Tuesday
The one silver lining in our Trump-induced nightmare is that we are called upon to reaffirm our faith in the American ideal. No longer can we take the Declaration of Independence or The Constitution for granted. At the New York Times, conservative NeverTrumpers have been turning to American classics to define true Americanism. Today I post on David Brooks citing Herman Melville and Langston Hughes. Tomorrow it will be Bret Stephens on Willa Cather.
As Brooks sees it, Trump’s version of America is “radically anti-American”:
In Trump’s version, “American” is defined by three propositions. First, to be American is to be xenophobic. The basic narrative he tells is that the good people of the heartland are under assault from aliens, elitists and outsiders. Second, to be American is to be nostalgic. America’s values were better during some golden past. Third, a true American is white. White Protestants created this country; everybody else is here on their sufferance.
To be truly American, Brooks says, is to be
pluralistic, future-oriented and universal. America is exceptional precisely because it is the only nation on earth that defines itself by its future, not its past. America is exceptional because from the first its citizens saw themselves in a project that would have implications for all humankind. America is exceptional because it was launched with a dream to take the diverse many and make them one — e pluribus unum.
There is a kind of divine mission in this vision without the divinity belonging to any particular religion or sect:
American life is so raucous and dynamic because people are inflamed by visions of creating a heaven on earth. As George Santayana put it, Americans often don’t make a distinction between the sacred and the profane. In building material wealth, they see themselves creating a country that will redeem humanity, that will become the last best hope of earth.
Melville voices this ideal in one of his seafaring novels, White Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War. Brooks quotes a passage that concludes an extended reflection upon the practice of flogging. Just because England flogs, Melville argues, does not mean that America should follow suit:
in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves. There are occasions when it is for America to make precedents, and not to obey them. We should, if possible, prove a teacher to posterity, instead of being the pupil of by-gone generations. More shall come after us than have gone before; the world is not yet middle-aged.
Melville doubles down in the next paragraph, which contains the passage quoted by Brooks. Echoing the words of the Mayflower’s John Winthrop, the author says we will be a boon to the world if we remain true to our founding ideals:
Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birthright—embracing one continent of earth—God has given to us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; in our inexperience, our wisdom. At a period when other nations have but lisped, our deep voice is heard afar. Long enough, have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we cannot do a good to America but we give alms to the world.
And now to the core of Brooks’s column:
Again and again, Americans have felt called upon to launch off into new frontiers — to design a democracy, to create a new kind of democratic person, to settle the West, to industrialize, to pioneer new technologies, to explore space, to combat prejudice, to fight totalitarianism and spread democracy. The mission was always the same: to leap into the future, to give life meaning and shape by extending opportunity and dignity to all races and nations.
This American idea is not a resentful prejudice; it’s a faith and a dream. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch put it best: “Only ‘America,’ of all national designations, took on the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many forms of nationalism have laid claims to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in open or secret heresy, to find the sacred in the profane; many European Protestants have linked the soul’s journey and the way to wealth.
“But only the ‘American Way,’ of all modern symbologies, has managed to circumvent the contradictions inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only ‘American’ has succeeded in uniting nationality with universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and the paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”
“The task before us,” Brooks concludes,
is to create the most diverse mass democracy in the history of the planet — a true universal nation. It is precisely to weave the social fissures that Trump is inclined to tear.
Then he turns to Hughes’s “Let America Be America Again” for a final punctuation. While Trump has been calling un-American any criticism of America other than that which he himself levels, Hughes proves that one can critique it and believe in its promise at the same time. Writing during the Jim Crow era, this descendant of slaves believes in the American Dream no less than those immigrants who came over of their own free will:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
For Hughes, it’s not “Make America Great Again” but “Make America America.” The greatness has always been part of the original package.