A contentious exchange of Election-Day posts at emptywheel led Marcy Wheeler to ponder what we need to salvage what is best about this creaky republic. Is our slavery-tainted Constitution a bit long in the tooth? In need of upgrades? Sure. But there are elements of our culture and diversity not born of that document that are worth salvaging, she argues.
“We need a new story about America,” Wheeler writes, explaining “the fracture of the myth of American Exceptionalism made Trump possible.”
In May 2016, she wrote:
But underlying that Donald Trump problem is a desperate insistence on clinging to the myth of American exceptionalism, with its more offensive parts even embraced in the mainstream. For the sake of the white men who’ve relied on those myths for their sense of dignity, but also to prevent future Trumps, it is time to start replacing that exceptionalist myth with something else.
And in April 2016, she wrote:
It is absolutely true that American workers and middle class, generally, have been losing ground. And it absolutely true that whites may perceive themselves to be losing more ground as people of color equalize outcomes, however little that is really going on. It is, further, absolutely true that large swaths of flyover country whites are killing themselves, often through addiction, at increasing rates, which seems to reflect a deep malaise.
They have lost faith in the gauzy image of America and their preeminent places in it that gave them a sense of purpose and pride. Trump promised a restoration through worship of an orange idol and his condemnation of Others 30 years of Limbaugh and Fox News taught them to blame. Especially, the people the myth-making conveniently excised from the American story but who now demand equal roles in it. Including but not limited to those the original Constitution treated as three-fifths of persons.
Wheeler writes:
Nevertheless, out of that document and a whole bunch of myth-making, we created a story that has worked to get Americans to believe in common cause for two and a half centuries. The process of that myth-making is critically important: It involved a belief in a virgin land that disappeared native people. It involved a belief in self-determination that disappeared the slaves. It came to include a notion of Manifest Destiny that excused our own imperialism.
Why that process worked is critically important too: All those disappeared people — Native Americans, Blacks and Latinos, immigrants, women — never held enough sway, collectively, to unpack the lies that our collective imagination relied on. That was why Barack Hussein Obama, seemingly the embodiment of American Exceptionalism, posed such a threat to it. And having failed to radically alter the means of power that exploited that founding myth, Obama left the ground ripe for a resurgence of white supremacy, the reality that long masqueraded as exceptionalism though its process of disappearance.
Today, in significant part as a result of four years of Trump, any premise of a common cause, of a shared American story, is utterly shattered.
Huge numbers of Republicans either believe or claim to believe that the only way to save the nation is to ensure, at all costs, that Democrats are not permitted to effectively govern. Those Republicans are willing to do real damage to this country — they’re willing to see a quarter of a million Americans die, many deaths of which were preventable, they’re willing to discount the votes of their neighbors and co-workers based on the most outrageous legal hoaxes — rather than joining together with their Democratic neighbors for a common good.
In days ahead, if we are to save the idea of America and prevent it from becoming an authoritarian behemoth, we need to find a new common story.
If you have read this far, sorry to disappoint you. She does not know what that story looks like any more than I. Rather than making America “great” for his followers, Trump has shredded what was left of the old myth both here and abroad. God help Joe Biden’s diplomats as they try to convince the rest of the world Trump’s America will not return to trash the china shop again after four to eight years of Democrats trying to restore it.
Over at Daily Kos, Bob Creamer of Democracy Partners offers “Sixteen Progressive Priorities to Defeat Trumpism.” He prefaces them by explaining:
We will not defeat Trumpism or other right-wing, “populist” movements by lecturing, or “educating” Trump followers. We will defeat Trumpism by addressing their legitimate grievances – by creating an economy that delivers for all working people. Or as President-elect Biden says, an economy that rewards work, not just wealth. We must create an economy that delivers for the people on the streets of Scranton, not just Park Avenue.
This does not mean that Democrats should do more to “compromise” with the Wall Street wing of the Republican Party. Just the opposite.
Aside from ending the pandemic, there are lots of useful-sounding, progressive-y things in Creamer’s list: labor reform, infrastructure spending, a public option, a $15 minimum wage, making American government more democratic, etc. Things that if Democrats deliver will improve the lives of Trump voters as well as their own.
People weigh their well-being relative to those around them. There is strong evidence that whites often oppose actions against inequality because of “last place aversion,” the desire to ensure that there is a class of people below oneself.
—Sean McElwee of Demos, 2015
What Creamer’s list misses: Trumpers don’t want them. Their “legitimate grievances” are not primarily economic but social.
They want the country put back the way it was, as Jesus intended, with white, male Christians at the top of the social order. It is why I get peeved when friends complain that conservatives are “voting against their best interests.” Progressives think they are showing off their clear-eyed perspective when what they have proven is they haven’t a clue what conservative voters believe are their best interests. And they are not economic.
Finding out the Earth was not the center of the universe was a rude awakening. It meant humanity was not the center of creation after all. Globalism, multiculturalism, and migration to the cities have stripped many Americans of a dignity built on the exceptionalist myth that stood them at the apex of American society (and on others’ backs). Paying them $15 per hour will help them, sure. The problem is if it will help equalize the status of others they perceive as a threat to their already shaky social positions, they will oppose it. Vigorously. They will not be placated with baubles. Trump’s faithful would rather go without than lose any more ground in a game they see as zero-sum. For others to gain status means they lose, and they are not having that. As the “Stop the Steal” protests demonstrate, they will burn the place down first.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
—LBJ to Bill Moyers, then on Johnson’s staff, 1960
The toothpaste is not going back into the tube. America’s “disappeared” are not going back into the shadows. Appeals to the common good will be unpersuasive — short of foreign or alien invasion — with people whose identities were defined by an exceptionalist myth that no longer pertains. America’s national identity as a beacon of democracy and stability lies in tatters as well. The question is: what if anything can replace it?