Nikhil Pal Singh writes:

Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.

In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.

In the days ahead, the US origin story will be told again with fanfare and at great expense, dressed in the garb of Christian nationalism and gaudy militarism, but drained of its narrative power as a world-making event – the idea that “the cause of America”, in the words of Thomas Paine’s 1776 revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, “is the cause of all mankind”. It is easy in the current context to forget that not long ago, this redemptive idea still resonated. On the night of his election to the presidency, Barack Obama framed his victory as an event that decisively narrowed the gap between the nation’s democratic ideals and its often flawed reality: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Celebrating ordinary people as the authors of “our better history”, Obama used his rhetorical gifts to trace a narrative arc – linking women’s suffrage to the New Deal, the civil rights movement and marriage equality, part of a continuous, unfinished march toward a “more perfect union”. The outlines of this American universalist narrative first emerged during the second world war, advancing upon claims to anti-fascism and anti-racism that gained sway even over conservative elites. During the post-second world war era, with anti-discrimination principles increasingly consecrated in law and culture, US history was defined as a series of emancipatory milestones that vindicated the domestic ruling order and US claims to global leadership.

Recent years have seen growing numbers of mainstream detractors from this consensus history – among the most prominent, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which offered an account of a “new founding” adjacent to the one championed by civil rights liberals, but wildly traducing the original. The revolutionary war, its lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones argued, was primarily motivated by the tawdry desire to give a free hand to Bourne’s plantation patriarchs “in order to ensure that slavery would continue”.

Conservatives howled at this re-telling of the founding, and Jones’s claims received pushback from US historians, who long debated whether the country’s birth was best understood in terms of the heritage of slavery or anti-slavery. But generally glossed over – by both the 1619 Project and the ensuing debate over it – was the fact that land hunger, and westward expansion, was a major impetus of revolutionary energies.

In fact, emancipation and expansion are twin pillars of the American revolutionary narrative. Both are closely bound to the histories of slavery and freedom, mobile frontiers and the United States’ continental and global reach, and both have been variously used to support the idea of a democracy upholding opportunity and affluence for the majority of US citizens and residents. In the great muddle of the present moment, however, the idea of a virtuous expansionist-emancipatory dialectic has fallen on hard times, undone by growing wealth inequality, civil rights reversals, violent policing and unpopular wars of choice. [Continue reading…]