One counterproductive argument I keep hearing goes something like this: A Trump supporter says “Make America Great Again”, and a Trump resister responds “When was America great? During slavery? When women couldn’t vote? The Native American genocide? Jim Crow?”
The problem with this argument is that it typically ends with each side hardened into its position. The resister goes away believing the supporter wants to return to an era when White male Christians reigned supreme and everyone else was second-class or worse. The supporter goes away believing that the resister resents anyone who has pride in America, and that liberals want Americans to feel ashamed of their country. But the supporter is never going to give up patriotic pride, and the resister is never going to voluntarily go back to times of oppression and domination. Both are immovable.
Imagining any kind of compromise within this frame is impossible. Is the Trump resister going to give ground and admit that a little bit of racism and sexism might be beneficial? Will the Trump supporter agree to be a little bit ashamed of his country? Not likely.
I want to claim that the root of the problem here is the frame, not the participants or their points of view. The problem is that the issue has been framed as being not doing.
If you start talking about doing, the logjam resolves: All through its history, the United States has done both great and terrible things.
As a liberal and a Trump resister, I have no trouble admitting that America and Americans have done great things over the decades. Like these:
- The US played a key role in defeating both Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism.
- After World War II, we helped rebuild Europe (including Germany) through the Marshall Plan rather than keep potential economic rivals down.
- All through our history, we have created opportunity for people who were destitute in other countries (like the survivors of the Irish Potato Famine).
- The example of our revolution and our constitution inspired the expansion of human rights around the world.
I could go on. If you’re searching for reasons to take pride in America, there are lots of them.
But here’s the key point: I can acknowledge those facts without forgetting that they all had downsides. We have never entirely lived up to the ideals of our revolution. The opportunities we offered immigrants weren’t available to everyone. Our fight against fascism in World War II also included the Japanese internment. During the Cold War we supported many oppressive right-wing regimes in the Third World, and also fought a ruinous war in Vietnam.
The problem with framing “greatness” as a state of being and pinning it to America in some past era is that those downsides either go away or become insignificant. Worse, saying America was great then, but is not great now, implicitly promotes the idea of going back. And none of those eras is a time we should want to go back to. Jim Crow America is nothing to be nostalgic about, even if that’s who we were on D-Day.
Idealizing past greatness also makes an unfair connection between our great and terrible deeds. We created unprecedented economic growth in spite of our social injustices, not because of them. Forcing gays back into the closet or women back into the kitchen won’t end inflation or bring back well-paid working class jobs.
But has America done great things? Of course it has. It’s important to recognize those achievements and take inspiration from them, because looking ahead, we need to do great things again. Converting our economy so that it no longer relies on cheap fossil fuels, for example, will be a huge undertaking. But the nation that put a man on the Moon and built the interstate highway system should be up to the task.
In fact it is the Left, not the Right, that most needs to believe in our ability to do great things. At the root of MAGA fascism lies a zero-sum view of the world: There is a limited amount of goodness to be had, so we — native-born White male Christians, or whoever “we” refers to in some particular context — have to seize all of it. There is a limited amount of freedom in the World, so any gain for women or gays or people of color must be a loss for everyone else.
Believing that the goodness in the world is a limited pile of pirate treasure, and then seizing more than your share of it, is a very shallow conception of greatness. Our greatness needs to be greater than that.
In short, it’s a mistake to get baited into arguing that America was never great. You’ll never win that argument and you shouldn’t want to. Great things still need to be done, and Americans need to see ourselves as the kind of people who can take on those challenges.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
My own blog on Jan 21, 2021, was posted early this morning https://thoughtstowardsabetterworld.org/january-6-2021/. I have come to label the ‘sides’ as “we” and “me”. There is a chasm between, and my struggle is how to bridge the gap. I have to look mostly at my own very limited sphere of influence, which includes over 20 in the category “family” and on and on. I happen to feel I’m on the “we” side, which presumes that community is all of us, imperfect as we are. The “me” side also believes in community, I’d say, but its view is winners get and losers are losers – “Super Bowl” in essence. Not very helpful in coming to mutual agreement.
