Most Christian fractures over the centuries, an old friend observed, boil down to arguments over the metaphors people use to understand the faith. Now a Greek Orthodox priest, he went on to say but they are just metaphors, not the faith itself. If one doesn’t work for you, find another that does. No need to go to war over metaphors.
People do anyway. Consider January 6, 2021.
Michael Hattem (“Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution“) is Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. His Twitter thread Wednesday considers how the left and right define this country, what it is for, and how (to extend his argument) that has become a cultural flash point along similar lines to religious disputes.
Our current historical discourse is shaped by longstanding conflicting notions of patriotism. Broadly, conservatives believe that patriotism is expressed through worship of individuals while liberals see patriotism as a commitment to further realizing our revolutionary ideals.
Similar divides along the political spectrum have long existed in relation to the nation’s two founding documents. For much of AmHist generally, liberals have seen the DOI as the doc that defines our revolutionary ideals/legacy while for conservatives its been the Constitution.
Our contemporary conflicts, as in the past, are less about facts than about emphasis. Choosing what to emphasize from our past is how we define historical memories and the meaning of our past. In other words, citizens engage in a process of selection just like historians do.
We inherited from England the idea that returning to our “first principles” is how to stave off a society’s decline. Over the last 300 years, we have intensified that idea in practice. As a result, many of the fights we’ve had/are having are about defining those first principles.
Are our revolutionary “first principles” liberty and equality or constitutionalism and federalism? Are they democracy or republicanism? Are they individualism or communalism? Are they best determined by urban or rural citizens? Etc….
In my work, I’ve found a few conditions that produce more intensive fights over the AmRev & AmHist: high partisanship, activism over inequality, a rise in immigration & anniversaries. In other words, we’re experiencing a perfect storm of conditions for fighting over our past.
Understanding that we have been fighting over our past like this since at least 1800 is important and valuable context because if you think everything happening now is new and unprecedented, it raises the stakes disproportionately, which is never productive.
Hattem’s demarcation of the American divide over first principles — liberty and equality or constitutionalism and federalism, democracy or republicanism, individualism or communalism — arrives as we consider the Supreme Court’s voting rights ruling Thursday that further undermined the now near-toothless Voting Rights Act. The court majority issued an opinion on who literally counts in this country and who does not.
In her dissent, Associate Justice Elena Kagan begins, “If a single statute represents the best of America, it is the Voting Rights Act. It marries two great ideals: democracy and racial equality. And it dedicates our country to carrying them out.” But the Act also represents the worst of America, “Because a century after the Civil War was fought, at the time of the Act’s passage, the promise of political equality remained a distant dream for African American citizens. Because States and localities continually “contriv[ed] new rules,” mostly neutral on their face but discriminatory in operation, to keep minority voters from the polls.”
But in the wake of the 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6 MAGA insurrection, it is clear, as in Hattem’s formulation of American oppositives, that democracy and racial equality are not ideals held by what were once Republicans and now are Trumpists. They are at open war with democracy. They look at the same two foundational American documents and come to very different conclusions about what this country is for and for whom.
CNN’s Brandon Tensley has pondered that divide since a hysterical Jan. 6 insurrectionist reacted to the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol, saying, “This is not America. They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.”
The patriots are Us. BLM are Them.
Tensley interviewed The Atlantic‘s Adam Serwer (“The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America“) about who counts as an American and who does not:
You’ve popularized the defining slogan of an age. Why do you think that “the cruelty is the point” has resonated so deeply with so many people?
I think that the column I wrote popularized the phrase because it articulated in a concise way something that we were all feeling when we watched Trump rallies — including the people who enjoyed the rallies — which is that the people at these rallies really have a lot of fun when Trump is attacking the people they don’t like.
That ritual of public humiliation didn’t merely diminish Trump’s enemies — it also forged a kind of community, a bond, between Trump and his audience. As I write in the column, this is a part of human nature. When we’re children, the cool kids tease the nerds, and that’s what makes the cool kids cool and the nerdy kids nerdy. It reminds everybody of their place and draws boundaries. It also forges a strange kind of intimacy, separating the people who are acting in a cruel fashion from the people who are being acted upon.
For all the conservative pretensions about freedom, it is freedom exclusively for Us and not for Them. Maintaining the formal and informal caste system behind the American flags and police lines, behind a system mostly neutral on its face but discriminatory in operation, is a paramount first principle for nearly half the country. The election of a Black president represented an abrogation of that informal arrangement and sent the Right over the authoritarian edge on which it already teetered.
Ahead of the Fourth of July, some Republican politicians are railing against the newly nationally recognized Juneteenth National Independence Day. They make the stunning claim that recognizing or interrogating the dark currents of US history is unpatriotic and even dangerous. Where does this apocalyptic thinking come from?
I think that the nature of Republican Party politics in the Trump era is incentivized by the structure of our political system, which substantially increases the influence of the most conservative elements of the polity. And those elements tend to be White.
In 2016 and 2015, Trump is essentially repeating back to conservative audiences what he’s consuming on Fox News. And what he’s consuming on Fox News is sort of 24 hours of trying to convince conservative White people that their way of life is in danger, that their entire existence is at risk of imminent destruction because of what liberals or Democrats or people of color are doing.
Democracy or republicanism? They choose not sharing power with the nerds. Nerds should know their place. The Supreme Court majority agrees.