The
Past was Another Country/Is the United States Finished?
The British historian
and journalist Martin Meredith published a book entitled The Past is Another Country in 1979. It chronicled the dying days
of white settler colonialism in Rhodesia as guerrilla movements representing
the black majority were grinding their way toward power. That settler past was
indeed a different place from what Africans had in mind for the future. White
Rhodesians didn’t want to live in the “new country” Africans had in mind and
they worked assiduously in the 1960s and 70s to prevent it from coming about. Many
might argue that given the catastrophic outcomes of the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe
today, whites may have been right to fear the new country’s arrival. But let’s
save that discussion (which I’m perfectly happy to have) for another time.
Today I want to use to
metaphor “the past is another country” to talk about the United States in the
era of Trump. The U.S. is often talked about as a relatively new nation. This
is usually stated by white commentators speaking from a Eurocentric perspective
relating it to the “older nations” of Europe (or sometimes Asia). They rightly observe
that the U.S. is the first modern state to break away from European
colonialism, and in that sense, it is one of the newer nations.
But in the modern world
which has emerged since the Enlightenment, the U.S. is one of the older nations.
In their book The Right Nation John Micklethwait
and Adrian Wooldridge point out that the U.S. has the world’s oldest continuously
operating written constitution. It is the world’s oldest republic (government
without hereditary rulers). The Democratic Party originating in Andrew Jackson’s
calls for universal white male suffrage in the 1820s is the oldest
popularly-based political party in the world.
So America is an old modern nation. It has navigated the course of
government by the people for more than two centuries undergirded by the values
of individual liberty and equality before the law. Liberty gave us freedom of
association and speech. But unencumbered by a communal past, it also gave us an
unflagging faith in free markets and a nearly unbridled capitalism. The value of
equality in a society founded on conquest, slavery and patriarchy bequeathed to
us successive generations of struggle to approximate that great ideal.
But an undying belief
in capitalism and tenacious commitment to equality do not sit easily at the
same table. Elsewhere I’ve written that the U.S. is not one nation, but two. Individualist
economic conservatism and cultural conservatism based in white supremacy and Christianity
are juxtaposed to equality before the law, multiculturalism and secularism. More
than two centuries of unending political struggle have made us grow weary of
each other. All white men hardly had time to savor the achievement of their own
right to vote, before women were clamoring for the same right, and blacks and
whites began the struggle to end slavery. Then came a bloody war that ended
slavery and forced the resentful former slave states back into the republic.
Soon however, they would be permitted to reconfigure white supremacy in a Jim
Crow system, which by the way, was imposed upon all people of color in
differing ways and degrees until the great transformations of the 1960s. Those
transformations included positionality in the public discourse for women’s
rights, lesbian and gay rights, environmentalism, and a critique of militarism and
imperialism.
That progressive
nationalism forced its way onto the stage, but was met by the backlash of
Reaganism in the 1980s, Gingrich’s “Contract on America” in the 90s, and
finally, a resurgent imperialism under Bush junior. Progressives, to our credit,
always pushed back. Finally, there was Obama who was black, but not really as
far left as many of us would have liked. But by that time demographers were
telling us that by mid-century the country would be majority-minority; and the
opinion data was suggesting an attendant tilt to the left. But while the Obama
generation weren’t voting in 2010, the right took control of statehouses, gerrymandered
the hell out of legislative and congressional districts and began passing voter
I.D. laws designed to keep people of color away from the polls.
Then in 2016, we
stunningly, got the fascist Trump. The left is rightfully traumatized by this
turn of events. My (few) conservative associates tell me that many of them were
equally in shock when Obama got elected in 2008. How could they have been so
fearful of so mainstream a politician as Obama? The answer must be because he
was black, and folks on the right had not thought that mid-century would arrive
so fast!
So the right does not
want to live in the same kind of country that we do, and we don’t want to live
in the land of Trump. The good news is, the left is pushing back hard. But the
right has shown its skill at push back over the generations. Aided by the
internet and the man in the White House, the public discourse has never been as
vitriolic as it is now. We have become thoroughly exhausted with each other.
The past was another country. It was a country that the right, under the mantle
of “make America great again,” would like to bring back; but one which the left
cannot allow to return. Where doth lie the political center in this depressing
societal landscape?
I started to name this essay “The United States is
Finished” … Is it???
