What is America, and for Whom?
A white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies or a pluralistic democracy with egalitarian aspirations? American society has always been divided over what this country should strive to be
Before we get into a broader reflection on how to situate the Trumpist moment in U.S. history: Democracy Americana is back!
I hope you will accept my sincere apologies for the long silence. At some point, I will probably write a separate post with more detail about what’s been going on these past few months – especially about my decision to leave academia after 18 years of teaching and 12 years as a full-time professor, and about why I reached the point where it no longer felt tenable for us to continue living in the United States. For now, I just want to start by telling you that I am sincerely sorry I haven’t been able to write lately.
I knew I would need to take a little break when I left Georgetown. But I didn’t think it would turn into a multi-month hiatus. When we left Washington, DC in early June, neither my wife nor I had a job, we had no income, no place to live, no schools for the kids, no health insurance – not much but what we could fit into the six suitcases we took on the plane, while everything else we own would remain sealed away in a container, stored in some warehouse until we would find a permanent new home. I now feel incredibly naïve for having so drastically underestimated the challenge of rebuilding all aspects of our private as well as professional lives on the other side of the Atlantic.
Things are now coming together: My wife has a great new job, the kids are enrolled in good schools. And I am slowly figuring out the logistics and legal requirements of this path I have chosen for myself, as an independent historian and full-time political writer. Stay tuned for more news on that soon, on what it means for the newsletter (as well as for the “Is This Democracy” podcast that I am hosting) as I will rely on your support if I want to make this work as a viable existence. I must admit I feel as anxious as I am excited about this new life, and I can only hope you will stick with me as I am about to launch this new career.
“Why is America suddenly so divided? Why is the oldest democracy in the world falling apart all of a sudden?”
I have done scores of interviews with US and international media since the election: Some variation of these questions has almost invariably come up. Most of my conversations about the political situation in the United States with journalists, politicians, and diplomats – but also with family, friends, and neighbors – have centered around the perception that something must have changed recently, causing American society to go off the rails rather abruptly, forcing us to suffer through some dark departure timeline.
Why is America suddenly so divided? Why is the oldest democracy in the world falling apart all of a sudden? Before you scoff at these questions: I actually appreciate it when people ask them directly. They are based on misleading, but pervasive assumptions about the nation’s history and I much prefer to discuss them in the open rather than let them fester under the surface. Confronting the erroneous ideas that inform these questions is not merely of abstract academic interest. Someone starting from the assumption that America has been a stable, consolidated democracy for two and a half centuries must struggle to adequately understand the current political conflict: The contortions necessary to explain why so many millions of Americans are now embracing a blatantly authoritarian leader when they had supposedly been fully on board with liberal democracy until quite recently will quickly lead you to strange, unhelpful places. And if you depart from such a premise, you have no chance of developing a proper response to the current crisis either: If there had been a broad consensus around democratic ideals until Trump came down the golden escalator, it would be reasonable to assume that the restoration of the pre-2016 status quo ante might be an adequate solution. But if the rise of Trumpism is a manifestation, rather than the cause, of forces and ideas that have always prevented the nation from living up to the egalitarian aspirations it has often proclaimed, then restoration is not enough. If our existential crisis is the latest iteration of a conflict that has defined the nation since its inception, America needs a truly transformative effort to propel the country closer to the kind of multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet and finally establish a stable democratic consensus that has so far eluded these United States.
Division is the norm
America has always been divided. We need to start here. This fundamental historical reality gets obscured by the fact that throughout its existence, the United States has conceived of itself as a democracy. And while that isn’t necessarily wrong, depending on the definition of “democracy,” it certainly obscures more than it illuminates about the reality of American life. It suggests a continuity of a democratic regime based on the American Constitution – when in fact the term has applied to a variety of social and political orders. Under the label “democracy,” these regimes differed widely in terms of who was actually enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not they extended the democratic promise to other spheres of life beyond politics: to the workplace, the family, the public square. They often existed side by side for long stretches of the nation’s history, as manifestations of competing, even incompatible ideological visions.
A profound – and oftentimes violent – division over the very nature of what “America” is supposed to be has been the historical norm. Unfortunately, much of the mainstream political discourse is enchanted with a very different narrative that starts from the assertion of consensus and cohesion as the standard, treating conflict and strife as aberrations. The pervasive lament over “polarization” as the root of all evil that plagues America, for instance, is grounded in the idea that it used to be better, that America is on a dangerous path away from an exemplary period in the recent past – a golden era of unity and bipartisanship. It usually comes with a hefty dose of nostalgia for a long-lost “consensus.” But to the extent consensus ever existed, it was usually confined to white male elites and based on an accord to leave a discriminatory social order intact.
