Our 250th anniversary as an independent nation is upon us. Looking back, we seem at times to have enfolded all of human possibility within our history, the best and the worst.
Given the throw of cultural dice, the malleability and heavy-handed imprecision of what has come of over two centuries of democratic experiment, it was likely inevitable that the negative attributes of our character would converge and coalesce in the emergence of what we now have. Let me put it out there right from the start: we are experiencing the worst of what we are. The people we have put in charge, those of us who actually voted in support of this, especially at the top, could not have better represented the darker, least sympathetic, venal aspects of what has been a part of who we are all along. This is a perfect storm.
The specifics are, while important and of the moment, less significant than the stew of cultural traits that have so toxically combined to manifest this current situation. When we look at ourselves through the lens of history, we might grasp how being who we are landed us here.
The cultural ingredients that have come together in the present to produce what can only be described as a crisis have, as I said, been here all along. Among those ingredients most notably is a strong sense of paranoia; a deep suspicion of authority; a dedication to something called Common Sense that usually has more to do with tribal lore than reason; and a fragile conviction that we are special. Running through all of that is an intransigent religious desire that often reinforces the rest.
I say “religious desire” deliberately, because it seems to be exactly that. Americans steeped in this are not satisfied to simply practice their specific religion. They have to be seen to do so and they insist on being validated by those around them. Along with their belief they need to be right by universal acclaim. Those who do not yield to their brand of righteousness are in varying degrees apostates, heathens, atheists, and an assortment of other derogatory designations. They loudly declare that their country is a christian nation fallen into the hands of unbelievers and they insist it be put right. This is not faith, this is a desire be seen as faithful. They have internalized something but it is not what they claim it is. The very documents and history they hold to clearly show that they have it wrong.
This has been a constant in American culture practically from the beginning of European settlement. Understandably so, given how many early colonies consisted of religious outsiders who left their homelands because they were oppressed, and hoped to exercise their faith freely. Perhaps those first colonists genuinely held to their inner beliefs, but as time passed and the country became more complex, with conflicting ideas expressed openly, a strain of that conviction seems to have taken over, that of a desperate desire to be right in the face of all the others who must surely be wrong.
That basic need has informed American civil and political life to varying degrees ever since—the need to be right. And faith requires the vanquishing of doubt. The one necessary ingredient for open understanding and intellectual growth and progress in general came to be, for many people, an intolerable challenge to their desire to be right.
With the growing plurality in the early decades and the need to find some common ground, this strain, this desire became abstracted, unmoored from a specific creed, even though those most committed to it insisted throughout that it was a singular creed, the One True Faith. It manifested in the two Great Awakenings and has never gone away, reemerging regularly depending on the moment. Both sides in the Civil War professed some variant of this ideology, and with equal fervor defended their viewpoint as a god-given truth.
It did not always manifest in strictly religious terms. During the first decades after the Second Great Awakening, religious leaders faced a dilemma. Their sincere christian principles required them to be austere and to oppose the accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake. This in a new nation that took as its first right that becoming rich is paramount. They hammered home a message that this ambitious new generation with its aspirations and commercial acumen must not “enjoy” their wealth. Leisure and indulgence were anathema to the Puritan strain that informed much of the character of the new country. It seemed unlikely the tidal wave of growing estates could be stemmed, so they tied the accumulation of wealth to hard work and self-denial. Work hard, do not rest, and for heaven’s sake do not yield to self-indulgence, and you might be the exception to the rule that says a rich man would have trouble getting into heaven. The sixty to seventy hour work week is nothing new and the zeal with which the early American entrepreneurial class can be seen in the tremendous growth in the national economy. But also in the suicide rate among that same class.
Keep in mind that this was not everyone. But we can debate how large a percentage of a population is necessary to bend the whole culture to its perspective. Ten percent? Twenty? Not a majority, but a powerful gravitic force, especially if everyone else is disorganized and disinclined to join together with others.
