My blog-related google news filter caught this article about American patriotism in the Irish Times. It's rather episodic and shallow in its analysis of an impossibly huge topic for a standard newspaper article to capture, but the patently shocked tone it takes in reporting its findings about American political culture is worth considering. The concept of American exceptionalism, taken so much for granted by most citizens of this nation, appears to be particularly foreign to the writer.
The implied thesis of the piece is that European nations have learned the historical lessons of their experiences with fascism, while the United States has not. This is a more interesting assertion than a crude survey of flag-related Americana, particularly since there is a great deal of difference between popular American patriotism and the right-wing nationalist movements of contemporary Europe. The intervening experience of the Cold War, during which the United States found it quite necessary with the rest of the West in shambles to assert itself as the hope of the world, weighs heavily in any answer. But I think it is safe to say that some of the more millennialist-mided among us have not thought long or hard about the similarities between the metaphysical relationship they see existing between nation and the divine and that of the fascist worldview.
Maybe there's a reciprocal exceptionalism at wok here, too. In my only experience attending a conference on foreign soil (in exotic Oxford, UK) I came to the rescue of my friend and fellow American historian Carl, who was arguing with a Danish student about what I thought was the American invasion of Iraq -- which we, of course, opposed as well. It turned out that Carl was defending the American military intervention in Afghanistan, on the grounds that the then-small American presence there was harming Afghan civilians. The European experience, I gathered, had demonstrated that no military adventure, no matter the purpose, was worth the blood of any innocent soul. Having grown up in a county that had lost scores of equally innocent civilians on September 11th, I found this moral relativism upsetting. I was proud my nation had deposed the Taliban and had wished the incompetence of the Bush Administration had not prevented our military might from unleashing more death upon such fanatics. Feeling this way did not make me a fascist or even particularly patriotic, nor did it force me to disregard the lessons of Hitler. It felt more like a defense of principles and ideals that were not exceptional to the American experience and that me and my dining partners from other Western European nations held so in common as to be unremarkable. They were principles and ideals that many Afghans likely ascribed to, too.
Showing posts with label American exceptionalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label American exceptionalism. Show all posts
Monday, June 7, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Vague impressions: "Saving" America from "Socialism" for sixty years
I've been reading over the giant folder of pdf scans I took home from my winter research trip to the American Legion Headquarters this week as I start on a new book chapter. I came across a speech by National Commander George Craig in 1950 to the Chicago Accident and Health Association. Craig would later be elected governor of Indiana. In the speech, Craig criticizes Harry Truman's health care reform proposal, noting the Legion's opposition to "socialized" medicine, in part because socializing it for everyone would diminish the quality of the socialized care veterans were receiving. "If some of the crack-pot do-gooders should have their way ... God forbid," Craig told the audience, "socializing this and socializing that ... they eventually would communize America. They tell us in honeyed words that more concentrated government control of everything will do something for us. They don't tell us what it would do to us."
Craig's words were resonating in my head as I read a recent interview with Newt Gingrich on fivethirtyeight.com. Asked to explain the subtitle of his latest book, "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine," Gingrich said:
Casting liberal reform as creeping totalitarianism, while not rising anywhere near the bar of plausible, as least made some sense in the context of the early Cold War era. Conservatives thought history was pointing in two directions and the nation had to either continue on its exceptionalist path or slouch toward Marxism. As Roland Reagan put in his "A Time for Choosing" speech in 1964, "You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down—[up] man's old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."
But for those like Gingrich and DeMint and the majority of Tea Party members who came of age during the Goldwater campaign Reagan spoke for, that time for choosing is still with us. It is not enough to disagree on policy ground with the Democratic Party; rather, the very essence of the nation must be "saved" from the scheming of technocrats. Taken to the extreme, even criticizing a multinational oil company that just destroyed a major ecosystem of the North American continent is "un-American."
Obviously, on something as big as saving the auto industry from bankruptcy or the structure of the nation's health care system, there's enormous room for substantive policy debate. What fascinates me is this nationalist-inspired defense by the Right of America's inherent identity, which to me seems like something encased in amber from a previous historical epoch. Are those born of the politics of the 50s and 60s simply incapable of escaping it? The Soviet other against which we had to constantly steer away from has been dead for 20 years. Even China has chosen not to follow elements of the totalitarian model. When can we finally say the time for America's choosing has come and gone? Why does this need to "save" America from foreign "isms" persist? Too much to break off for today, so I'll leave that for you loyal readers to ponder.
