the seeds, however, for serious reform 100 years later. SCORE: REFORM (3)

1876 – 1900: The Gilded Age … Republican & Democratic agreement re tariffs, trusts, union-busting, continued “removal” of natives and strengthening of segregation among a long list of political, social and economic markers of American conservatism. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (8)

1900 – 1918: Progressivism … foreshadowing the New Deal a generation later, a fit and start effort to clean up government, expand its power and protect selected (e.g. white) segments of the labor force … undermined by WWI. SCORE: REFORM (4)

1918 – 1932: Republican Backlash … Roaring Twenties disguised unfettered rise of debt, consumerism, the KKK, nativism and large-scale racial violence. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE (10)

1932 – 1948: FDR & the New Deal … though much of its reforms were before 1938, the New Deal radically reshaped our nation, realigning the government in our lives as a source of security and a counter weight to concentrated corporate power and individual wealth … NEVER would have happened without the massive suffering that came with the Great Depression. SCORE: REFORM (1)

1948 – 1968: The Great Aberration … representing 75% of the war devastated post 1945 world economy and with a “clear and present danger” in the aggressive language and tactics of the communist world, the United Sates was as “unified” politically, socially, and economically as at any time since our founding years. This very tenuous and, for the most part, white and male consensus would unravel with great social cost and violence in the Sixties, accelerated by an unpopular war and a Civil Rights movement that exposed for all to see our racist id. Our REFORM energy from the New Deal would resist CONSERVATIVE efforts to roll it back and then would accelerate to unheard of levels of change in the brief shock of The Great Society. CONSERVATIVE forces meanwhile would try to keep segregation alive and ignite fears of communism as an agent for control of individual freedoms … all of this with the Vietnam War and our inner cities aflame in the background would come to a head in the conservative backlash election of Nixon in 1968 – with 15% of voters supporting the hate machine, George Wallace. SCORE: CONSERVATIVE/REFORM (5)

NOTE: The Great Aberration is a book that I have thought of writing. When this country “won” WWII (with the pivotal role played by the Soviet Red Army), it inherited a world where we represented at least 75% of the GDP of the non-communist world. No nation (now a full-fledged empire) had ever been in this position in human history. We managed it with a mixture of pure self-interest, enlightenment with one entirely foreseeable result – the world would catch up. This Aberration is the seed of toxic nostalgia like MAGA and the tragic overreach of The Great Society. It was our Icarus moment … we have never gotten over it.

1968 - 1980: Period of Political Misery … both parties would rise and fall behind political extremism (McGovern), Presidential dysfunction (Nixon), economic strangulation (OPEC), financial mismanagement (Stagflation), terrorism (Iran) and the unleashing of radical social change (Women’s Liberation) that would trigger our fourth religious Great Awakening (Moral Majority) and the beginning of our still roaring Culture War. SCORE: Not Applicable

1980 – present: Age of Reagan … though the present MAGA / Trump incarnation seems and is miles away from the kinder, gentler and often bipartisan Reagan/Bush years, the latent conservative forces he unleashed are behind the world we are struggling with today. The list is long: demonization of government, tax relief and the inequality that came with it, a fetish for deregulation, the culture war and the political activism of the Christian right, eventual disarming of gun laws, the scapegoating of immigrants and the rise of the cult of the military. None of this would have taken such a secure hold, one eventually radicalized by MAGA, without booming markets, the end of the Cold War, the War on Terrorism and the weakening and appeasement of the Democratic Party. Clinton represents that appeasement with OBAMA the brief by-product of personal magnetism, near financial collapse and two unpopular wars. The strength of the conservative coalition since 1980 is how resilient it remains despite the leadership failures of the Neocons and now MAGA. Given the distracted and easily manipulated public that is now our reality, it is a bit frightening to think what it will take for us to shed this conservative hypnosis that has, at present, crippled our civic discourse. SCORE: Conservative (7)

Though this “scorecard” is an exercise in subjective narrative creation, the scoring illustrates the bias of the country with close to 50% of our history firmly in the hands of our conservative impulse. Reform, representing 20% of our political history, arrives in bursts and often after a crisis and too often easily extinguished. These bursts, however, left permanent marks on our society and the predictable conservative response has been mostly limited to dramatic but only partially successful efforts at peeling such progress back. We still have Social Security despite very real opposition throughout its existence. The same applies to Medicare and much of the basic regulatory functions of government put in place during the reform bursts. But … universal health care and childcare remain a bridge too far. The painful rub is that the “peeling” effort often disguises the very real steps forward our pluralistic, fractured society makes and, in the meantime, halting further reform. Will the furor over trans rights and gender identity extend to rolling back gay marriage? History suggests it won’t. We must hope that the current reactionary burst plays out in the same tortuous fashion as it has over our 250 years … to put it way too simply – a three steps forward, two steps backward kind of thing.

A HISTORY OF ABERRATIONS

As alluded to earlier, the American Century reached its apex during a historical aberration when she was left standing strong with a devastated world at her feet. It can be argued that most of the hinge moments of history are a product of a great aberration. There would have been no Napoleon without the French Revolution. There may not have been a Bolshevik Revolution without WWI. This could go on forever – a college bull session dream topic. But, seriously, the United States and its vast presence in the world over the past 150 years was, except for her geography, a product less because of her “exceptional” characteristics and more because of the fickle or aberrant rhythms of history.

1. BIOLOGY

Starting in the late 15^th century, the Old World brought (mostly unintentionally) to the New World a vast array of fatal diseases that over a couple hundred years would kill around 80% of the native population. Initially brought by the Spanish, these diseases had spread through North America before any Englishman had settled in their “new” world. By 1620 and the arrival of the Pilgrims and shortly after, the Puritans, the landscape was littered with the skeletal remains of most of the indigenous population. The fact that the great majority of Native Americans had already died from Old World diseases before any whiff of westward (west from the Atlantic coast that is) expansion had taken hold is too often glossed over when addressing our shared mythic narrative. It was the first wild aberrant gift given to the European settlers. The Puritans immediately interpreted it as a sign of God ‘s grace that would empower them to build their “city on the hill” – a biblical foreshadowing of Manifest Destiny 200 years later. I often asked my students to imagine a “wilderness” populated by four to five times the number of disease resistant natives when the English first arrived. What seemed like a vast empty continent to the Europeans, delivered by some version of a divine right, would instead have required either accommodation or an overt effort at conquest, subjugation and

extermination … altogether, in either case, a very different national origin story.

2. FRONTIER

As America opened the 19^th century, the vast and now sparsely inhabited and unexplored wealth of the frontier lay available for Europeans of all stripes desperate for land, autonomy and riches. With maybe the exception of the wintry expanse of Russia’s Siberia, never had so much wealth been available to so many and defended by so few. Its unique place in human history has made the frontier story the beating heart of our shared narrative. We have always remained fixed on what might be over the next hill whether it be the unique restlessness of most Americans, the dreams of the immigrant, putting a man on the moon or a foreign policy whose sphere of influence is pretty much the entire world. This frontier mindset took shape because the continental expanse of America was not covered in tundra or desert sands or impenetrable jungle. It was uniquely available in every sense only requiring the rapacious, relentless and violent ambition of the hungry common European migrant to realize it. Imagine if the Moon was a smaller verdant, watery version of Earth with a population that pretty much disappeared. Such was, and to some extent still is, the NEW WORLD to millions of immigrants. It remains human history’s greatest reveal and … aberration.

If you got this far, I deeply appreciate it.

Happy New Year (really!

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