What? How how these two positions remotely juxtaposed?
On what planet is “a little bit of racism and sexism” ever a position any person of moral character would remotely consider? There’s nothing here to even consider compromising with; it’s a complete non-starter.
However, no person with even a passing and accurate acquaintance with American history who is also an empathetic human being can’t help but feel at least a “little bit ashamed of his country”, while also feeling thankful to be a citizen of it as it works toward the more perfect Union Lincoln spoke of.
Juxtaposing these two positions as if they are somehow in the same moral ballpark, but merely different perspectives, is extremely hard to understand. What in the world are you thinking?
This is the curse of liberalism (as opposed to leftism). Once you try to find common ground (with ACTUAL FASCISTS, no less), you end up making these insane attempts at equating horrific oppression with appropriate shame as equally bad. This is why I am unsubscribing.
You seem to be unsubscribing from your strawman argument. The article to which you are responding had no such “equating”.
That rhetorical either/or is meant to evoke “of course not!” to underscore the point that such an argument is a dead end. Mr Muder is not proposing such a course for longer that it takes to reject it.
Who’s ever argued that America was never great? This is a quintessential straw man.
Because educated adults tend to have more nuanced understandings of things, what has been argued is that the simplistic, cultish appeal to a Leave It To Beaver nostalgia of America is a product of a well-massaged fiction that’s (a) missing a ton of inconvenient reality that would damage the narrative if admitted to and (b) we can no more return to this fantasy world than change the present into it because, as presented, it’s a woefully incomplete, childish paradigm that never existed to begin with.
Just as the MAGA cult is unable to separate the fiction of the character named Trump in a scripted tv show from the real-life grifter playing them all for suckers precisely because they can’t, this same cohort is easily persuaded to believe in the unifying fiction that gives it its moniker.
There’s absolutely no point in even attempting to argue with these people. They’re engaged in an arrested-development emotional fantasy, not some sort of quest for a factual, reality-based program of improvement. Let’s not make the work ahead even more challenging by punching straw men that don’t exist.
This is why I am a leftist and not a liberal. The entire concept of “countries” is based on lines drawn arbitrarily by dead, rich men. So people in northern Minnesota are supposed to believe they have more in common with people in south Florida or San Diego than they do with people in southern Ontario. America began with genocide and slavery, it has ALWAYS been a nation by, for and of elites, and it’s expressed core values of freedom, tolerance, compassion, opportunity, etc. have NEVER been applied to the entire population. Therefore, they are empty promises at best, craven lies at worst. Nations are no less cuplable than corporations, religions, or any other insitutions that take more than they need at the expense of everyone else. Unsubscribe.
You are correct in that nations don’t exist in nature; they’re entirely man-made. What you’re missing is that culture is also man-made. So what if people in northern Minnesota have more in common with people in southern Ontario than they do with people in south Florida or San Diego? Why is that more legitimate than the United States or Canada? The only reason is that the US and Canada are powerful entities preventing the much weaker cultural entity of northern Minnesotans and southern Ontarians from intermingling freely, so in that sense the two countries are oppressive while the culture is “authentic.”
But the difference between being and doing is at the heart of white supremacy.
Most of the racists, sexists, etc. whom I have ever met believed in unearned superiority. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough sexism to know that some of those guys believed that they were superior to women just because. It was a state of being. The sum total of what a given man could do versus what a given woman could do didn’t enter into the equation. It had to do with being, not doing.
The same certainly appears to be the case for Christian nationalism. Again, there is the core idea that Christianity simply is superior to other belief systems. It just is. That’s a state of being.
The same appears to be true of white racism—there is a fundamental belief that whites are simply superior. They just are. Again, a person’s virtues or accomplishments—that is, things that they do—does not enter into the assessment.
