America Suspended

I have long been fascinated with the concept of “nationalism” – what makes a collection of people a “nation.”  In my own academic career, I became convinced that political and economic integration had muffled nationalism, a good thing, since nationalism could be fingered as the underlying cause for tragic global wars and regional conflicts.  In light of recent events, I’m pretty sure I was wrong.

Years ago, I threatened to write about the U.S. form of nationalism, what traits caused us to self-identify as “Americans.”  Back then, I believed I could sit at the airport in Paris and, even amidst the bustle of races, ethnicities, obvious religious preferences, etc., pick out an American by simply watching him or her.  Regardless of our outward appearances, we seemed to have a nonchalant confidence and aura that caused us to carry ourselves differently.  We were, all of us, viscerally and collectively unique.

    I wondered where this uniqueness came from.  What bonds did the Jewish lady from Seattle share with the gay guy from Miami?  What connected the hot dog vendor in Brooklyn to the sailor in San Diego?   How did our myriad sub-cultures, still identifiable today, get supplanted by “Americanism”?

My studies led me to Benedict Anderson’s excellent “Imagined Communities” (1983), the Introduction to which greatly influenced me (I will do his formulations no justice here by cherry-picking passages; suffice it to say I think you would be enlightened if you at least gave the Introduction a full read).  Anderson defines “nation” as an imagined political community, “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”  Anderson sees the imagined enterprise as a community “because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.  Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible.”  Importantly, Anderson postulates that the development of print-capitalism became the mechanism by which these imaginations could be shared.

I thought that Anderson’s conceptions pretty well described the American experience.  We were a far-flung, imagined community that, despite our differences and inequalities, conceived of ourselves as a vast horizontal fraternity.  Through our educational history of struggle and sacrifice, consensus surrounding a set of “inalienable rights” and libertarian values, and the communal belief in the efficacy of our political institutions, we were “Americans” first.  Electronic media in all its forms, the new age “print-capitalism,” facilitated the sharing of these beliefs. 

Now I question whether the United States is indeed a “nation” at all in the Benedict Anderson sense.  It seems like America as an “imagined community,” a “vast horizontal fraternity,” is gone.  I don’t share “communion” with the people who voted for Donald Trump; I don’t “know” them, even in my imagination, like I once thought I did.  They would probably say the same about me or anybody else who cast a vote for Hillary Clinton.  

We seem so different from each other now.  Hostile camps pit themselves across tactical issues like trade and immigration while debating even grander notions regarding democratic processes and institutions, the value of truth in politics, and the imperatives for moral character in our leadership.  In the past, cataclysmic events pushed aside these differences (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) and reunited the American fraternity with renewed allegiance to the American Dream.  Now, not even pandemics nor police murderers can unite us with common purpose.

Last summer, I attended a book review seminar led by my sister.  The audience was asked to write a short paragraph that completed these words:  “The American Dream is...”  I wrote something to the effect of equal opportunity regardless of imagined birthright, belief in democratic institutions and their ability to provide equal justice, and freedom and tolerance in expression of thought.  Silly me.  My colleagues delivered a cynical rebuke:  “...dead.”  “... an anachronism.”  “... an idea without merit in today’s society.”  So much for an imagined community.

Without a consensus on ideals, America is just a place to live.  Nothing special - no American “exceptionalism.”  Black lives matter. Democratic institutions matter. Global warming matters.  American leadership in foreign affairs matters.  Poverty and decency matter.  Justice for all matters.  On and on.  If we cannot reestablish a consensus on these fundamentals, dissolved out from under us in the last four years, we’re just a collection of tribes and ethnicities trying to get along with each other - Switzerland writ large.  

If consensus can’t reunite us, perhaps conflict will.  It seems to me that an enduring source of American covalence is the blood and sacrifice of the people who made America great in the first place - the veterans of our armed services. The history of our nation, our collective, is written in the stories of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines and the sacrifices of their families and loved ones. Despite our differences, this has been our bond and the most likely source of its endurance.  Will we have to once again come under attack to lock arms with each other?  I hope not.

Has America, the idea, died?  Is it time to simply, if reluctantly, acknowledge our postpartum depression for a “nation” lost?  Are we 'two nations, under God, divided, with liberty and justice, as defined by the ruling party’s elite, for all'?  

I prefer to believe we are America Suspended, undergoing an anomaly, a deviation from our norm.  Thankfully, the answer is just around the corner.  Come November, we will know.  While regime change would be a relief, I will be cautioned by the percentage of our brothers and sisters who will be voting for the status quo, thinking our current path is fine.  Regardless, we must relentlessly pursue ideological fraternity, in principles if not policies, if our nation, our imagined community, our “America,” is to survive and thrive.