Posts Tagged ‘America’
“Las Vegas: a savage journey to the heart of the American dream”*…
Isaac Ariail Reed muses on Las Vegas and what it can tell us about ourselves…
It comes buzzing into my mind like a hazy half dream, the kind that arrives when you’ve had too much espresso and need to close your eyes in the dark of your hotel room for a moment. I’m in two places at once: One is the Neon Museum in Las Vegas, where I am wandering around the sandy two-acre lot amid the retired signs of dynamited casinos, hotels, and other businesses on the Strip, listening to old Elvis live shows on my headphones; the other is the recently opened poker room in the Venetian Casino, where I find myself sitting next to Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish intellectual who once saw, with a clarity that remains difficult to reckon with today, the end of an epoch.
As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing…
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… What I did not quite realize viscerally before this year, though, is something that the great art critic Dave Hickey was always on about. Las Vegas, despite its similarities to Macau, is in its history, culture, and politics deeply American. Hence, de Tocqueville: “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.” In Hickey’s 1997 classic, Air Guitar, he wrote, “America…is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America.” He continued:
What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility. So when you fly out of Las Vegas to, say, Milwaukee, the absences imposed by repression are like holes in your vision. They become breathtakingly perceptible, and, as a consequence, there is no better place than Las Vegas for a traveler to feel at home. The town has a quick, feral glamour that is hard to localize—and it arises, I think, out of the suppression of social differences rather than their exacerbation. The whole city floats on a sleek frisson of anxiety and promise that those of us addicted to such distraction must otherwise induce by motion or medication.
Hickey was luminously perspicacious in his ability to recognize, amid the vast and disturbing inequalities of Las Vegas, the horizontality of its cultural politics, which are not so much lowbrow as they are open to weirdness and conformity in equal measure such that the sheer humanity of the equally but differently weird (or conformist) is suddenly public and undeniable. Hickey also argued that there was something about the American experiment wrapped up in his “home in the neon.” The secret of Vegas is that there are no secrets, he explained, and, furthermore, “there are only two rules: (1) Post the odds, and (2) Treat everybody the same. Just as one might in a democracy (What a concept!)” Hickey thus found in Liberace’s rhinestones the key to a democratic politics of honest fakery as a defense against the subtle tyranny—recently become much less subtle—of a politics of authenticity and its handmaiden, the deep hatred of art, freedom, and changing your mind dressed up as love of family, morality, nation, and the supposed liberty of guns and tariffs. The emphasis, for Hickey, is on the honest and the different human commmunities of desire that are the root of pluralism in aesthetics: Liberace’s rhinestones is not a real diamond, but union wages, sexual freedom, and aesthetic ambition are honestly held commitments. In Hickey’s version of Las Vegas, no one asks who is a “real” American, because the reality of the USA is not something that has to be performed into existence by duplicitous electoral promises and unpaid contractors; it’s right there in the posted gambling odds, the midnight steak and eggs, and the civilizational ambition of the Hoover Dam.
This, then, is the problem we have inherited from Hickey: Can the bare and brutal honest fakery of Las Vegas, and the deeply American, weirdly libertarian, outsider-art-loving union democracy that Hickey found inside that honest fakery sustain itself as part of a free society? Or will the crushing inequality, insane techno-oligarchy, and battling moralisms of toxic masculinity and therapeutic bureaucracy be, in the end, too much for Vegas and thus too much for the United States as well?…
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… There was in Hickey’s writing a deep suspicion of both the aesthetics and the politics of authenticity, and that suspicion, one might hazard, is the connection between Las Vegas and the kernel of freedom held in common that has, on occasion, here and there, made itself present in American life, and which has sustained American intellectuals as distinct as John Dewey and Joan Didion. What, then, does Las Vegas do for us when it reminds us that libido is a fact of life and building a culture on its suppression is a little like taking a political stand against gravity? Here I found my way to a different kind of theorizing, once I realized that far from any simulacrum, Las Vegas is in fact the place where American modernity articulates the eternal problems of being human.
