This morning, DemFromCt posted a book review of Ian Reifowitz's Obama's America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity. Also included was a brief interview with the author, who, in response to the last question, cited his book for a 1988 quote from philosopher Richard Rorty:
Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of. They must tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past….to which the country should remain true….Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.
I have no problem with this idea - Hell, I fully support it -- but it made me think about whether there are
any American achievements from which we could craft a truly unifying national narrative of pride. For reasons discussed below the squiggle, I honestly don't think there are.
Again, let me be clear: what the Rorty quote made me wonder is there is anything -- anything at all -- in America's history and its achievements upon which we could all seize as a people and from which we could craft a unifying story of national pride. I am emphatically not suggesting that there is nothing of which America can be proud. I am simply wondering if there is anything about which we can all agree America should be proud, and around which Americans of all political stripes and persuasions can rally as a fundamental, ongoing narrative of American greatness.
Here is why I do not believe such history exists.
America's History of Military Adventure
The first thing I considered was America's history of military victories. Leaving aside (for a moment) the problems inherent in shaping a national narrative around military adventure, this seems to be the aspect of our country to which we predominantly point when we as a people want to tell the rest of the world "We're Number 1." Hell, I can't remember the last time I saw a major sporting event without a fly-by being performed by military jets.
But can our history of warfare serve to rally and unify us as a people? Can we think of any wars that all of us support?
A few, of course, immediately spring to mind. The Revolutionary War and WWII, for example. But - after those - I'm kind of drawing a blank.
Pretty much all the wars since WWII have been controversial and naturally lend themselves to political polarization, especially if we were to try and present them as "inspirations" for national pride. The Korean War might be an exception, but only because I think it does little to inspire or horrify; most Americans don't know anything about it other than what they've seen on M*A*S*H reruns, it ended relatively quickly, and it ended in stalemate, the status quo of which is still being preserved.
But, then, the same problems (divisiveness or blandness) present themselves with respect to any of the big wars that came before WWII as well. I'd suggest that WWI and The War of 1812 fit into the "bland category." WWI is too complicated; historians today still argue about what really precipitated it, other than the shooting of Archduke Ferdinand. The War of 1812 is too anciently obscure to inspire.
The Spanish-American War and the Mexican-American War, although little discussed today, would be rendered too polarizing if we attempted to exalt them. In the case of the Spanish-American War, because through it we seized the Philippines (an act that caused that great American man of letters Mark Twain to inveigh against the war even while it was being pursued). In the case of the Mexican-American War, because through it we seized a large part of the western United States. Try to make these the face of American pride, and we'll end up arguing about colonialism and expansion by conquest.
Of course, the Civil War retains the title of Ultimate Polarizing Event in America History, and has not yet lost its ability to divide us, as demonstrated by the Neo-Confederate party that is today's GOP. And can you even imagine trying to shape a proud national identity today out of the so-called "Indian Wars," by which whole indigenous peoples were slaughtered in order to seize the lands on which they were living?
My point here is not to condemn all American military actions, and especially not to denigrate any of the Americans who fought in those wars. (My own grandfather served during the Korean War.) My point here is simply that it is not possible to craft an inspiring and also unifying national narrative out of our past military exploits. Which is, you know, a good thing. it seems to me that creating a shared national identity based on military exploits can only result in jingoism, xenophobia and, of course, more wars and carnage.
But if we can't point toward our victories over those nefarious Others, to what victories can we point to instill national pride?
America's History of Democratization and Enfranchisement
To me, the obvious answer is those victories fought and won to make life a little better for the previously dispossessed. The Worker. The Woman. The African-American. The Native American. Members of the LGBT community. Hell, even the national enfranchisement of everyone 18 years old and older. These were all heroic efforts to wrest a little fairness out of the then prevailing system (too often, a global system of disenfranchisement; hell, women didn't even the right to vote in France until 1944) to make us a fairer people and a more just society.
And yet these same triumphs (and, in the case of LGBT people, ongoing efforts) are the heart and soul of our current culture wars. Craft a unifying national story/identity out of these victories? Especially when fully one-half of our political establishment is doing everything it can to role those victories back? Not likely.