Discard the consensus mythology and the unity nostalgia. The current conflict is, at its core, the latest iteration of a very old struggle. Competing forms of nationalism have defined the American project since the beginning. One conceived of America as a credal nation. Anyone can be an American, in this understanding, as long as they subscribe to certain ideals and aspirations: Freedom, liberty, and that “all men are created equal.” Another rejected the aspirational creed as the basis of the nation and instead defined America in racial and religious terms, as an ethno-state in which wealthy white Christians deserve to rule and have a right to draw the boundaries of who gets to be “American.”
Proponents of this ethno-religious nationalism have also claimed to be defending freedom and liberty, but they understood them to be in tension with egalitarian ideals, if not outright incompatible with visions of equality. Their overriding concern was the liberty of certain “deserving” or “virtuous” individuals to be more, have more; their allegiance was to a particular form of “freedom” – the white male freedom to take the land and curtail the liberties of others. Every form of domination in American history has been justified in the name of this “freedom.” The loudest and most influential defenders of Native American dispossession, slavery, and racial segregation have always presented themselves as champions of freedom from government tyranny or federal overreach.
The conflict between these different forms of nationalism has inevitably shaped the question of how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country. If America is defined by the egalitarian aspiration that all people are created equal, then a fully realized democracy – one in which the individual’s status is not determined by race, religion, gender, or wealth – is the order best equipped to express and accommodate that. But if “real America” ceases to exist once white Christians are no longer in a position to shape the public square in accordance with their interests and sensibilities, then democracy must be restricted. And as the country becomes more pluralistic demographically and culturally, the need to curtail democratic participation becomes more acute. For those clinging to a white Christian ethno-nationalist conception of America, the key question has always been: How much authoritarianism is necessary to prevent too much democracy for too many people?
A credal nation defined by egalitarian aspirations – or an ethno-state of and for white Christians, defined by strict “natural” hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth? Contrary to the collective mythology that politicians of both parties used to draw on and, at least rhetorically, affirm until not long ago, there has simply never been a consensus answer to that fundamental question, no agreed upon identity or “soul of the nation.” By contemporaneous international comparison, the nation founded in the late eighteenth century was indeed remarkably democratic if you happened to be a white man – and something else entirely if you were not. As the Civil War ended, and those who had chosen to commit treason in defense of their right to enslave fellow human beings were defeated on the battlefield, the nation was fundamentally reconceptualized. The Reconstruction amendments changed the nature of the constitution – the document itself, but also the political and social regime it prescribed – so profoundly that the historian Eric Foner has called it a “Second Founding.” (Opens in a new window) During the Reconstruction period immediately after the Civil War through the mid- to late 1870s, the nation embarked on an unprecedented experiment in biracial democracy – brief, but breathtaking in its impact. Amongst white Americans, there was a widespread expectation that formerly enslaved people would probably not even know what to do with their newly acquired rights. But in reality, voter turnout among Black people was extremely high. About 2,000 Black men were elected to public office on all levels – Mississippi even sent two Black senators to Congress. South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, elected a majority Black state legislature in 1868. And beyond just politics in a narrow sense, African American social and cultural life soared in those years. Here was the glimpse of what a democratic society might look like.
But it did not last. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable levels of white reactionary violence. After Reconstruction, the country was dominated for decades by a white elite consensus to not only leave the brutal apartheid regime in the South untouched, but to uphold white Christian patriarchal rule across the nation. The level of biracial equality and democratic participation the South experienced during Reconstruction would not be reached again until almost a full century later. There would not be another Black senator in Congress until 1967; the South did not elect another Black person to the Senate until 2013.
American authoritarianism was never just a regional issue either, it was never confined to “just” the South. Before the Civil War, Slave-holding elites exerted a dominating influence over the Republic, and Southern segregationists were immensely powerful in national politics until the 1960s and beyond. Moreover, there is a strong domestic tradition of white nationalist, white supremacist extremism across the country. The Ku Klux Klan was very much a national organization in the 1920s; in the 1960s, George Wallace quickly realized that his fight against racial equality resonated with white voters far beyond the South; and a well-established far-right grassroots activism has shaped political culture on the ground across post-war America.
A counter-mobilization against civil rights
An ethno-state dominated by white Christians and defined by sharp hierarchies or a pluralistic democracy with sincere egalitarian aspirations? That conflict was not resolved in 1776. It wasn’t settled in 1865. And it didn’t recede into the shadows with the passing of the civil rights legislation in the 1960s either.
In the dominant mainstream narrative about U.S. history, the civil rights breakthrough of 1964/65 is generally framed as the moment America got serious about enforcing its aspirational founding vision of freedom and equality. Wasn’t this, finally, when the country came to a conclusive decision to go full steam ahead towards true democracy? I think it is fair to say that those who passed the civil rights legislation intended it to be a definitive answer to the question of whether or not the United States was supposed to be a pluralistic democracy at all: They sought to take that question off the table, redefine the boundaries of what was acceptable within the political and societal mainstream, and narrow the conflict to a discussion of how to best achieve the unifying goal of democratic pluralism. At long last, America would start enforcing the democratic consensus, or so this tale goes, leaving those who still rejected it to toil on the margins, confined and condemned to an existence on the fringes of society.