On the one hand, Las Vegas is the culmination of the historically specific phenomenon of the American modern, bringing together the technological sublime, movable capital, representative democracy, and libertarian culture in the first postindustrial metropolis. Yet on the other hand, Vegas is about the inescapable aspects of human existence from time immemorial: desire as multiple, the importance of creature comforts to a sense of well-being, the philosophy of uncertainty and the problem of fate, embodiment as both wonderful and unbearable, and the irrepressible need to create new art and build new buildings. In this regard, we can say that Vegas is the place where the American project’s complex and conflictual relationship to the more immovable aspects of human life together was thrown into stark relief.
And then there are the binaries. In Vegas, it becomes quite clear that the towering economic power that drives American politics has, in the end, cultural sources and cultural consequences. The USA is about sin and salvation, filth and cleanliness, God and the Devil, believer and atheist, winners and losers. All societies have such binaries. The sociologist Émile Durkheim mapped them all as versions of sacred versus profane, while the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used them to read stories as clues to the structure of the mind itself. But in the United States, with its Calvinist inheritance and infamously strict racial hierarchy, the binaries have a special importance. They have always resisted middle grounds and gray areas, preferring the intense clash of purified poles to ambiguous endings and existential despair. This is why American movies are melodramatic to the point of absurdity and why the harshness of the American moral climate, when combined with the filth of American politics, created a political culture that can be unbearably self-righteous. Vegas puts on display the harsh feel and gleaming strangeness, bordering on surreality, of the American binaries, but it also breaks them down, which is the deep effect of its honest fakery. Vegas is not there to make you feel your job back home is unavoidable. It is there to make you ask whether the difference between good and evil is really what your pastor says it is.
For a long time, it sure looked as though Hickey was right to find a home in Las Vegas, and to find his version of America there too, because of the way Vegas both displayed the binaries and embraced the gray areas in between. It happens in two steps. First, the town cuts through pretense. One night in Vegas will remind you that in America, the most famous cultural critic in the world, past or present, is about as important as the current special-teams coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers (and probably less). Second, it liberates you from the defensiveness that constantly infects the American intellectual trying to justify his existence. Why? Because Vegas is an intellectual’s paradise in so far as it is the place that knows, better than anywhere else in the United States, that we are all creatures addicted to symbols, entranced by our illusions, and in need of a lucky roll. In Vegas, as Dean Martin and Katy Perry have both attested, the desirous body, the strategic mind, and the neon sign are bound together in a cosmic swirl, and the result is the Frankenstein’s monster of American modernity. What could be more intellectual than that?
Back when American modernity was more than the latest tweet from the Department of Homeland Security, its intellectuals navigated the harsh binaries of American culture via innovation in thinking and generosity of spirit, making some kind of room, some of the time, for the next immigrant culture to arrive and do the two most American things of all: make a buck and do whatever you want with religion and culture. This is the spirit we have lost; we increasingly just want to double down on the same binaries that every other preacher in this godforsaken land does, calling endlessly for the return of the cultural artifacts of an earlier era. But the two great philosophies of culture to emerge in America—pragmatism and jazz—are, among many other things, attempts to solve the problem of the excluded middle between the purest Good and the worst Evil, and to find in the very confrontation of contradiction an improvised way for humans to live together a little better tomorrow than they did yesterday. This is the American promise: that beyond the binaries lies not transcendent meaning or nihilism but a little bit of democracy, a little bit of freedom, and a whole lot of practicality.
But navigating the binaries to subvert and reinvent them takes energy, and it is that energy one still finds in Las Vegas. Even if in enervated form, it is there, and this is the part of the city—the Strip, yes, but also the Arts District and downtown—that some foreign visitors grasp intuitively and immediately and others will never, ever understand: Vegas as the intensity of American hustle. On that winter-vacation visit, I was set straight about it by my bartender. I had just had a quite unpleasant interaction at the craps table with an overstimulated and sleep-deficient fellow in town for the rodeo. His truculent attitude had turned very dark, even threatening, in response to my friendly overtures. I was getting ready to bitch about it to the young man from Los Angeles who had just served my whiskey and had all the signs of being a safe political harbor. He cut me off right away: “Shit, I’m glad they’re here. Otherwise, we’d have no money to make these two weeks in December.”