But among those others, the problems I mentioned above took root in other groups. The sense of millenialism that was a feature of the early Republic need not have expressed itself in religious narratives. Just for one let’s take paranoia.
This is an easy one. Paranoia, to greater or lesser degrees, is a common human condition. It seems, though, that here in the United States we have perfected it to a remarkable extent.
It is perhaps understandable as a residue of our origins. The perfect flower of our paranoia was the Bill of Rights. The Constitution was a completed project. Benjamin Franklin, among others, felt there was no need for a list of specified rights, that the make-up of the government defined by the Constitution was sufficient to keep factions at bay. But the Bill of Rights was a deal-breaker. Without it, ratification may not have happened. As you go own the list of that first ten amendments, it is clear what people were afraid of.
The worst of it, though, was the near-panicked fear of the slave population. There had been a handful of slave rebellions, but only one successful one in Haiti, and yet the anxiety that informed the white population is palpable in their writings and the laws they passed and the excessive maltreatment meted out to the enslaved. The way this carried forward after the Civil War in the Jim Crow laws and the marrow-deep mistrust that drove white populations to near-frenzied reactions to any movement toward equal treatment.
Between these two extremes—one that secured the promise of potential freedom for the population at large, the other a staggeringly unjust reaction to that very promise for select groups—can only be explained by an unmitigated strain of paranoia that has never been addressed or effectively dealt with.
Suspicion of authority is a relatively easy one to understand, and again in its best examples can be seen as a net positive. We will not be cowed by privileged authority that has no justification but its own prerogatives and will to power. We fought a war to be free of the arbitrary exercise of authority, we created a Constitution with a Bill of Rights to delineate the boundaries between power and civil liberty. Questioning is a fundamental right and a demand that any assertion of authority, even in times of crisis, must justify itself has been part of our national character.
But like anything else, it becomes a habit and often one based on nothing more than a desire not to be bothered. Careless application of the rejection of authority has often become a rote response to anything not understood or, perhaps more pointedly, not welcome, whether it is justified or not. It might best be seen in the tenacious resistance to gun laws, but it has certainly manifested in the anti-vax movement, which has demonstrably proven fatal. Because it is reflexive we can see that it has left the realm of reason and compromise and become nothing more than arbitrary reaction. In some instances, it becomes a rejection of expertise, especially expertise that requires specialized knowledge, namely education.
This goes with our much-vaunted claim to respect Common Sense. The implication that this covers a species of practicality comes down to us from the early colonial days when a certain self-sufficiency was often in conflict with the demands of legal authority. But it was also in response to education that suggested what we took for granted was not what we thought it was. The world is round but common sense tells us it is flat. The reasoning behind the former assertion—the true one—requires more than the simple application of opening one’s eyes and standing up. The proofs that our senses deceive us are complex and to some extent disconcerting. Bring that to other areas and it becomes a matter of responsibility. Some people have always seen poverty as the fault of the poor—if they worked harder, if they did not squander opportunities, they might not be—which is easier to grasp than the all-but-invisible structure of society that operates to deny them ways out. Common Sense tells us such things are too distant and abstract to matter on the ground in front of us. Believing that frees us from responsibilities which, while trenchant, are equally difficult to see. Common Sense offers no formula for seeing past our own prejudices. Again, push this too far and it becomes a species of resentment.
And yet practical application of intuitive insights functions and in a vacuum of frontier conditions may keep us alive. Is that the same thing as Common Sense? Going forward, we mythologized Common Sense as somehow a god-given presence of mind and natural ability that transcends anything “education” might offer, especially when that education runs counter to desired perspectives. The oft-repeated axiom that “you can’t learn about life from a book” became a mantra. In fact, you can learn a lot about life from books, because books are written by people who lived. Books did not grow in a field, filled at ripeness with nonsense. Yet our national literacy rates are pathetic and our educational standards have been slipping for decades. It shows in the choices made in who should run the country.