If the stories we tell about the past could not have plausibly led to the present we are experiencing, we have a problem. This is one of those cases: In order to get from that tale to where we are now, one would have to conceptualize Trumpism as an aberration, an accidental departure.
A much more plausible interpretation is that America did not reach a consensus about what this nation should be in the 1960s. Instead, the forces who rejected the vision of egalitarian pluralism have engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization. It was spear-headed by a coalition that formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century and called itself the conservative movement. It quickly emerged as the most influential part of the broader rightwing coalition, taking over as the dominant force within the Republican Party.
Those who rejected the democratic “consensus” were not – and are not – confined to the fringes. The Civil Rights Act not as the culmination of noble egalitarian ambitions but as a fateful turn in the wrong direction: That is the defining position on today’s political Right far beyond the rabid MAGA base. Versions of this are articulated constantly by rightwing activists and politicians. It has become dogma in the reactionary intellectual sphere as well, where it has been quite in vogue to write whole books about why the Civil Rights Act is bad and needs to be rolled back. Sometimes, like in Richard Hanania’s 2023 The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (Opens in a new window), these books offer little more than the raging of an aggrieved mind, angry that white men were deprived of their privilege to do as they please. But the anti-Civil Rights Act stance is also shared among intellectuals who are widely seen as the most respectable representatives of the Right. Among the most serious / least unserious of these is Christopher Caldwell, who has migrated towards the rabidly Trumpist Claremont Institute orbit, but is also a contributing opinion writer (Opens in a new window) for the New York Times. In 2020, Caldwell published The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Opens in a new window), in which he condemned the Civil Rights Act as a departure from the American Constitution. In Caldwell’s interpretation, the CRA created an entirely new social and political order supposedly at odds with what the country was founded to be. The sprawl of the detested administrative state, the loathsome federal bureaucracy: all a result of the government trying to impose civil rights legislation – a machinery set up to intervene in all spheres of life, disrupt private relations; a system that has subsequently allowed other “leftist” groups to impose their will on America and undermine the traditional social order, like the (patriarchal) relationship between man and woman.
These rightwing thought leaders are clearly not arguing from within a consensus that America should exist as a pluralistic democracy. To Caldwell, a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-cultural, gender-egalitarian democratic order is, at best, a dangerous pipe dream, as it necessarily lacks the social cohesion any nation must preserve if it is to survive; the costs of mobilizing the state in an attempt to achieve it far outweigh the potential benefits.
On January 20, those who explicitly reject the creedal or civic national identity came to power. In a speech at the Claremont Institute (Opens in a new window) on July 5, Vice President JD Vance yet again renounced the idea that America was defined by egalitarian aspirations and aggressively promoted an ethno-religious nationalism instead. It is the same case Vance made most prominently in his speech at the Republican convention (Opens in a new window) a little over a year ago. “America is not just an idea,” he declared from the stage: “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
Who is part of this group of people? That is decided by ancestry and blood. Vance traced his own history back many generations to the mid-nineteenth century as proof that he belonged among those who are one with the “homeland” they inherited. “They love this country,” Vance proclaimed, “not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home.” These “real Americans” have become one with the land – a Volk inseparable from their homeland. They alone have a right to decide who gets to come to this nation, who gets to belong in America.
The Trumpist regime’s core project is fueled by this very old ethno-nationalist vision: Redefine citizenship, redraw the boundaries of who gets to belong, roll back the post-1960s civil rights regime, nullify the very foundations of pluralistic democracy rooted in the Reconstruction amendments. The overarching goal: Restore white male domination in all spheres of life and recenter the social and political order around strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion and wealth as opposed to equality and egalitarian principles.
The Trumpists are at war with pluralistic democracy, with the diverse American society as it actually exists, with the very idea that the nation’s identity should be defined by egalitarian aspirations. They didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism to begin with. As their vision of an ethno-state dominated by wealthy white Christian men has increasingly come under pressure, they have decided that any measure – regardless of how extreme – is now justified in defense of what they maintain is “real America.” The conflict that shapes America today is the latest iteration of a very old struggle.
Why now? Why has the Right radicalized so much in the early twenty-first century – what is it about our particular moment in this longer-term struggle over what “America” should be that allowed the extremists to take over and catapult Trump to power? And where does the country go from here: Is there something to be learned from previous moments in U.S. history when a democratic leap was achieved? What are the circumstances under which transformational progress becomes possible in what is fundamentally a divided society? As we are over 3,000 words in already, I’ll pick it up right here in a Part II on the past, present, and future of the Trumpist moment that will come out in the coming days.