There, in that moment, I saw the tiniest glimpse of possibility for a new, but nonetheless recognizable, American culture, and I realized everything I was, in my academic bubble, missing. Vegas is much cheaper to live in than LA; for the first time in its history all major casinos on the Strip are unionized; my bartender, like me and the poker pros, was hustling most weeks of the year but was also going to take a real vacation with his girlfriend; I might be able to write and teach, but who cares about my opinions on the cultural politics of the rodeo? And that’s the deal that Las Vegas has offered: Make the wages fair and the housing affordable, post the damn odds, and let people make their own judgments about what kind of clothes, art, sex, and sports they want. That’s the project, if we want our country back in a new and better form. But the artists in Vegas are here to tell you: The odds are very long…
What does it mean to “think Las Vegas”? “Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas,” from @hedgehogreview.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with “Lost Vegas,” from @lukewinkie.bsky.social in @slate.com: “Everyone inside America’s most flailing destination city has a theory for what’s wrong. Now I have my own.”
* Hunter S. Thompson
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As we check the odds, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that Las Vegas strip fixture The Aladdin hotel and casino closed. The site of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s wedding in 1967, its final show was a preformance by Mötley Crüe.
The building was demolished the following March (in front of 20,000 spectators, 1,000 of whom paid $250 each to watch the implosion from inside a “ringside” tent). In 2000 a new Aladdin resort, three times larger than the original, opened on the site, but quickly went broke. It was purchased out of bankruptcy to become “The Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino.”
“False confidence often leads to disaster”*…
In 1957, in the depths of the Cold War, Russia launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite– a success that surprised the U.S., which had rested comfortably on an assumption of technical superiority. Shaken, the nation responded with the Space Program and a broad array of flanking initiatives aimed at reinviograting education and innovation in the U.S.
Now it’s 2025, and America’s rivalry is with China. But in sharp contrast to the U.S. response to “the Sputnik moment,” America seems to be intent on a belligerent nationalism, rooted in a self-satisfied sense of superiority, that is only too happy to sacrifice the very things that could keep us in the global game– e.g., education and science domestically; the soft power that accrues to a good neighbor globally.
Kaiser Kuo, an astute observer of the situation, weighs in with a provocative warning…
The world feels unsettled, as if history itself were changing tempo. The familiar landmarks of the modern age are blurring, slipping away, and the stories we once told ourselves about progress and power no longer map cleanly onto the terrain before us. What we are living through seems, with each new day, less like a passing rearrangement of power, less like a momentary realignment of nations. We sense something deeper and more enduring: a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. History no longer feels like something unfolding behind us but something rushing toward us, urgent and impossible to ignore.
The economic historian Adam Tooze, reflecting on his recent, intense engagement with China, put it to me in July with characteristic directness: “China isn’t just an analytical problem,” he said. It is “the master key to understanding modernity.” Tooze called China “the biggest laboratory of organized modernizations there has ever been or ever will be at this level [of] organization.” It is a place where the industrial histories of the West now read like prefaces to something larger.
His observation cuts to the heart of what makes this moment so difficult to process. We have witnessed not merely the rise of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought—about development, political systems, and civilizational achievement itself. We simply haven’t yet found the intellectual courage to face it.
This reckoning touches all of humanity, but it falls especially hard on the developed world and hardest on the United States, where assumptions about exceptionalism and hierarchy are most exposed and most fiercely denied. The familiar framing of China as “rising” or “catching up” no longer holds. China is now shaping the trajectory of development, setting the pace economically, technologically, and institutionally. For Americans especially, the deeper psychic shock lies in the recognition that modernity is no longer something they authored and others merely inherit. That story has outlived its usefulness.