We come then to the idea that we are special. Gifted. Blessed by a deity with the opportunity and acumen to create desired lives. This has gone by many names over time. Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, American Know-How, the Spirit of Can Do. Basically it is a way of explaining our good fortune (if that is what it is) as somehow deserved.
It has been argued that Americans are sensitive about this because we have too little history to be completely comfortable in our own skin. Consider, we are about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of becoming a separate nation and since then we have risen to the position of being the most powerful country on the planet. It took Rome seven centuries to get to similar stature, and that is only if one ignores the existence of China. But like Rome, in a rough sense, we have two periods in our history. Europeans have been on this ground almost 500 years. The 250 before the Revolution are also “our history” but in many ways it is a history we would like to ignore, because it is a history of conquest and exploitation and intolerance. When we are faced with our infelicities we are uncomfortable. Because of how we define success it is too easy to simply ignore the costs. But the stamp left by our “success” is not so easily ignored.
If you judge the greatness of a nation by what it builds, America is certainly a contender. But that is, once the work is done and the tourists begin to show up, a surface thing. The core of what makes us who we are is not that. Somehow, it seems, we are insecure about it all. We have created a nation based on some of the noblest and most innovative ideas in history and we have successfully created the institutions that, if properly used, could elevate all of humanity to a level of civil (and civilized) interconnectedness that might actually result in a genuinely marvelous future. And yet…and yet…we seem to have no real faith in those ideas. If we did we wouldn’t be so fearful of even hearing about other ideas.
We insist on throwing our Americanness in everyone’s face, even our own. As if without the advertising we would be insignificant. We are regularly so unnerved by new ideas we go through revolutions of anxiety-driven trials and purges to keep those ideas at bay, even when they may stem directly from our own. We persecute people who seem to be different, not just in their veneer but in their thinking, often without taking a pause to understand what is being presented. We are thin-skinned. We in fact seem to have a tenuous hold on our own identity and instead of figuring out why we try to shout down everyone else.
All these things are not original to us, but since we are a democracy and since we have reached a point of having actual power and ability, we are suffering the worst aspects of all these things. They have been part of our character all along. They have never before resulted in such a complete rupture in our institutions. Why? Because we are not all consumed by these things, at least not all at the same time, and because before it was rare for more than one of these traits to dominate our national dialogue at a given moment. The give and take of our democratic methodology has allowed for an ebb and flow of good and bad so that at any period we have had leaders elected by the pluralities who have not been in thrall to all these characteristics.
Until now.
Because these character traits have always been there, it seems that it was inevitable that one day a perfect storm would sweep through and hand us the worst example of what we are and overwhelm the checks and balances that have traditionally kept us mostly intact. Not this time. We are experiencing a moment brought to us by an evangelical paranoia based on a sense of our insecure exceptionalism determined to assert an authority without accountability or restraint. Given the last three centuries, it was perhaps inevitable that at least once we would end up with this.
Let me reiterate, this is not everyone. But a sufficient plurality under the right conditions has always had the potential to do this. This is one reason why many of the Founders distrusted actual democracy.
One last condition which perhaps is essential to the manifestation of the moment. Americans in general, since the beginning, have not wanted to be bothered. Not bothered by politics. By that I do not mean the party atmosphere of electioneering but the real meat of political science. We want to be left alone to do what we think matters, which is often securing a legacy for our families and communities, and in that Americans have often seen the larger political sphere as a a distraction if not an actual impediment. This was an important factor in the westward expansion. The number of utopian communities that have sprung up throughout our history. We can see this in our voting trends. But now it seems we are angry. Recognizing this, those who have benefitted from this confluence of our less laudable aspects are trying to prevent people from voting.
The wheel turns.
But as I said, this is not everyone, and only parts of these things manifest now and then. What we have been facing lo these last few decades is a confluence of competing flaws, exacerbated by the unfortunate arrival of the means to communicate our fears and resentments to each other as never before, amplifying the effects. I suspect that it is only a minority, as has been shown to be the case elsewhere, who have driven this bus and made the rest of us afraid. The rest of us are where our dreams express a better quality.
