Another year. Another Fourth of July.
Just one of many the man has seen. He’s older -- seen more, experienced more. His once thick brush of unruly black hair. now shot through with grey streaks, has thinned considerably, its fringes receding almost as fast as an outgoing tide. He’s also quite a few pounds heavier now, burdened by a surfeit of long hours, stress and far too much fast food that he knows may well be inexorably clogging his veins.
Yet, for this moment at least, all of that is background. His present, the now, finds him on a wrought iron park bench looking out at a sweeping vista of mowed grass on which people laze, or stroll through. The sound of children playing fills the summer air, which, at least for today, is clear. Sitting here, he has space, perspective with which he can try to make some sense of all that has gone on, and is going on, in America this 242nd birthday.
It is hard to make sense of all that is coming at us these days, he reflects: the words, the images, the sounds, the fury raging forth from the heart of the Trumpian maelstrom that has engulfed us. So omnipresent and pervasive has been this din that we have all steadily risk becoming tone deaf, punch-drink, indifferent to everything else around us. Consequently, we must be cautious about being numbed to whatever outrage has been perpetrated by the powerful over the powerless, be it the forced migration of people from their ancestral homelands, bloodshed on our streets, or the in our schools.
The dissonance from the president and other “anti-establishment” politicians has created a global “reality distortion field” full of chaff designed to misdirect, misinform and confuse. It’s a surreal, new reality.
Fundamentally, what Donald Trump is espousing is not new. Beyond the sturm und drang which infuses his chaotic administration and the way it goes about its business, he is espousing a profoundly small-c conservative, quasi-libertarian populistic view of a kind we have seen before. That such a philosophy finds itself in eternal conflict with the FDR New Deal-inspired welfare state is also not news. Republican presidents have been trying with varying degrees of effort and success to disassemble it for decades. That someone – be it Trump or a successor will succeed is a matter for history to judge. Simultaneously, the discourse between both sides may seem especially toxic but yet again vituperation in American politics is not new – in 1824 President John Quincy Adams’ supporters called opponent Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and Jackson’s mother a “prostitute” and in 1884 GOP candidate James Blaine’s campaign created a widely-played jingle about Grover Cleveland’s out of wedlock child entitled “Ma, Ma, where’s my paw?” The difference is the pervasive influence of contemporary media, by which any attack or slur is both automatically posted and widely amplified. Where Trump is profoundly different is his sheer disregard for convention, and therein lies the true danger as he tries to run the US like a corporation and finds out, to his immense frustration, that it doesn’t quite work that way.
That much being said, it’s also important to recognize that fundamental realities about America itself – the essence of the nation and its people, has not changed. It’s all too easy to become cynical, to buy into the reality show that has come to define this current era. It’s harder to realize that, for all the prognostications of those who would suggest that the US, this evil self-aggrandizing empire insufferably cloaked in supposed altruism, is in terminal decline and that Trump’s evil wrongheadedness is simply a manifestation of this, is well, simply simplistic.
First off, and contrary to propaganda, America has never sought, not had for long, an empire. The very idea has always been nothing more than a conceit. Unlike imperium Romanum or Pax Britannia or other classical empires, Americans suffers from no insatiable hunger for territory: acquisitions like Texas or the Philippines came as by products of conflicts with Mexico and Spain, an inevitable clash as the young American state expanded across its continent and came up against territorial lands held by others.
In fact, Americans tend to consistently display a historical preference for isolationism: witness the incipient aversion towards entering both World Wars which bedevilled presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. Americans like it here behind their own borders, wall or no wall. They like their McDonald’s, KFC’s, and Taco Bell’s. They prefer their baseball and football, and admire those who play the game with grace and honour (even if they do overpay them). Americans like their rock-and-roll. They have the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, the Rockies, and Graceland. The Caribbean is practically at their doorstep. America has vast farms that grow everything from fist-sized tomatoes to basket-ball-proportioned watermelons. It has new untapped sources of oil, seas of trees and forests. Americans have New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and LA. And if that’s not enough, there’s always Vegas -- which is a tawdry copy of everything. … If they want Chinese or Indian or Italian, Americans go to the food court or any number of specialized cuisine-specific restaurants.