The denial, the deflection, and the anxious overreaction so often seen in Western discourse are symptoms of that dislocation. Yet the reluctance to acknowledge this shift extends beyond governments, media narratives, or expert consensus. It includes people who’ve spent years thinking about these issues. I have been as susceptible as anyone—tempering big claims, second-guessing implications, staying in safer territory even when the evidence has been pointing in this direction for some time. There’s always a “but” when it comes to recognizing China’s accomplishments, a reflex to tick off the costs and enumerate the failings, to pull back just when the scale of transformation becomes clear.
The greater risk, I now believe, lies in saying too little.
This essay doesn’t rehearse the familiar bill of particulars on China—constraints on political pluralism and independent media; expansive security powers and preemptive detention; pressure on religious and ethnic expression; and episodes of extraterritorial coercion—not because those concerns are trivial, but because the task here is different. We’ve all learned to recite that litany, as a way of protecting ourselves from what real comparison might imply. The aim here is to confront, with intellectual honesty, what China’s achievements oblige us to reconsider about modernity, state capacity, forms of political legitimacy, and our own complacencies. Recognizing real costs can coexist with taking the magnitude of transformation seriously. This argument asks us to face squarely what has been accomplished and then measure ourselves against it.
And let me be clear: This reckoning is not a surrender. It is not an argument for abandoning liberal values, declaring authoritarian systems superior, or slavishly imitating features of China’s governance. It is instead a call for the kind of frank, sober assessment that genuine confidence requires—the willingness to acknowledge challenges directly, to learn from others’ successes even when they unsettle our assumptions, and to strengthen our own institutions through clear-eyed recognition of their shortcomings rather than defensive denial of their failures. Liberal democracy is indeed undergoing a profound crisis, but that crisis need not be terminal. The question is whether we will meet it with the rigorous self-examination that has historically enabled democratic renewal, or retreat once more into the comforting myths that have blinded us to both our weaknesses and our rivals’ strengths…
What the West should learn from China: “The Great Reckoning,” @kaiserkuo.bsky.social in The Ideas Letter. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with: “China Has Overtaken America,” @pkrugman.bsky.social and “China has copied America’s grab for semiconductor power.,” from @himself.bsky.social.
* Aesop
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As we rethink, we might send birthday greetings to a character in a cautionary tale from history, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor (The Hongwu Emperor) of the Ming dynasty, who reigned from 1368 to 1398. Under Zhu, China was the world’s largest economy and had it’s leading navy, projecting power and enabling trade beyond Asia.
But in the mid 15th century, all of this changed:
… shifting political priorities, and rising Confucian skepticism toward maritime commerce, the Ming government ordered an end to all foreign voyages. Shipbuilding for large vessels was banned, and Chinese citizens were forbidden from traveling overseas. This self-imposed isolation would have profound consequences. While Europe was entering its Age of Exploration, building colonies and global trade networks, China had turned inward, forfeiting its naval advantage and potential leadership in global affairs… – source (more, here)
“I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong”*…
The founding fathers’ hopes notwithstanding, citizenship is under attack in the U.S.— and the intensity of the attack is increasing. On this 4th of July weekend, let us appreciate Kieran Healy‘s account of his path to citizenship…
In 1995, at the beginning of the last week of August, on the afternoon of an inhumanly hot and intolerably humid day, I arrived at Newark Airport to live in the United States. I was twenty two years old and about to start as a graduate student at Princeton. I have been here more or less the whole time since. I spent six years on an F-1 Visa while getting my PhD. After that, I lived and worked in Tucson for seven years. My conception of what counts as an inhumanly hot day changed. During that time I was on an H1-B Visa sponsored by my employer, the University of Arizona. Subsequently, I was granted Permanent Residency—a Green Card—through marriage. In 2009 I moved to North Carolina. My conception of what counts as an intolerably humid day changed. I am an immigrant to this country. I have made my life here. My two children are Americans. And now, as of yesterday [June 27], so am I.