Even the most anodyne of our historical accomplishments, justly albeit unreflectively celebrated in our classrooms - the creation of the Constitution, our governing document - is a cultural flashpoint. Sure, we all celebrate freedom of religion, but a whole lot of us think that doesn't include Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus or Atheists. Sure, we all celebrate freedom of speech, but a whole lot of us think that doesn't include the freedom to burn an American flag in protest, to mouth off to a cop, to say shocking and ugly things in public, or even to criticize the President (at least when that President is a Republican; I've not forgotten nor gotten over the Bush War Years.)
It is impossible to create a unifying national narrative out of the enactment of our Constitution - which, for all its flaws, still remains one of the most significant and progressive political acts in human history - when about half the population refuses to believe it says what it says.
What else?
America's History of Non-Confrontational Achievements
What about things like the American contribution to medical advances, our space program, and our Interstate Highway System. Ho-hum. Don't get me wrong, all of these (and more) are remarkable accomplishments and should justly be celebrated; the outpouring of pride over the recent successful landing of Curiosity on Mars was a beautiful thing to witness. But such stories lack a single hero and, more importantly, an identifiable villain over which we can be said to have triumphed. Ignorance? Indolence? Apathy? Not inspiring antagonists.
And, besides . . . right now we're doing all we can to cut investment in exciting things like the space program and important things like our infrastructure. Trying to hold these past accomplishments up as emblematic of American greatness would automatically draw the ire of our conservative faction, which would simply argue we were trying to block their American Austerity Uber Alles agenda.
And that leaves us, finally, with American culture. Hollywood, baseball, Jazz, Rock and Roll, blue jeans, cowboys, hotdogs (and, really, the very notion that an entire meal should be eaten with one's fingers), Coca-Cola . . . . Yeah, I'm not seeing that either. Don't get me wrong, I like all of those things to at least some degree (always found baseball to be a slow spectator sport, though I did enjoy playing when I was a kid), but, really, America: The Land of McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Michael Bay is just not a winning slogan.
Maybe the problem is that we are still so young a nation. Counting from our founding (the enactment of the Constitution) we are less than 250 years old. We don't have the comforting distance of centuries, as do, say, Britain or France, to look back and laugh ruefully yet fondly at all the mistakes we have made and experience a slight frisson at the mere idea of being us and of having just so much history behind us. Our mistakes are too much with us, and the insistence of so many rabid right-wingers that America is and always has been perfect makes it impossible even for us to celebrate when we stopped making some Godawful mistakes and improved ourself as a nation and as a people.
(You may remember that early this year the Tea Party in Tennessee demanded that schoolchildren not be taught about American slavery, because acknowledging this historical fact might tend to lessen the greatness of our Founding Fathers in the eyes of American children. Oy vey. How can we celebrate the greatness of America ending slavery if we can't first acknowledge that Americans had, y'know, slaves?)
* * *
Of course, I could be entirely wrong about this. Maybe there is some overarching narrative running throughout American history that I am simply blanking on, some one thing that demonstrates us to actually be a great nation and that all of us -- progressives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, and Tea Partiers -- agree on. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.
But if no such single, unifying narrative exists, then what we are left with is exactly what Rorty and Reifowitz exhort us to do: start crafting our own, progressive stories about what made America great.
We could insist, for example, that our schoolchildren not be told that the U.S. Constitution and Amendments 1 through 10 jointly constituted - as Michele Bachmann would have them believe - a perfect and unimprovable document, or even a perfectible document, but were only the first step in a perpetually ongoing process "to form a more perfect union." We could insist that they be told that the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th and 26th Amendments to the Constitution were glorious and important steps toward that American dream.
We could insist that the Labor Movement and the Civil Rights Movement and the legislation enacted to further their goals were the crown jewels of 20th century American accomplishment, easily on par with our creation of nuclear weapons and our defeat of Nazi Germany.
We could try instilling in our fellow citizens the idea that America is the greatest country in the world because we consciously recognize that this distinction is not something we won in the past, but something we have to fight for and win every single day. We could remind people of JFK's words and demand that everybody -- not just the working and middle class, but the plutocrats too -- do their fair share for our country.
We can still accomplish a lot in this, the first modern experiment in representative democracy, and we still have the power to shape the United States into the country we think it should be.
But we've got to get better at our storytelling.