Studying 19th century American culture and literature can feel both acutely pertinent and frustratingly antiquarian. After all, we’re not getting any closer to the past: Emerson and Thoreau are like tiny specks in the distance, almost two centuries away, nearly disappeared over the horizon, while the moral murderousness of the Civil War is so alien to us by now that no one has quite managed to explain it to contemporary audiences. Really think about it: would you join the Union army to defeat the South? Would you die to preserve the country, with the vague hope that you might be ending slavery? Nevertheless, there seems to always be some shadow of the American past interfering with our day, some idea of the nation’s republican mission to contend with: our pretentiousness will not be laid to rest. We refuse to become a nation of animals. There are outrageous things people do that offend our sense of propriety, our moral code. We ignore calls to become practical citizens of the world and insist on some dream or another we believe to be our inheritance. In short, we’re still – as Nietzsche might say – interesting. We’re the people who voted for “Hope” in 2008, and now, with the hazy, nostalgic invocation “Make America Great Again”, many people in economically strangled communities have conjured up a coherent past they long to resurrect, against all reason (in fact in direct opposition to all reason) and against all odds (in fact, precisely because of those odds). You can almost hear a faded Southern belle sigh: “Make America What it Might Have Been, Alas!” There’s nothing sober about our politics, though Hillary made a valiant effort.
Since at least 2010, a question ubiquitous in polling “Is America going in the right direction?” has been answered overwhelmingly in the negative. The fact that this is a question that can be understood, and moreover about which people have opinions is a testament to the continued relevance, acknowledged or not, of History: it assumes that there was a starting place to our journey, a destination we had in mind and possibly still have in mind, and that it’s a journey that is roughly speaking collective, national, and unitary. In other words, it assumes a History with a capital “H”, the kind famously declared dead and abandoned by Frederic Jameson, theorist of postmodernism. It seems modernity never ended after all and that the 1990s might just have been a hedonistic reprieve. The question is: given that we need a History, how can we ensure that it’s Our History-all of Our History? Where is it going anyway; where would we like it to go? What has given us, even back in 2010, the sense that we’ve gotten lost? And how do we know when we’ve arrived at the destination?
My point here is not to answer these questions but to show how important it is for the opposition to answer them, to produce our own theory of history that goes beyond the vague promise of social and economic liberalism. Donald Trump did a passable job of offering a convenient, if non-specific, historical narrative to his supporters: America was great, now there are immigrants and a muslim Kenyan president and America has become “a mess.” We can stare at his ascent in horror and astonishment, or we can try to understand the underlying concerns, observations and perspectives that hoisted this storyteller to power, and take seriously the call to narrate our History for a new generation. We have to define what America means, what it looks or looked like at its best, we have to paint that picture for an electorate in economic peril, and we have to commit to that vision without apologies.
When we fight for immigrant rights, women’s rights, workers rights, disability rights, and LGBT rights – for any rights at all – we have to find a way to protect these struggles from being swept up into a narrative of scarcity and resentment: conservatives would have us believe that there are not rights enough to go around, that so-called illegals are by default outside of purview of American justice. They’re stealing our jobs, and robbing precious public money. Republicans like Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump want us to decide between caring about veterans and caring about refugees, when both are the victims of the same neo-imperialist crimes, carried out by the untaxed 1%. While Melania Trump charges the public $2 million per week for her security in New York, we are supposed to decide who to keep alive, and which families to tear apart. The opposition has to demonstrate that documenting the undocumented actually benefits all Americans, increases tax revenue, and raises wages in general; we have to make an argument for easing immigration restrictions, not just cry about deportations (though I’ve done quite a bit of that lately). Morality and economic prosperity are not at odds in our vision of American History: they can go hand in hand. Take for example, the many successful employee-owned businesses and stores across the country, the economic benefits of unionization, public education, and healthcare for all (or at least, a public option), how higher wages increase productivity, consumer activity, and ultimately raises the standard of living for everyone.
Studying 19th century history immediately reveals how America’s past is not as great as a million red hats might suggest; that the country and the city were not as much at odds as people believed; that poor white people did not fare well in the South before the Civil War or at any period in American history; that greedy “captains of industry” killed their workers with impunity, and that pro-business president Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops to Chicago and St. Louis to put down the strikes there by force, to keep costs down and profits soaring. So if this post argues anything, it’s for greater investment in history. Every monumental improvement in our society was brought about alongside a new theory of the past: Abraham Lincoln made sense of the purpose of the Civil War by invoking the founding of the country “four score and seven years ago” to bring about a “new birth of freedom”. Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated the New Deal by stating that he would “resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small”, and Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of a “moral arc of history” bending toward justice. So while I know I’m annoying many great historians by saying this, I do believe we the opposition must boldly wield the past, not just tell it. This means resurrecting class as a useful frame of analysis, alongside gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. We should write useful histories for the present, histories that explain conundrums like economic inequality, money in politics, and the many developments cited by poor white people as signs of the end-times, including religious tolerance for muslims, affirmative action and DACA. In short, we have to write History, not history, before it’s rewritten for us by a legion of insane clowns.
Human beings are stubbornly addicted to stories; we’re children. We like treasure maps and adventures. Case in point: there’s a Franz Kafka parable called “My Destination” wherein a man hears a distant horn or bugle, and immediately calls for his servant to get his horse, quickly: “Where are you going?” asks the servant. “Away-from-here! Away-from-here! Only away-from-here!” replies his master, “It is, happily, a place so far away that I must die if I don’t find help along the way.” Americans are like this absurd Don Quixote on his horse going somewhere else, anywhere else: we’re on an important quest (the specifics are vague), and, happily, we need one another if we’re to get there in one piece. The details of this journey, however, are up for grabs.
Resisting Fascism 