When I sat down to write something about becoming a citizen, I was immediately tangled up in a skein of questions about the character of citizenship, the politics of immigration, and the relationship of individuals to the state. These have all been in the news recently; perhaps you have heard about it. These questions ask how polities work, how they impose themselves upon us, how power is exercised. They are tied up with deep-rooted principles, claims and myths—as you please—about where authority comes from and how it is or whether it ever has been justly applied. These are not easy matters to understand in principle or resolve in practice. Nor can they simply be dismissed. But I am not writing this note because I want to take on these questions, even though I acknowledge them. I am writing this because I do not want to forget how I felt yesterday.
If you are a legal permanent resident of the United States, you apply to be naturalized as a citizen by filling out Form N-400. Part 1 of the form asks for information about your eligibility for becoming a citizen. Parts 2 and 3 ask about your name, address, country of birth, and also identifying information about you including your race and ethnicity. In Part 4 you list everywhere you have lived in the past five years. In Parts 5 and 6 you tell about your marital history and your children. Part 7 is your employment and schooling. In Part 8 you document all the times you have been outside the United States in the past five years even though, as a Lawful Permanent Resident, the state already knows this about you. Frankly, it already knows all the other stuff about you, too. Every time you enter the country you are photographed and fingerprinted.
Part 9 consists of thirty seven questions designed, in the main, to establish whether you are a person of good moral character and also whether you understand, assent to, and are willing to swear to each component of the Oath of Allegiance to the United States. After filling out the form you go to a biometrics appointment where your identity is once again confirmed and you are once again fingerprinted and photographed. Then your citizenship interview is scheduled. At the interview you are assessed by a USCIS Officer on several points, including whether you can speak, read, and write English at a basic level. They also check once again whether you understand and are willing to take the Oath of Allegiance that will make you a citizen. Finally, you must also pass the Civics Test.
The test has one hundred questions. At the interview you are asked up to ten of them at random and you must get six right. There is a Civics Booklet and Study Guide for the test. It is eighty five pages long. Its index is also a list of all one hundred questions and their acceptable answers. The test covers the Constitution, the branches of government, some elements of U.S. history and geography, the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizens, and national symbols and holidays.
[The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reports that over 95% of applicants pass the test. A 2018 survey found that only about 1/3 of American citizens at large would pass.]
The ceremony room was the kind of place, if you are an academic like me, you might expect to be named “Salon C” or “Wabash Room” or “Sequoia East” and be the site of a sparsely-attended conference talk. The two main differences were the words stenciled on the slightly dropped ceiling, and the fact that the room was full up and alive with nervous energy. At the front of the room there was a large-screen TV. The person leading the ceremony—who, coincidentally, was the USCIS Officer who had interviewed me a couple of months ago—introduced himself and welcomed everyone. All the staff were dignified and low-key delighted. The ceremony opened with a two-minute video that consisted of Ken Burns effect pans over still images and with W.G. Snuffy Walden music underneath. The Statue of Liberty. Ellis Island. Immigrants arriving in the nineteenth century at various locations. And then photographs of the modern equivalents of those people. I began to worry that I might have something in my eye.
The room filled up. It looked just as you might imagine. Some people looked like me, which is to say a middle-aged Irish guy in a standard-issue blazer and tie. There was a guy from Ghana in an immaculate suit. A couple from Algeria held their baby son. A family from the Republic of the Congo had their three young sons sit in the guest area. The boys all wore identical red-white-and-blue check. A German man looked dapper in a lavender shirt. An Indian woman had a green and gold sari. A Chinese family all in a row. A Romanian delightedly offering to take pictures of anyone in need of a photo. A Mexican man in cream-colored linen. A Peruvian woman’s bold floral dress. A family whose two children were wearing tiny plastic Stars and Stripes cowboy hats. It looked like America.
