Former ABC journalist and radio producer, Peter Clarke, asked me to think out loud about what is happening in the United States and to chat about the effect their politics is having on ours. I hope you get some value from the discussion.
I must admit, I was reluctant. And what ended up coming out wasn’t optimistic. But nor was it defeatist.
The older you are, the more traumatised you probably are about what is happening in the US.
Like many people of my generation, the America I grew up with was omnipresent, and we had mixed feelings about it. We were saturated in its popular culture and schooled in its political dominance and resented it and appreciated it in ever-shifting degrees. Love-hate just about covers it.
At no point did we expect it to collapse into fascism, but fascism comes slowly and then it comes fast.
And here we are.
I keep using that refrain lately: “and here we are”. It’s like Kurt Vonnegut’s refrain in Slaughterhouse 5, “and so it goes”. That phrase maps out in slow, mournful steps—steady as a heartbeat—the sad, dissociated narrative of Vonnegut’s master novel. That voice is in my head a lot these days.
And here we are.
I reread Slaughter House 5 recently, or rather, listened to the audiobook, recited with a perfect lack of affect by James Franco, and I think he knew. I think Vonnegut knew. I think he knew what was coming, what people were capable of, people everywhere. His people. There is no delusion about manifest destiny or the necessary nation or any of the other nation-affirming lies Americans tell themselves. Just a sad unacceptance of what humans are capable of, however they divide themselves. America saved us from Hitler so they could produce their own. It’s all there.
And so it goes. And here we are.
One of things we canvas in the podcast is the appropriateness of using the word coup to describe what is happening, and you will hear my answer to that question. Another way of looking at it is to wonder whether the country is heading towards civil war, and one answer to that is that the last one never ended.
Read Ellen Willis’s collected works and you realise the way in which reactionary America has never accepted the progress of progressive America, that the advances made were always on borrowed time, or at least, on deeply contested time, and that those opposed have seem always to have had more conviction than those in favour. This is from an essay in The Village Voice from 1979, and the same issues and vectors of blame that we argue about today are all there:
Far from being revolutionary, the cultural left was basically apolitical. That so much of its opposition was expressed in terms of contempt for capitalism and consumerism only confirms how little most sixties radicals understood the American social system or their own place in it. There is a neat irony in the fact that leftists are now romanticizing the family and blaming capitalism for its collapse, while ten years ago they were trashing the family and blaming capitalism for its persistence. Ah, dialectics: if an increasingly conservative capitalism has propelled the seventies backlash, it was a dynamic liberal capitalism that fostered the sixties revolt. The expansion of the American economy after World War II produced two decades of unprecedented prosperity, which allowed masses of people unprecedented latitude in making choices about how to live. Just as more and more people could afford to buy houses, cars, and appliances, they could choose to work less—or at less lucrative occupations—and still earn enough to survive without undue hardship, especially if they didn’t have kids to support. As a result a growing minority—particularly among the children of the upper middle class—felt free to question the dominant social arrangements, to experiment and take risks, to extend student life with its essentially bohemian values into adulthood rather than graduate to professional jobs, nuclear families, and the suburbs.
What most counterculture opposition to capitalism amounted to was this minority’s anger at the majority for refusing to make the same choice. Even the organized left, which should have known better, acted as if the way to change American society was for each person individually to renounce the family, material comfort, and social respectability. That most people were doing no such thing was glibly attributed to sexual repression, greed, and/or “brainwashing” by the mass media—the implication being that radicals and bohemians were sexier, smarter, less corrupt, and generally more terrific than everyone else. Actually, what they mostly were was younger and more privileged: it was easy to be a self-righteous antimaterialist if you had never known anxiety about money; easy to sneer at the security of marriage if you had solicitous middle-class parents; easy, if you were twenty years old and childless, to blame those parents for the ills of the world. Not that radicals were wrong in believing that a sexually free, communal society was incompatible with capitalism, or in perceiving connections between sexual repression, obsessive concern with material goods, and social conformity.
But they did not understand that, psychology aside, most people submit to the power of institutions because they suffer unpleasant consequences if they don’t.
(Willis, Ellen. The Essential Ellen Willis (Function). Kindle Edition.)
A good way of looking at what is happening is this explanation from Joseph O’Neill in his review of Jill Lepore’s “little book”, These Truths: A History of the United States, “a monumental and brilliantly assembled work of political history that is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions.”
Riffing off Lapore, O’Neill suggests the eternal civil war is the one between the idea of America and the idea of the United States. That is, it is a battle between a spiritual idea of nation—a volk, if you like—and the intellectual idea of the United States as defined in its liberal constitution.
In a long discussion, O’Neill says that “The unspoken ratio decidendi of Bush v. Gore is that, when it comes to the crunch, America trumps the United States and its papery constitutional affirmations. Democrats get this as much as Republicans do. Consciously or unconsciously, they know the score. They experience this knowledge mostly as fear.”
He quotes Lapore:
This America is a community of belonging and commitment, held together by the strength of our ideas and by the force of our disagreements. A nation founded on universal ideas will never stop fighting over the meaning of its past and the direction of the future…. The nation, as ever, is the fight.
And here we are.
You will hear in the podcast that I don’t think this will end well, but I take some solace from the fact that it will end. The wimp in the White House may have arms of splitable atoms but his feet are still made of clay. His ideas are borrowed from the worst people in history and will not endure. In the meantime, we all—all of us in the rest of the world— must reinvent ourselves in a way that doesn’t have America, or the United States, as a defining parameter. In that sense, what is happening is a gift, giving us all an opportunity for a second act, that thing American lives aren’t meant to have.
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