I don't think it's merely a discursive strategy, like the phrase "take back America" has become. I found this piece, in which Republican members of Congress more or less admit they're stealing a line from the Tea Party for convenience's sake, pretty illuminating. Why waste the time on a book if you don't sincerely believe it?
Following up on a previous post, I thought it was interesting that 46 percent of adults surveyed by NBC this week on immigration issues thought that children of illegal immigrants born in the US should not be granted American citizenship. A net +11 thought that thought immigrants had a positive impact on the "culture and character of the community," while a net -25 thought immigrants had a negative impact on crime. Cultural chauvinism seems to be waning - we'll see how long race takes to follow suit.
Craig's words were resonating in my head as I read a recent interview with Newt Gingrich on fivethirtyeight.com. Asked to explain the subtitle of his latest book, "To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine," Gingrich said:
by any reasonable standard Obama is committed to socialism. I mean socialism in the broad sense. I’m not talking about a particular platform adopted by the International Socialist Movement in the late 19th century. I’m talking about a government-dominated, bureaucratically-controlled, politician-dicatated way of life. Not only have we taken over GM, Chrysler and AIG, but there’s a czar in the White House who believes he can establish the pay scale for 30 companies he’s never been in, for hundreds of people he’s never met. They just nationalized the student loan program. They designed Obamacare so there’s a backdoor road to socialized medicine because it creates an incentive for companies to drop their employees. There’s evidence that hundreds of companies may drop millions of employees from their health insurance and have them go buy individual insurance. So there’s a lot of different practices that would lead us to believe this is socialist operation.Criticizing Obama for being a "socialist" is not something that's novel in Gingrich's book, of course. And Gingrich is forthcoming enough at least to admit when he says "socialism" he doesn't really mean an set of economic policies, or even the historical Socialist Party, but an autocratic political system like the old Eastern Bloc or Communist China. That's the socialism Jim DeMint has in mind, too, in his book, the cover of which suggests freedom-loving Americans are destined for the gulag. It's the socialism of "death panels."
And socialism is inherently secular because it believes the center of authority is not god, the center of authority is not your rights as an individual—the center of authority is the state, and the state gets to decide what you’re allowed to keep and what you’re allowed to do.
Casting liberal reform as creeping totalitarianism, while not rising anywhere near the bar of plausible, as least made some sense in the context of the early Cold War era. Conservatives thought history was pointing in two directions and the nation had to either continue on its exceptionalist path or slouch toward Marxism. As Roland Reagan put in his "A Time for Choosing" speech in 1964, "You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down—[up] man's old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."
But for those like Gingrich and DeMint and the majority of Tea Party members who came of age during the Goldwater campaign Reagan spoke for, that time for choosing is still with us. It is not enough to disagree on policy ground with the Democratic Party; rather, the very essence of the nation must be "saved" from the scheming of technocrats. Taken to the extreme, even criticizing a multinational oil company that just destroyed a major ecosystem of the North American continent is "un-American."
Obviously, on something as big as saving the auto industry from bankruptcy or the structure of the nation's health care system, there's enormous room for substantive policy debate. What fascinates me is this nationalist-inspired defense by the Right of America's inherent identity, which to me seems like something encased in amber from a previous historical epoch. Are those born of the politics of the 50s and 60s simply incapable of escaping it? The Soviet other against which we had to constantly steer away from has been dead for 20 years. Even China has chosen not to follow elements of the totalitarian model. When can we finally say the time for America's choosing has come and gone? Why does this need to "save" America from foreign "isms" persist? Too much to break off for today, so I'll leave that for you loyal readers to ponder.
I don't think it's merely a discursive strategy, like the phrase "take back America" has become. I found this piece, in which Republican members of Congress more or less admit they're stealing a line from the Tea Party for convenience's sake, pretty illuminating. Why waste the time on a book if you don't sincerely believe it?
Following up on a previous post, I thought it was interesting that 46 percent of adults surveyed by NBC this week on immigration issues thought that children of illegal immigrants born in the US should not be granted American citizenship. A net +11 thought that thought immigrants had a positive impact on the "culture and character of the community," while a net -25 thought immigrants had a negative impact on crime. Cultural chauvinism seems to be waning - we'll see how long race takes to follow suit.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Lesson from Texas Textbook Debacle: Stop Teaching American History in Public Schools
The Texas Board of Education has attracted considerable attention this spring as it rewrites its American History textbook standards in a starkly conservative direction. The vote on these changes is approaching shortly. The alterations, as many media outlets have covered, include the explicit assertion that the United States was founded upon biblical principles, that the Confederacy wasn't all that bad, and that the UN is evil. You can read the full list of the proposed changes here (hat tip TPM).
