I was delighted my letter to the BBC History Magazine was featured in April’s edition. It was a response to Adam IP Smith’s article about what January’s riots on Capitol Hill showed about America. You can see my letter pictured. Letters for publication always have to be frustratingly short, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to elaborate a little further here.
America has a curious relationship with its founding principle – freedom. The country considers itself the land of the free, but also the home of the brave, leading to an aggressive defence of freedom that is uniquely American. Those seen to be taking freedom away are evil, while those that promise to retain or return it are patriotic champions.
This has proven ripe ground for populism, and we have seen it time and again. Nineteenth-century president and archetypal self-made man Andrew Jackson promised ‘Jacksonian Democracy’ by transferring power from elites to the people, after he campaigned against the “corrupt bargain” of an election he lost (where have we heard that before?). While Huey Long is best known for his power-grab in Louisiana that inspired Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, he was hugely popular for attempting to bring about a genuinely progressive agenda during the Great Depression and may well have been president if he wasn’t assassinated. Recently, we have seen the pluto-populism of Donald Trump, a reactionary who promised to keep America free by taking power away from of elites, the Left, China, and anyone else he could scapegoat.
This is America’s subtle relationship with authoritarianism. It believes so strongly in freedom, and is so distrustful of its perceived enemies, that it is willing to grant autocratic power in defence of it.
This apparent oxymoron points to the dark side of America. Its supreme self-assurance in its freedom and exceptionalism leads to a binary view of the world. A world where America is the shining city on the hill which needs to shine its light upon the world. Such beliefs have promoted manifest destiny, post-War cultural imperialism and the fundamental desire, epitomised by Conrad Hilton, to bring America to the world – and even to space. This mentality was reinforced by staunch Christianity, leading to the crude idea that by defending and spreading America that they were doing God’s work. The fallout is a childish obsession with good and evil. Whether the “evil empire” or the “axis of evil”, there is always a monster America needs to slay.
This compulsion to defeat evil seeps inside America’s own borders. New York’s broken windows policing strategy consisted of clamping down hard on visible crime, for fear it would create an urban environment of civil disorder. The strategy was not only a failure, it shone a light into the heart of America that believes there is a criminal other that needs to be kept at bay. It points to the fundamental problem: a misunderstanding that the devil is an ‘other’, rather than inside the heart of every human.
We are witnessing a surge of anti-Americanism, both inside and outside of America, as the sentiment grows that the great American experiment has failed. Everyone used to want to be American – it really was ich bein ein Americana. But that has changed. As the glories of WW2 retreat into distant memory, Iraq and Vietnam dominate perceptions of America’s influence in the world. People used to stare in wonder at never-ending American malls, but now they remind them of postmodern alienation and the consumerism driving the climate crisis. The American dream is founded on a presumption of freedom – but people are increasingly questioning who that freedom is for. The WASPish 1% in Wall Street and Washington?
As the chemtrails over the country club that is America thickens into a fog, now is a good point to return to how I concluded my letter. America would do well to lose the tarred sheen of superiority and confidence, and work to listen and understand more. It may learn something.
This is where the battle for America’s soul, and ultimately its future, will play out. Will America decline and fall as it contorts under the weight of its own inconsistencies or will it free itself from the shackles of the past and realise its enormous potential? Only America can decide.
Ben's Blog 