Independence Day

 

The United States celebrates its 247th birthday tomorrow. By tradition, it is a day for cookouts and hot dogs, parades and fireworks - our modest contemporary version of John Adams' famous prescription that the day "ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

Yet, for all the cookouts and hot dogs, parades and fireworks, and other forms of festivity, Americans are apparently a relatively unhappy lot as we approach this Fourth of July. Despite the obvious fact that the U.S. economy has been doing increasingly well, many Americas do not seem to experience it that way. Despite the obvious fact that President Biden has been, by any objective measure, one of the most legislatively effective and successful presidents since LBJ, many Americans are apparently convinced that he is barely competent. It is weird, but so it is. There is a certain - to coin a phrase - "malaise" in the land. 

Over and above that "malaise," both as a consequence and as an exacerbating contributing cause, there is the increasingly widespread sense that Americans do not like each other much, that we have sorted ourselves - geographically, educationally, etc. - into two hostile tribes. The one other time it has been this bad in our history, many argue, was on the eve of the Civil War - hardly a comforting analogy.

Actually, Americans were already divided before and during the Revolutionary War, when (it is usually claimed) that only about one-third actively supported independence and another one-third actively opposed it. After the Revolution, they were divided again about what kind of national government (if any) they should have. The conflict over whether or not to ratify the constitution polarized the country into federalists and anti-federalists. Once the constitution had gone into effect and a functioning federal government was in place, the country continued to quarrel about the meaning of the constitution, the desirability and extent of federal power, and a host of other issues. These divisions were often sectional, geographically based conflicts. Blessed by a continuing inflow of new immigrants, the young country as a consequence consistently experienced ethnic and racial conflicts as well. 

Of all the conflicts, that relating to race has been the most persistent and neuralgic. The years 1607 and 1619 conventionally mark the dates, first, of the first permanent British colonial settlement in what is now the United States and, secondly, the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to what is now the United States. So slavery and the conflicts concerning it have been with us almost from the beginning. Divisions over slavery and race characterized the revolutionary period and the founding generations, and were later exacerbated by the expansion into new territories and those territories' potential incorporation into the Union.

Abolitionism as a political movement acquired a new salience with William Lloyd Garrison’s famous Fourth-of-July address in 1829 at Boston’s Park Street Church, energizing enthusiastic Christian abolitionists like Charles Finney and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, began publication in 1831 and continued weekly until the abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment in 1865. By the 1850s a new political party had taken up the anti-slavery cause (or, at least, the anti-expansion of slavery cause). Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860, which reflected the thoroughly polarized politics of that time, led directly to the Civil War which followed.

Are we now on the verge of another Civil War? Not really - at least not one like the last one. For one thing, despite the pro-Union strongholds of East Tennessee and West Virginia and the Confederate sympathies of Border States like Kentucky and Maryland, our sectional Civil War was distinctly geographical and dependent on the formal secession of specific states. Our divisions do not map so exactly.

Yet that is not to deny the degree of division among us, nor the fact that, in contrast to the celebrated "cross-cutting cleavages" of old, our divisions increasingly align along educational, economic, regional, religious, and cultural lines. One of the curiosities of our current political predicament has been the ideological narrowing of our political parties. They have also, so to speak (and not for the first time), switched sides in terms of whom they represent and what they ostensibly stand for. For the greater part of a century, the Republican Party was, broadly speaking, the party of progressive nationalism and civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was (broadly speaking) that of states' rights and white supremacy. In the 20th-century, the Democratic Party became the party of urban ethnics and organized labor, and then later the party of civil rights. By the 21st century, however, the Democratic Party was well on its way to becoming the party primarily of educated elites and global finance, while the Republican Party (especially after the 2008 economic collapse and thanks in particular to the rise of Donald Trump) is increasingly becoming a working-class "populist" party of neo-isolationist Christian nationalism and racialized politics. Meanwhile extremely rich, elite, privileged personalities (e.g., Donald Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) present themselves as "outsider" populists and spokespersons for the genuinely left behind, steering them away from problem solving political coalitions into warped libertarian fantasies of marginalization and persecution.

These deep divisions not only inhibit the United States from addressing seriously pressing problems (climate change, homelessness, increasing inequality, Russian imperialism, etc.), but increasingly also pit some Americans against their other fellow citizens in intensifying, mutual, intemperately ideological, self-reinforcing hatreds.

Such is the somber state of our sad United States on our 247th birthday.

The American founding was flawed from the start and in multiple ways. It was, as already noted, a minority movement, divided from other Americans about independence and within itself about the purpose and power of government and, increasingly, about slavery and race. Its leaders - not all, but certainly some of them - were tainted by Deism, and colonial society was somewhat less churched than we like to think. That we are inclined to try to remember it otherwise is a reflection of the tremendous transformation of America that happened after the founding. I refer, of course to the so-called "Second Great Awakening," which managed to marginalize the Deistic elements of the founding era in a new (admittedly Protestant) Christian consensus. From its desultory colonial condition, American Church membership meanwhile rose throughout the 19th-century and continued to rise until reaching its peak in the mid-20th-century. If our presently polarized and dangerously secularizing politics increasingly associates religion with some of the worst aspects of American character, our history reminds us that, since the Second Great Awakening, religion has consistently been associated with what is best about America. Our history reminds us that deviations are part of the story but not necessarily the whole story, and that things can - and do - get better.

So let us together toast another Glorious Fourth! As much as our own greedily self-induced climate crisis of heat waves and smoke-filled air will allow, let it be, as it is supposed to be, a day for being together - with cookouts and hot dogs, parades and fireworks.