And a key aspect of this is the unearned part. It’s like aristocrats who believe that they are superior to others because an ancestor did great things. That ancestor is safely in the past, and their descendants now feel no need to justify their beneficial position by earning it. Again, it’s a matter of being, not doing.
In fact, doing is often seen as bourgeois scorekeeping, and not the kind of thing that aristocrats do.
Further, I think that this is why so many bigots grump about education. Earned degrees may make a lower-order person feel that they are superior to a higher-order person, and we can’t have that. Not even to the extent of admitting that a lower-order person may know more about the field in which they were educated than a higher-order person. This is why MAGAs so easily resisted the idea that we were having a pandemic, and needed to wear masks and socially distance ourselves. MAGAs simply assumed that they knew more than that silly Dr. Fauci with all his book learning. In the supremecist world view, book learning can’t compete with the opinions of those who are naturally superior.
I strongly suspect that this is an important part of MAGA resentment—that MAGAs feel that they are not being accorded their rightful superior place in society, which MAGAs should be able to claim, regardless of their actual accomplishments.
How your re-framing would work out is an interesting question. It might fall on deaf ears, or it might lead to useful conversations. It is very worth trying. But we must be prepared for the basic mindset of greatness being a case of being, not doing, and that being, almost by definition, is unearned.
Abby
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BRAVO!!
First, I hope you are managing okay after your wife’s death.
Second, while I appreciate your distinction between being and doing, I don’t share your underlying assumption that we can have a meaningful conversation between MAGAs and the rest of us. This would require a shared language that includes evidence-based decision making, logic and belief in science. MAGAs don’t use or even understand that language. If you don’t share my cynicism, watch some interviews of MAGA types when confronted with facts. It is painful to watch.
We need to focus on out-voting them, not convincing them.
dmichael
America has always been bad. It began with breaking away from Britain because Britain wouldn’t let the colonists steal more native land to speculate on. The project was always going to be a vampiric state that expands and expands until it runs out of blood to suck from the world. American history makes much more sense when you realize it’s just the American state trying to find new places to expand to and dominate in order to fuel its need for endless growth.
Speaking practically though, the idea that anything good can come from the American state at this point is absurd. As America started running out of places to expand to, it made up for the reduced profits by allowing the state to be dismantled and privatized for short term gain. That’s the whole neoliberal project.
After 40 years of neoliberalism America has so little capacity that it can’t even do things that would be good for its empire like making shells for Ukraine. I keep coming back to shell production because it’s such a pure test of state capacity. It was clear by April 2022 that the war in Ukraine was an artillery war, and clear by June that NATO stockpiles couldn’t sustain the Ukrainian army for a conventional war. The technology to mass produce shells has existed since WW1, so no new systems need to be developed. However, the margins on shell production are too low for private industry to justify the capital investments, especially when they know that the war in Ukraine will end at some point so demand will dry up. The American state could have theoretically nationalized the industries needed to produce shells and built a dozen new state arsenals to manufacture them, but that would have required making capital subservient to the state. That’s so far beyond its capability it was never attempted, and so far beyond its leaders’ conception of what the state is for that as far as I can tell it was never even considered. The result is that all of NATO is now being outproduced by Russia, another capitalist hellscape that happens to have state arsenals as a Soviet legacy. Any other American project that requires capital’s short-term profits to take a back seat to the state’s goals will be as moribund and pathetic as its attempt to keep the Ukrainian artillery firing.
“Great things still need to be done,” but America will not be doing them. What it can still do is use its legacy control of financial systems to starve small countries with sanctions, use its legacy air force to bomb civilians without air defenses, inflate financial bubbles, and repress its population with its bloated police forces. American politics will just be choosing the cultural signifiers used to justify these policies. Do you wring your hands about how it’s all Regrettable But Necessary (D), or do you hoot and oink in glee at how others are suffering more than you are (R)? As Thatcher said, “there is no alternative.”