I know the nationalities of my fellow oath-takers because of the next stage of the ceremony. This was the Roll Call of Nations. I did not know this was going to happen. Every country of origin represented was announced in turn. As your country was named, you were asked to stand up, and remain standing. Afghanistan came first. Then Algeria. The last person to stand, immediately to my left, was from the United Kingdom. There were twenty seven countries in all, out of only fifty or so people. For me this part in particular was enormously, irresistibly moving. It perfectly expressed the principle, the claim, the myth—as you please—that America is an idea. That it does not matter where you are from. That, in fact, America will in this moment explicitly and proudly acknowledge the sheer variety of places you are all from. That built in to the heart of the United States is the republican ideal not just that anyone can become an American, but that this possibility is what makes the country what it is.
But isn’t it more complicated than that? You know as well as I do that it is. So much more complicated. So much more painful. So much more dangerous. So much more messed-up. I will think about and work on strands and threads of that impossible tangle tomorrow, just like I have thought about and worked on bits and pieces of it since I came here. But I will not forget this moment. I will not forget what it felt like.
Now all standing, we raised our hands and took the oath. Once we stopped speaking, we were citizens. We watched a two-minute congratulatory video from President Trump. Even though the video was short, you could see that, in his usual way, he was improvising and riffing around what was on his teleprompter. The result was that he said some odd-sounding things, like how we had U.S. citizenship “like no-one has ever had it before”. It did not matter. The video finished. We filed out of our seats in row order to get our certificate of citizenship. And that was the end.
Afterwards people milled about in the room, delighted, shaking hands, hugging one another. I hugged my daughter. I hugged my friends who had come down from New York at the last minute on an overnight bus to be there. I counted my blessings. There was a little staged area in the corner where people could pose for photographs against a backdrop. At the rear of the room, volunteers were set up and ready to register you to vote if you wanted. People were smiling and crying. Children were running around meeting one another. We were gently reminded that there was another ceremony due to start in twenty minutes.
A new line began to form outside…
“American,” from @kjhealy.co.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt enjoined us: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants…”
* George Washington
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As we remember our roots (and celebrate all that has– and can still- grow from them), we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, having been ratified by 38 states, was certified as adopted by the Administrator of General Services, Robert Kunzig. The amendment establised a nationally-standardized minimum age of 18 for participation in state and federal elections.
“Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.”*…
When Columbus landed in 1492, the Americas had been settled for tens of thousands of years. He wasn’t the first person to discover the continent. Rather, as Nick Longrich explains, his discovery was the last of many discoveries…
In all, people found the Americas at least seven different times. For at least six of those, it wasn’t so new after all. The discoverers came by sea and by land, bringing new genes, new languages, new technologies. Some stayed, explored, and built empires. Others went home, and left few hints they’d ever been there…
From last to first, here’s the story of how we arrived in the “New World”: “Seven times people discovered the Americas – and how they got there,” from @NickLongrich in @ConversationUS.
* James Joyce
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As we ponder precedent, we might that it was on this date that about 300 Seneca warriors defeated a detachment of the British 80th Regiment of Light Armed Foot in the Battle of Devil’s Hole (near Niagara Gorge in present-day New York state). The action was part of what is known as Pontiac’s War, which had begun earlier that year when a loose confederation of Native Americans dissatisfied with British rule in the Great Lakes region following the French and Indian War moved to reclaim control of the land they had historically occupied.
Warfare on the North American frontier was brutal, and the killing of prisoners, the targeting of civilians, and other atrocities were widespread. In an incident that became well-known and frequently debated, British officers at Fort Pitt attempted to infect besieging Indians with blankets that had been exposed to smallpox. The war ended the following year after peace negotiations; and while the Natives were unable to drive away the British, the uprising prompted the British government to modify the policies that had provoked the conflict.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand”*…
It’s painfully obvious that America is a divided nation. The reasons are many, and have deep roots. Alan Jacobs contemplates three of the most fundamental…
The American Civil War was not that long ago. The last surviving Civil War veteran died two years before my birth. A conflict of that size and scope and horror leaves marks — marks on the land and marks on the national psyche — not readily erased.