It doesn't take a PhD in history to know these changes are dumb, or to be disturbed by their radically conservative political intent. Even as curriculum "reform," they're a joke. The board, led by profoundly unqualified individuals, basically is asking school teachers and textbook publishers to teach what they like instead of stuff they don't like. Board member Cynthia Dunbar, a decorated graduate of Pat Robertson's law school, would just throw the whole state public education system out and homeschools her own children.
Dunbar told the Guardian:
The reason that these controversies bubble up ad nauseum is not that the left and right cannot agree on the importance of particular historical detail, but that conservatives have no respect for the historical profession. Rather than uncovering the story of American greatness for all to celebrate, historians try to recreate as best they can the worlds of the past and to understand them in their own right. We want to capture fleeting human experience through the passage of time because to do so is a profoundly humane endeavor. Conservatives would prefer we erect heroic idols and, especially in this case, contribute to the institution of a Judeo-Christian version of sharia.
As a historian, the most depressing part of this most recent textbook battle is that all of the wonderful methodological advances of the last half-century within the historical profession are not even remotely part of this "reform" conversation. History in the minds of the conservative school board members is still nothing more than the story of battles and leaders, and maybe a great organization like the National Rifle Association. All the efforts by historians to delve into the experiences of those left behind by such a narrative -- women, workers, racial minorities -- are irrelevant to the secondary school classroom. Methodological innovation has revolutionized the way professors teach the survey at the collegiate level, I would strongly argue for the better. But they have not made a dent in the way school boards or even the public in general thinks about what history is.
No other academic discipline receives less professional respect in American schools than history. Efforts like the one in Texas explicitly claim to be defending the vulnerable minds of students from the "un-patriotic" intellectual "elite" of American universities. There is plenty to be patriotic about in the tale of American history told straight. But this insistence that history classes merely serve as vehicles for "patriotic ideology," however narrowly defined that ideology should be, throws into question the usefulness of the entire exercise.
So perhaps, until history as a profession gets the respect it deserves, we should just stop teaching American history at all in public schools. Conservatives will cry that the nation will fly apart because children will lack patriotic spirit, as they have been warning since the Gilded Age. The nation's JV basketball coaches will have to find some other subject matter to butcher. The average student might know slightly less about the nation's history than she or he would have before -- which isn't much anyway. And at the end of the process we will have learned whether it is the present or the past that most informs our feelings for our country.
It doesn't take a PhD in history to know these changes are dumb, or to be disturbed by their radically conservative political intent. Even as curriculum "reform," they're a joke. The board, led by profoundly unqualified individuals, basically is asking school teachers and textbook publishers to teach what they like instead of stuff they don't like. Board member Cynthia Dunbar, a decorated graduate of Pat Robertson's law school, would just throw the whole state public education system out and homeschools her own children.
Dunbar told the Guardian:
"We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."The obligation to make history a vehicle for "patriotic ideology" is really the core of the issue here, not whether or not Ronald Reagan gets more ink than Caesar Chavez. If you have ever taught the American History survey course at the collegiate level, you know that the likelihood of students comprehending and retaining more than a fraction of any course material - revisionist or not - is low. For their part, those few liberals on the Texas school board understand what's really at stake. To quote from the fine Guardian piece once more:
"There is a battle for the soul of education," said Mavis Knight, a liberal member of the Texas education board. "They're trying to indoctrinate with American exceptionalism, the Christian founding of this country, the free enterprise system. There are strands where the free enterprise system fits appropriately but they have stretched the concept of the free enterprise system back to medieval times. The president of the Texas historical association could not find any documentation to support the stretching of the free enterprise system to ancient times but it made no difference."The only reason to learn American History in school, conservatives are essentially arguing, is to imbibe patriotism. Conservatives have argued this for as long as there have been history textbooks. The Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic monitored texts for overly sympathetic portrayals of the American South and "pro-British" bias in describing the American Revolution. Charles Beard's economic interpretation of founding of the American republic, which found its way into high school textbooks in the early 20th century, came under fire for not being patriotic enough. My guys in the American Legion claimed the popular texts of Columbia Teachers' College professor Harold Rugg were pro-Communist for emphasizing social and economic factors in American historical development. They also complained in the 1950s, in ways Texas board member (and dentist) Don McLeroy echoes, that the UN was spreading the ideology of one-world government through lessons developed by UNESCO. Lynne Cheney made almost identical complaints about history standards when she was the chair of the NEH in the 1990s.
