America has failed time and time again (on normalizing our political failures)
For both Democrats and Republicans (and hell, maybe even some independents, why don’t you ask one), Inauguration Day is an occasion for celebrating how special and wonderful our country is. Even in 2021, just weeks after an armed right-wing mob stormed the Capitol building —insert your favorite ironic comment about the peaceful transition of power here — the incoming administration of Joseph Robinette (!) Biden, Jr couldn’t help itself. The most enduring and unique thing about America is, after all, how frequently and loudly we proclaim our endurance and uniqueness. Joe Biden’s first presidential address could’ve been written by freedom-loving algorithm (i.e. Pete Buttigieg):
Through a crucible for the ages America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge.
Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy.
The will of the people has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded.
We have learned again that democracy is precious.
Democracy is fragile.
And at this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed.
Seemingly every story we tell about America has this kind of Hollywood arc: the challenge, the struggle, and finally, the triumph. Speeches with long litanies of obstacles overcome were a hallmark of the Obama era, and Obama’s right-hand man (as in, to the right of the Democratic center on just about every issue) seems ready to rely on the same trope:
Our history has been a constant struggle between the American ideal that we are all created equal and the harsh, ugly reality that racism, nativism, fear, and demonization have long torn us apart.
The battle is perennial.
Victory is never assured.
Through the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War, 9/11, through struggle, sacrifice, and setbacks, our “better angels” have always prevailed.
“Better angels,” of course, comes from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address (slash “The Monitor” by Titus Andronicus), a speech given in the lead-up to one of the great obstacles in Biden’s litany. But Lincoln’s “better angels” don’t “prevail” like a Marvel superhero punching an alien in the face: they simply “touch” the “mystic chords of memory” that bind Americans to a shared history and culture. Lincoln’s call for understanding is graceful and melancholy — we don’t really do those things in America, anymore. We’re more into rising above / crushing it / being a boss / etc, as exemplified, again, by Biden’s inaugural:
This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward.
And, we must meet this moment as the United States of America.
If we do that, I guarantee you, we will not fail.
We have never, ever, ever failed in America when we have acted together.
There are many people who think this kind of relentlessly optimistic language is appropriate in the middle of multiple crises that are — Biden is correct — truly historic. But I’d argue that what we need right now, from our leaders and from ourselves, is almost exactly the opposite of relentless optimism. What we need is language that acknowledges some very mean realities. We need a vision of our country that is true. A story of our country that acknowledges disappointment, cruelty, oppression, and failure. An idea of our country that’s not based on bullshit!
America as the world’s greatest success story is a tale that just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. An observant middle schooler could point out some basic ways that we’ve failed to live up to our “founding creeds.” Does a nation that refuses to take any action to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic really care about the value of “life”? Can we wholeheartedly claim to love “liberty” in this country built by slave labor (a country that still “employs” thousands of literal slaves to do its capitalist bidding)? And how many people does America punish and jail for “pursuing” a happiness that they can’t get from their awful job, overpriced apartment, and oppressive consumerist culture?
Most observant high school grads know that we’re just scratching the surface, here. A true reckoning with all of the ways America has failed itself (and other countries!) would require an encyclopedia set, one that included the names of every person ever maimed, killed, enslaved, or impoverished by our wars, our imperial ambitions, our racism, our homophobia and transphobia and misogyny, our utter lack of care for the vulnerable and sick, and our fetish for all things gaudy, rich, and phony. And yet, to call these miscarriages of justice “mis-steps” along the way is to completely misread the path of America: these are not bugs in the system, but features, the intended results of policy ideas and popular notions that defined “success” in the cruellest, most self-serving ways (where the “self” being “served” is always unbelievably wealthy). The genocide of Indigenous people, the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, the useless slaughter in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq: these are not “problems” that we’re currently “working on.” There is no magical narrative that somehow turns the historical tide in favor of decency and justifies all of this human suffering. The “triumph” of, say, the Voting Rights Act only came after centuries of wholly pointless, unfathomably brutal treatment of Black people — and even that “win” has been mitigated by ceaseless Republican efforts to deny Blacks political power. To say that we’ve “grown” or “learned” from such a dark, troubled record is both to underplay the severity of our crimes and to overrate the maturity of contemporary Americans (74 million of which cast a vote for a serial rapist; 80 million of which cast a vote for a different rapist).