I have come to believe that certain habits of mind arising directly from the Civil War still dominate the American consciousness today. I say not specific beliefs but rather intellectual dispositions; and those dispositions account for the form that many of our conflicts take today. Three such habits are especially important.
1. Among Southerners – and I am one – the primary habit is a reliance on consoling lies. In the aftermath of the Civil War Southerners told themselves that the Old South was a culture of nobility and dignity; that slaves were largely content with their lot and better off enslaved than free; that the war was not fought for slavery but in the cause of state’s rights; that Robert E. Lee was a noble and gentle man who disliked slavery; and so on. Such statements were repeated for generations by people who knew that they were evasive at best – the state’s right that the Confederacy was created to defend was the right to own human beings as chattel – and often simply false, and if the people making those statements didn’t consciously understand the falsehood, they kept such knowledge at bay through the ceaseless repetition of their mantras. (Ty Seidule’s book Robert E. Lee and Me is an illuminating account, from the inside, of how such deceptions and self-deceptions work.) And now we see precisely the same practice among the most vociferous supporters of Donald Trump: a determined repetition of assertions – especially that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen, but also concerning COVID–19 and many other matters – that wouldn’t stand up even to casual scrutiny, and therefore don’t receive that scrutiny. It’s easy to fall into a new set of lies when you have a history of embracing a previous set of lies.
2. Among Northerners, the corresponding habit is a confidence in one’s own moral superiority. Because the North was right and the South wrong about the institution of slavery, it was easy for the North then to dismiss any evidence of its own complicity in racism. Our cause is righteous – that is all we know on earth, and all we need know. (But if our cause is righteous, doesn’t that suggest that we are too?) And then, later, whenever there were political conflicts in which the majority of Northerners were on one side and the majority of Southerners on the other – about taxation, or religious liberty, or anything – the temptation was irresistible to explain the disagreement always by the same cause: the moral rectitude of the one side, the moral corruption of the other. The result (visible on almost every page of the New York Times, for instance) is a pervasive smugness that enrages many observers while remaining completely invisible to those who have fallen into it.
3. And among Black Americans, the relevant disposition is a settled suspicion of any declarations of achieved freedom. Emancipation, it turns out, is not achieved by proclamation; nor is it achieved by the purely legal elimination of slavery. Abolition did not end discrimination or violence; indeed, it ushered in a new era of danger for many (the era of lynching) and a new legal system (Jim Crow) that scarcely altered the economic conditions of the recently enslaved. After this happens two or three times you learn to be skeptical, and you teach your children to be skeptical. Brown v. Board of Education produces equal educational opportunity for blacks and whites? We have our doubts. The Civil Rights Act outlaws racial discrimination? We’ll see about that. I wonder how many times Black Americans have heard that racism is over. They don’t, as far as I can tell anyway, believe that things haven’t gotten better; but they believe that improvement has been slow and uneven, and that many injustices that Americans think have died are in fact alive and often enough thriving.
I think these three persistent habits of mind explain many of the conflicts that beset Americans today. And if I were to rank them in order of justifiability, I would say: the first is tragically unjustifiable — and the chief reason why, to my lasting grief, we Southerners have so often allowed our vices to displace our virtues —; the second is understandable but dangerously misleading; and the third … well, the third is pretty damn hard to disagree with.
As the man [William Faulkner] said: The past is not dead; it is not even past.
From Jabob’s always-illuminating blog, Snakes and Ladders, “habits of the American mind.” You can follow him at @ayjay.
[Image above: source]
* Abraham Lincoln (in his speech to the Illinois Republican State Convention, Springfield, Illinois June 16, 1858)
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As we dwell on division, we might recall that it was on this date in 1787 that an organic act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States, the Northwest Ordinance. It created the Northwest Territory, the new nation’s first organized incorporated territory, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the territory’s western boundary; Pennsylvania was the eastern boundary.
Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories and set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands.
The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the geographic divide between slave states and free states from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, an extension of the Mason–Dixon line, helping set the stage for later federal political conflicts over slavery during the 19th century until the Civil War.
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