The reason that these controversies bubble up ad nauseum is not that the left and right cannot agree on the importance of particular historical detail, but that conservatives have no respect for the historical profession. Rather than uncovering the story of American greatness for all to celebrate, historians try to recreate as best they can the worlds of the past and to understand them in their own right. We want to capture fleeting human experience through the passage of time because to do so is a profoundly humane endeavor. Conservatives would prefer we erect heroic idols and, especially in this case, contribute to the institution of a Judeo-Christian version of sharia.
As a historian, the most depressing part of this most recent textbook battle is that all of the wonderful methodological advances of the last half-century within the historical profession are not even remotely part of this "reform" conversation. History in the minds of the conservative school board members is still nothing more than the story of battles and leaders, and maybe a great organization like the National Rifle Association. All the efforts by historians to delve into the experiences of those left behind by such a narrative -- women, workers, racial minorities -- are irrelevant to the secondary school classroom. Methodological innovation has revolutionized the way professors teach the survey at the collegiate level, I would strongly argue for the better. But they have not made a dent in the way school boards or even the public in general thinks about what history is.
No other academic discipline receives less professional respect in American schools than history. Efforts like the one in Texas explicitly claim to be defending the vulnerable minds of students from the "un-patriotic" intellectual "elite" of American universities. There is plenty to be patriotic about in the tale of American history told straight. But this insistence that history classes merely serve as vehicles for "patriotic ideology," however narrowly defined that ideology should be, throws into question the usefulness of the entire exercise.
So perhaps, until history as a profession gets the respect it deserves, we should just stop teaching American history at all in public schools. Conservatives will cry that the nation will fly apart because children will lack patriotic spirit, as they have been warning since the Gilded Age. The nation's JV basketball coaches will have to find some other subject matter to butcher. The average student might know slightly less about the nation's history than she or he would have before -- which isn't much anyway. And at the end of the process we will have learned whether it is the present or the past that most informs our feelings for our country.
Monday, September 14, 2009
...and we're back
A friend of the blog reminded me how long its been since I posted anything new this morning. Yeah, sorry about that. A combination of three straight weekends of being out of town, other more pressing things to do, and a bit of blogging ennui kept me behind.
I really wish I had stayed home Saturday to check out the teabagger march on Washington. Anything would have been preferable to watching the UVa football team stink it up yet again, but I'm really curious to see what two million people jamming into the city looked like. What, it wasn't two million? More like the attendance of the Ravens game? Rats.
Seriously, I would have liked to have gotten a personal flavor for the crowd (much of the one I was in left at halftime). Fortunately, Daily Kos did a nice job linking to a bunch of different photostreams. I've been holding my powder on most of this movement so here are my impressions, second-hand as they are for this weekend at least.
* I agree with Nate Silver that Democrats/progressives mock these protests at our own peril. Yes, they represent a coalition of hard-Right groups that are outside the mainstream of American politics (get rid of the Federal Reserve? Seriously?) Some wear funny hats and jeans shorts and can't tell the ideological difference between genocidal dictators. But they employ a wide array of potent symbols and phrases that are central to American national identity with aplomb. I think that, if asked, every person at Saturday's rally would agree with the Palinesque assertion that they represented the "real" America and "real Americans." And they know the currency of patriotic symbolism well. Their invocation of Revolutionary War-era symbols -- the Don't Tread On Me flags, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence -- might be historically nonsensical, if not merely corny; but they are familiar and easily digestible messages that may peel off millions more voters to their side of the debate. All they have to do is give the feeling of authenticity as a grassroots movement and address many Americans' gut feeling that something is amiss for the nation. That their conflation of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian meanings of the word "Liberty" would give Herbert Croly a migrane is not important.
Which is why I loved the last 10 minutes of President Obama's speech to Congress last week -- the Why We are Liberals part. The American narrative of living up to the Better Angels of ourselves is just as potent as "Don't Tread on Me." Given how the untrammeled greed of our time threatens most of our well being its power should be even greater.
* How much the idea of American exceptionalism shapes the Right is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of American political life. Take this comment reported by Politico from one of the marchers: “I see our nation changing into something the roots of us don’t want,” said Jim Bryant, an aviation consultant from Trenton, Georgia. “Why turn the greatest nation in the entire history of mankind into something else?” Conservative Americans have believed in this principle since the 1920s. They interpret the chaos, belligerence, and horror of other nations' experiences in modern history to be the result of their embrace of "isms." The American nation's capacity to rise above this history is the result of its unique political and governmental traditions and institutions. Hence, the fixation upon the Constitution (to be a true believer in Americanism, you need a pocket-sized copy for extra portability.)
The argument that America has escaped the gravity of history and therefore must never change is the antimatter to liberalism's matter.