Even if most liberals have given up the fantasy of us being a perfect or even a “great” country, there is still a widespread sense that Americans are fundamentally “good.” Even when our leaders have been misguided, we say, the essential soul of the American people has been righteous. Martin Luther King, Jr, a great believer-skeptic in the American project, spoke of the “moral arc of the universe” bending toward justice. And yet, just prior to King’s death, a majority of white Americans disapproved of his work. A substantial portion of our people didn’t know a great democratic voice when they heard it. Which of course begs the question: do Americans know what democracy is, or even care?
This question is a big and historic one for our nation, one that our national bard Walt Whitman wrestled with in “Democratic Vistas,” his all-time great work of American disillusionment. A reckoning with the “appalling dangers of universal suffrage,” Whitman’s essay stakes the potential superiority of his country not on its wealth and power (which even in his time, were quite substantial), but on its ability to realize the dream of a democratic society. He finds Americans’ lack of faith in said project… disturbing:
Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling.
The proof of a democracy is in its personalities, says Whitman. If American men and women can’t feel their worth, and don’t believe in their capacity to make decisions for themselves, and to govern themselves, then all of our institutions are just remnants of a crusty old order.
Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy. I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help’d, though often harm’d, by them. It has been and is carried on by all the moral forces, and by trade, finance, machinery, intercommunications, and, in fact, by all the developments of history, and can no more be stopp’d than the tides, or the earth in its orbit. Doubtless, also, it resides, crude and latent, well down in the hearts of the fair average of the American-born people, mainly in the agricultural regions. But it is not yet, there or anywhere, the fully-receiv’d, the fervid, the absolute faith.
Whitman does not see a democracy in his present, and so says, “therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.” We now stand just outside of the bard’s bicentennial, with a new president who insists that “democracy has prevailed.” But is “the peaceful transfer of power” alone… democracy? Is Lady Gaga singing a hymn to a flag… democracy? Can we even say that a flurry of Day One executive orders really counts… as democracy? Like Whitman, what we are facing in this country are the husks of rotting, rat-infested institutions (with, I dunno, Katy Perry as the embodiment of Whitman’s “hectic glow”). The baton was passed. The procedure is complete. But can this possibly be the be-all end-all of American “success”?
Modern Americans love cops, and the military, and Disney, but are unsure about protesters. An electorate that feels the need to wave banners for agents of the state and put down opponents of major corporations doesn’t seem like the sort of political body you’d expect to take democratic decision-making seriously. I can’t do any better than David Bentley Hart when it comes to describing just who our country is, today:
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).
What Hart is describing is a population that has failed to lived up to its democratic ideals. That might not be their own fault — Whitman knew that true democratic feeling would only come with sustained democratic training, and the unending propaganda machine that passes for American history, on TV, in movies, in books, and in the speeches of prominent politicians, doesn’t exactly burnish one’s “democratic armor” (to use Cornel West’s phrase). But the American lack of interest in democracy, regardless of where it came from and how it’s sustained, hardly bodes well for the American democratic future.
If we are genuinely invested in things getting “better,” we need to realize all the ways that America really, truly sucks. We need to not only give up the triumphant language of patriotism: we need to internalize the sadder, but finally more revealing vocabulary of failure. Remembering the lives of actual Americans, those passed and those still forced to live and toil and die in this country, will require us to forget the corny, snowflake-y, false stories about challenges bested, which exist only to “make sense” of very senseless death and destruction. We must replace our child-like and simplistic faith in a “nation” with a textured but spirited faith in real democracy.
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