As an American living in Europe, I have an uneven mixture of attachment and detachment to my native country. I see it from the inside – though 20 years of life away has made that view a bit fuzzy and out of date – and from the outside – though 20 years of life here still has made it clear that I will never be, truly, European. But two of my experiences give some perspective on American greatness.
One took place in the first summer of Covid, when there were hopes that we had already seen the worst and travel restrictions were lifted briefly. My wife, our son, and I all took the opportunity to drive to the Aveyron to explore a part of France we had not yet seen. Because it was that Covid summer, we choose to stay away from big cities and the most obvious tourist sites, choosing instead to stay in houses near small, rural villages.
The last house we took was actually part of a compound of cottages on what was once a farm, and, to our surprise, we were not the only family staying there. In addition to the owners – a couple of middle-aged, Ex-Pat Brits – there was a Parisian family of four, with two boys, the older of whom was the same age as our son, and a Dutch family, with a teenaged daughter, who had friend in tow.
One evening, the owners invited all of us to a drinks party on the terrace next to the swimming pool. It was a beautiful evening – the weather was temperate and the sun was setting over the mountains in the distance, lighting the few, high clouds in brilliant reds, yellows, and oranges. The kids were in the pool – the boys playing a noisy game that involved splashing and hitting each other with long, pool noodles, and the girls chatting quietly on the pool’s steps in between taking lazy laps in various strokes. As for the adults, the conversation and wine flowed easily across the social distance we all maintained out of, what? Politeness? Caution? Expectation?
The Dutch family’s cottage was adjacent to the pool, and the father had placed a small speaker in a window to provide background music. His playlist was a wide selection of classic American R&B – Motown, Stax, Ray Charles, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield (with and without the Impressions) – classic American singers taking on the American Songbook – Sinatra, Fitzgerald, Holiday, Tormé, even Etta James – and a touch of classic American Jazz – Miles, Bill Evans, Stan Getz, Cannonball, ‘Trane, and Chet Baker. It was obvious that every adult there was familiar with the music, and that it was all – more or less – part of the soundtrack of their lives.
And, as I sat there, I thought to myself that, if this music was all that was left of America in a hundred or two hundred years, it would still mark America as having given one of the great cultural gifts to the world.
The second took place in Normandy, on a warm and sunny day in the late spring, when we took my wife’s elderly aunt to visit the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. Her father had been killed in action on, or near, Utah Beach in the early days of the invasion – the aunt wasn’t quite sure of the story. (Coincidentally, the man who became her step-father (and my wife’s grandfather) landed on Utah on D-Day + 2, and then fought his way across Europe, mostly with V Corps, and ended up near Pilsen at war’s end, with Patton’s 3rd Army.)
The aunt is a wonderful woman, but has the American prejudices against all things French. She was, of course, moved to see how beautiful and well maintained the Cemetery was, but stunned when she realised that all of the groundskeepers and the gardeners were French. (She assumed they were American soldiers.)
But even more surprising to her were the troops of French school kids being led through the Cemetery, with paper maps and guides, searching for graves of men they had read about. At the monument, groups of kids stood looking at the battle maps engraved on the walls, showing the paths of the American Armies, while their teachers gave them a short history of the war, and pointing out the cost the US had paid to liberate Europe and to rebuild it after the war. (My wife translated much of the talk on the fly for her aunt.)
In the Monument itself, surrounding a huge statue, the “Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves,” these words are engraved: “THIS EMBATTLED SHORE, PORTAL OF FREEDOM, IS FOREVER HALLOWED BY THE IDEALS, THE VALOR AND THE SACRIFICES OF OUR FELLOW COUNTRYMEN”
And it is the sacrifice of those Americans buried in Normandy, and in other cemeteries in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and the ideals they died for, in which the true greatness of America lies.
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