* The American exceptionalist narrative at the center of these protests makes it impossible to separate out its political critique from its racism. This narrative comfortably asserts that the particular genius of white, Protestant American men led the nation to its historical greatness. Obama's blackness upsets this narrative quite obviously. But there's more to it. Just as this form of American exceptionalism insists the nation must reject foreign "isms," it also demands that immigrants to its shores be utterly transformed and accept the ideological standards of American politics. It is not just that Obama's father was from Kenya for these people, or that he spent part of his childhood overseas: it is the combination of what they perceive to be his personal foreignness and the alien nature of his ideas (from the Orwellian socialist wastelands of Canada and the United Kingdom) that exacerbates their reactionary ways. The Right's assertion that "he is not one of us," made in so many ways during the campaign and now during Obama's presidency is more complicated than mere white supremacy - but it's still racist.
If you are struggling to understand some of the more conspiratorial elements of this movement, ask yourself, how would I perceive the world if I believed what the guy quoted in Politico was absolutely true?
I really wish I had stayed home Saturday to check out the teabagger march on Washington. Anything would have been preferable to watching the UVa football team stink it up yet again, but I'm really curious to see what two million people jamming into the city looked like. What, it wasn't two million? More like the attendance of the Ravens game? Rats.
Seriously, I would have liked to have gotten a personal flavor for the crowd (much of the one I was in left at halftime). Fortunately, Daily Kos did a nice job linking to a bunch of different photostreams. I've been holding my powder on most of this movement so here are my impressions, second-hand as they are for this weekend at least.
* I agree with Nate Silver that Democrats/progressives mock these protests at our own peril. Yes, they represent a coalition of hard-Right groups that are outside the mainstream of American politics (get rid of the Federal Reserve? Seriously?) Some wear funny hats and jeans shorts and can't tell the ideological difference between genocidal dictators. But they employ a wide array of potent symbols and phrases that are central to American national identity with aplomb. I think that, if asked, every person at Saturday's rally would agree with the Palinesque assertion that they represented the "real" America and "real Americans." And they know the currency of patriotic symbolism well. Their invocation of Revolutionary War-era symbols -- the Don't Tread On Me flags, the Boston Tea Party, the Declaration of Independence -- might be historically nonsensical, if not merely corny; but they are familiar and easily digestible messages that may peel off millions more voters to their side of the debate. All they have to do is give the feeling of authenticity as a grassroots movement and address many Americans' gut feeling that something is amiss for the nation. That their conflation of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian meanings of the word "Liberty" would give Herbert Croly a migrane is not important.
Which is why I loved the last 10 minutes of President Obama's speech to Congress last week -- the Why We are Liberals part. The American narrative of living up to the Better Angels of ourselves is just as potent as "Don't Tread on Me." Given how the untrammeled greed of our time threatens most of our well being its power should be even greater.
* How much the idea of American exceptionalism shapes the Right is one of the most under-appreciated aspects of American political life. Take this comment reported by Politico from one of the marchers: “I see our nation changing into something the roots of us don’t want,” said Jim Bryant, an aviation consultant from Trenton, Georgia. “Why turn the greatest nation in the entire history of mankind into something else?” Conservative Americans have believed in this principle since the 1920s. They interpret the chaos, belligerence, and horror of other nations' experiences in modern history to be the result of their embrace of "isms." The American nation's capacity to rise above this history is the result of its unique political and governmental traditions and institutions. Hence, the fixation upon the Constitution (to be a true believer in Americanism, you need a pocket-sized copy for extra portability.)
The argument that America has escaped the gravity of history and therefore must never change is the antimatter to liberalism's matter.
* The American exceptionalist narrative at the center of these protests makes it impossible to separate out its political critique from its racism. This narrative comfortably asserts that the particular genius of white, Protestant American men led the nation to its historical greatness. Obama's blackness upsets this narrative quite obviously. But there's more to it. Just as this form of American exceptionalism insists the nation must reject foreign "isms," it also demands that immigrants to its shores be utterly transformed and accept the ideological standards of American politics. It is not just that Obama's father was from Kenya for these people, or that he spent part of his childhood overseas: it is the combination of what they perceive to be his personal foreignness and the alien nature of his ideas (from the Orwellian socialist wastelands of Canada and the United Kingdom) that exacerbates their reactionary ways. The Right's assertion that "he is not one of us," made in so many ways during the campaign and now during Obama's presidency is more complicated than mere white supremacy - but it's still racist.
If you are struggling to understand some of the more conspiratorial elements of this movement, ask yourself, how would I perceive the world if I believed what the guy quoted in Politico was absolutely true?
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