In fact, looking at things objectively, Americans have everything they need.
America is not an imperial power, but a republic based on mercantile free-market principles that, by pure accident of history and happenstance, has become both the preeminent economic engine and custodian of the international monetary system. Everyone wants to beat them. Why not? They have set the standard, real or imagined 00 but definitely aspirational, as to a global standard of life to be attained. As for fair competition? Americans love competition. And they hate to lose.
America first does not mean an America unengaged. This is the error of both the left and right wings of political argument. Globalization saw an incautious America throw its trade and immigration borders wide open without regard for the nuances of balance whereas those who believe in turtling up ignore the singular fact that, with the Internet spreading an ever-pervasive monoculture we can no longer live with ethnocentric conceits, apart from each other.
How to reconcile those uneasy dichotomies? By engaging, not retreating. By confronting the Four Horsemen of our contemporary age: isolationism, faux internationalism, legalism and pessimism. Isolationism which is nothing more than a shallow ideology of fear; liberal internationalism which supports alliances of the kind where the US only gives and gives and those it supports only take or the use of force is employed only in cases devoid of national interest constraining the legitimate uses of hard and soft power through legalisms that are at best fictitious. There is no place for a shirking realism which believes in American power but does not offer a compelling vision by which it can be exercised, or those who have enjoyed its fruits for decades are not made to pay more for that alliance.
In their place, let’s consider what the Founding Fathers endowed the revolutionary state with as a governing philosophy: democratic realism, which saw as the engine of history not the will to power, or the compulsion to subdue, but the will to be free.
America must support democracy everywhere, but will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a clear, strategic necessity. Be it at home where issues of gun violence must be confronted beyond the simplistic “Get rid of all the guns” or “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people” arguments to weed out the root causes: poverty, racism, black-on-black violence, the NRA with its state-within-state institutionalized corruption; a failing education system and looming health care crisis that demands that we revisit a federal budget that in 2016 allotted 24% to social security, 26% to Medicare/Medicaid, 16% to defense, 9% to safety net programs, 8% to retirees and veterans, 2% to transport, education and research, 6% to interest on the national debt with the rest left over to sundries.
Abroad the US should intervene where it matters. Nazi Germany and imperial Japan mattered. So did the Soviet Union and its "evil empire." So does the battle against religious radicalism, intolerance and totalitarianism. So now does North Korea, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea. Why? Because bullies must be stood up to, old friendships reinforced (when they deserve to be), new frenemies warily tested and foes obliterated.
The man stirs from his reverie, jarred from reflection by the sound of an ice cream vendor’s bell, the delighted cheers of children. The wind picks up, ruffles his air, carrying on it the sweet scent of honeysuckle and grilled hot dogs. In the distance he sees the flag snap to attention in the breeze.
This is the real America, as she is, as she should be. Where abstract thought ends and real, everyday life begins.Far from the toxic world of the Washington beltway and fake news, where parents take their kids to Sunday school, men bow their heads towards Mecca in worship, and everyone meets at friends’ homes to watch weekend sports or just enjoy each other’s company around a barbecue. Where they breathe the same air, dream the same dreams, cry when those they care for are lost, cheer when they beat the odds. It is the same America that united when planes struck the twin towers that crisp fall day in 2001 causing the same shock and horror when sixty years before bombs rained down on a warm Pearl Harbour. A land of countless points of light against the grim darkness of everyday life. A country not without big problems, to be sure, but also with big hearts trying to solve them, where values are tested and occasionally vociferous debate can result in surprising compromise.
If Americans remember all that, and most of all that they are free to live their lives the way they want to, that freedom has a price and that all must remain ever-vigilant against those who would subvert it, then the great 1776 experiment will continue. Regimes come and go. Laws can be changed. Would-be demagogues replaced.
What America is, remains, and endures.