Is America Over?

by Crispin Sartwell

 

Recently I was interviewed by a filmmaker who's working on a documentary about American philosophy. He asked me the big, hard, obscure questions about the nature of the American spirit, about the great themes of American history, about what makes America distinctive.

    I have tried to answer such questions before. But this time as I ran through them I was seized with nostalgia for the mere existence of questions: the idea of America is more and more thoroughly retrospective, a survey of something of great value, now lost to history.

   The first thing we might think about is the content of American mythology, which has its basis in reality: a celebration of the frontier where there is no structure of authority; of the outlaw; of Clint Eastwood's man with no name; of the gangster from Al Capone to Snoop Dogg; of political radicals such as Emma Goldman, H.L. Mencken, Abby Hoffman, Barry Goldwater; of pointedly distinctive artists from Robert Johnson and Hank Williams to Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.

     But as time goes on, we have fewer and fewer figures capable of real boldness or defiance or self-reliance: we worship bureaucracies and their leaders, bureaucracies and their products. Our frontier is the cubicle.

    Surely, we have to understand the vision of America - its imaginary essence, its function as a symbol - in terms of individuality and freedom. The radical protestants who fled England and Europe believed that each person had his own relation to God, unmediated by the Catholic church or the government of England. Each person was answerable to God only as God expressed Himself in that person's conscience.

    This is the motivation for the First Amendment, with its insulation of individual conscience, expression, and religion from state interference. This radical religiosity and the idea that it entailed radical liberty was the position of abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown.

    This independence of spirit from institution was secularized in the work of the greatest American intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and his best friend Henry David Thoreau. As Thoreau asked in "Civil Disobedience": "Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward."

     The individualism that Emerson famously set out in the essay "Self-Reliance" - perhaps the greatest statement of what America means - is not an individualism that tries to disconnect people from one another or from the world: quite the reverse. It celebrates the life of each thing as essential in the life of all things. But that entails that each person ought to free to become himself.

   There are two opposing forces between which this America has been crushed. We might call them quasi-communism and quasi-fascism.  (Actual communism and fascism would require more clarity than most of us now possess.)

    The social programs that grew exponentially with the New Deal - and the huge bureaucracies needed to fund and administer them - are almost self-evidently good: feed the poor, house the homeless, care for the elderly, eliminate bad products from the marketplace, assure our health. But of course they are destructive of self-reliance. And they permeate America with state power.

    Americans are now processed by state educational institutions into a fundamental unanimity that revolves around the simultaneous muttering of cliches: even "believe in yourself" is an invitation to witless conformity; even reading "Civil Disobedience" - a text no American educator could possibly accept - is rendered empty by its institutionalization. Our devotion now is only to standardized tests and standardized minds.

     That's the quasi-communism. The quasi-fascism was brought home to me last week when I revisited my home town, Washington D.C. It was bristling with barriers, cameras, security forces. The capitol must be the most surveilled and policed city in the world. To call that the symbol of human freedom is laughable.

    At every turn - from its Patriot Act to its overwhelming propensity to secrecy to it use of the term "Homeland"- the Bush administration is intent on reducing freedoms and increasing state power. Even its theocratic wing has a grim fascistic flavor. Texas governor Rick Perry signing a law against gay marriage at an evangelical church is telling you one thing: we have established evangelical Christianity as the state religion. 

    America is dead and really no one seems to be mourning. At any moment we will be as thoroughly bureaucratized as France and as theocratic as Iran. If there is any enthusiasm for - or even understanding of - what makes America distinctive and valuable, it is not currently visible on our political landscape.

    In our pathetic little world, some people - Hillary Clinton, maybe - want to shape your mind and then take care of you; others - Alberto Gonzales - want to watch you all the time and then intern you. But no one wants you to be free.