The Past was Another Country/Is the United States Finished?

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???