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What is “Un-American”?
We must acknowledge America’s history of state authoritarianism and racial violence – but also dare to claim its aspirational tradition of egalitarian democracy.
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We must acknowledge America’s history of state authoritarianism and racial violence – but also dare to claim its aspirational tradition. Make MAGA un-American, finally.
Steady (steady.page)
I quote James Baldwin in this piece:
“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”
I believe this is profoundly true. It should be the paradigm that guides our political imagination and choices.
The Right’s vision of white Christian patriarchal domination is indeed deeply rooted in U.S. history. To counter it, we should take heart from that other American tradition, that boldly democratic promise of egalitarian pluralism.
The reluctance by those on the liberal-left to engage the Right on this terrain, the tendency to abdicate and surrender the field of patriotism to the Right, has allowed a bunch of ethno-nationalist extremists to present themselves as the guardians of the national mythos.
Too long have rightwingers been allowed to drape their grievances and bigotries in the nation’s collective symbols, to call on the patriotic mythology of the nation in order to pretend that their desire to dominate is somehow an expression of the timeless essence of the nation.
I believe such dark mirror exceptionalism is deeply mistaken. We must distinguish between acknowledging traditions of racial violence and state authoritarianism on the one hand – and reducing the nation’s history to those traditions on the other.
Whereas the traditional exceptionalist tale presented America as intrinsically good, noble, and democratic, this dark mirror narrative views the nation as inherently incapable of anything but hierarchical violence: There never was democracy in America – and there never will be.
If we finally get rid of the willfully naïve exceptionalism that glorifies America, let us not replace it with its dark mirror equivalent that only serves to confirm MAGA’s tale – but with an aspirational creed, fueled by an acknowledgment of injustice, as our common understanding.
MAGA claims that “real America” was only ever intended to be and only ever existed as a white Christian ethno-state. Let us not help them perpetuate this idea that the injustices of the past and present represent the sole true essence of the nation by renouncing America’s aspirational tradition.
That aspirational tradition isn’t any less authentically American than the idea of a white Christian “homeland” defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. There simply has never been a consensual answer to the question of “who we are.”
But to insist that America – its history, identity, and political tradition – is solely defined by these continuities of racist authoritarianism and white patriarchal domination is equally ahistorical. From the start, the American experiment was also shaped by an egalitarian promise.
For too long, a willfully ignorant, self-exculpatory exceptionalism that mythologizes U.S. history into an easily digestible, triumphant tale has hampered the struggle against authoritarianism by engendering a dangerously unimaginative “It cannot happen here” complacency.
What the MAGA government is doing does not constitute some accidental departure from an otherwise heroic democratic tradition. America has a long history of racial violence perpetrated and condoned by the state, of state authoritarianism in service of a white supremacist vision.
Let’s Make MAGA un-American, finally.
I wrote about the conflict over national identity, the need to reclaim patriotism from the Right, and the struggle between two traditions that are both authentically American: White male supremacy vs. the egalitarian promise of democratic pluralism.
We must acknowledge America’s history of state authoritarianism and racial violence – but also dare to claim its aspirational tradition. Make MAGA un-American, finally.
Steady (steady.page)
The Right’s vision of white Christian patriarchal domination is indeed deeply rooted in U.S. history. To counter it, we should take heart from that other American tradition, that boldly democratic promise of egalitarian pluralism.
Make MAGA un-American, finally.
There is an American tradition of egalitarian pluralism that puts the Right’s vicious, exclusionary domination fantasies to shame. We should invoke it as a reminder to the Trumpists that their claim to be the sole representatives of “authentic” Americanism has no historical basis.
The reluctance by those on the liberal-left to engage the Right on this terrain, the tendency to abdicate and surrender the field of patriotism to the Right, has allowed a bunch of ethno-nationalist extremists to present themselves as the guardians of the national mythos.
Too long have rightwingers been allowed to drape their grievances and bigotries in the nation’s collective symbols, to call on the patriotic mythology of the nation in order to pretend that their desire to dominate is somehow an expression of the timeless essence of the nation.
But it is simply not true that the latter, with all the brutal subjugation it fueled and legitimized, is the sole true political tradition - while the former is just hypocritical theater intended to distract us from that reality.
What Is America, and for Whom? Two competing forms of nationalism: A pluralistic democracy with egalitarian aspirations – or a white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies? American society has always been divided over what this country should strive to be.