It is both true and simplistic to point out that what we are experiencing is a politics of resentment. A one-size-fits-all problem, while containing an essential truth, does not yield enough traction to address the issues.
I am hopeful. I believe there are more of us not in thrall to these ugly strands of out national fabric, which is why we have fought a holding action against exactly this moment for so long. We need to recover from this and find a way back to the better angels of our nature. If such can be done, I do feel it will be amazing.
We start by acknowledging that our flaws are not the parts of us that should be in charge.
One Response
This 4th hits differently this time because I recently found out doing genealogy research that instead of all four of my mother’s grandparents being immigrants (both my father’s parents were immigrants) one of them had deep roots in America, with some branches reaching into the 1630s to the early colonies. I have a couple of documented Patriot ancestors, and some more that looked to have served in some way, so it’s more personal now. Ancestors and relatives of mine put their lives on the line to create this country, and shameless parasites and grifters are feeding off of it. Whatever societal trends there are leading to the current crisis, it’s largely been fueled by certain people in various leadership positions, whether political, business, news & “news”, entertainment, or religious, feeding off their followers and the population in general, grifting for their own personal gain, heedless of the damage they are doing.
This situation brings to mind the concept of a “worm” in CJ Cherry’s “Cyteen”, population level psychology & sociology combining over generations in unforeseen ways that can create societal issues.
It’s not just that there’s a rejection of authority, but this very weird combination of rejection of authority they don’t like joined with utter credulity of authority figures they agree with. These people will say you can’t trust the Deep State, Big Business, Big Pharma, etc, but some random person on Facebook or TikTok spouting absolute nonsense, as long as it’s someone of the “right tribe”, they’ll just accept whatever it is, because why would Random Person On The Internet lie to them? Maybe because they’re a foreign agent or paid by a foreign agent to sow dissension, making a bunch of money off of the supplement or whatever they’re selling, making money off of views.
People are people, and that hasn’t changed throughout history. I just read “The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster” by Shelley Puhak, about the infamous Elizabeth Bathory, and there’s much that is familiar: a disinformation campaign spreading sensationalized stories of murder and torture, to discredit an inconvenient woman (and steal her wealth), and a population lapping up those lurid stories. A monarch driving a wedge between different ethnic groups to keep them from joining together against him, and who accepts bribes to make legal troubles go away. An elite woman said to kidnap virgins to bathe in their blood to stay young.
To succeed and survive, a democracy needs an educated, informed, and engaged populace. It’s been a while since I’ve been in school, but civics education seems to be increasingly neglected at all levels, as well as rigorous, balanced history, and critical thinking skills in favor of “teaching to the test”. There’s been entire news ecosystems created all along the pollical spectrum where people can get siloed information and not be exposed to other points of view or doublecheck the information they’re getting. As far as engagement, that goes to your point of people not wanting to be bothered, more interested in voting for “American Idol”, more willing to stand in line for Black Friday deals than to vote.
I hate to use the term “both sides,” but the extremes on both sides, religious right and ultra leftists, are engaged in the politics of righteous and purity, where you must agree 100% with their belief system, or you are not merely wrong, but evil, and unworthy of debate, maybe even existence, and must be coerced into agreement by whatever means necessary. It is a small, but very vocal minority, on both sides who have a stranglehold on politics. There is a way around, but it requires a deep, and painful, and honest discussion, beyond slogans and platitudes, about our history, and what it means to be an American, and how best to fulfill, for all Americans, what was started 250 years ago.
Captain John Crane (7th Regt, Dutchess Co Militia), Captain Henry Strang (Westchester Co Militia, 3rd Regt), Corporal Jonah Thayer (Capt Oliver Avery’s Company of Minute-Men), and all the other people who fought or otherwise served in the cause of the American Revolution, thank you.