Many of us were brought up believing that the United States was a “propositional nation.” In other words, it was a nation united not by ethnicity but by broad political ideals, such as representative government, rule of law, personal liberty, and egalitarianism.
The idea (as I understood it) was that both people born into this community and people who immigrated into it would grasp the advantages of such a system and make sure to raise the next generations with the same values.
But in the last three years, we’ve seen that ~40 percent of the population may well have a different idea of what America is. We see that they are pleased to have an authoritarian-minded, ethnonationalist White House and will defend it, come what may. (And some of them reject the “propositional nation” concept explicitly.)
Surely, America can’t be a nation united by shared ideals if it includes 63 million MAGA supporters insisting otherwise?
Could those of us who believed in the “propositional nation” have been wrong all along?
Of course not. I think one of the greatest divisions are between folk who emphasize the common good, and those who value the individual’s ability to maximize their own interests. Another is the willingness to tolerate different points of view, as opposed to the desire to impose one’s own views on the entirety.
Not being entirely cynical, but the closest I can come to shared ideals (whether they qualify as political) is a desire to accumulate as much stuff as cheaply as possible, while not bearing the externalities of one’s choices. Our words greatly differ from our deeds.
No. The idea that people living in such different ways should be forced under a continent-spanning centralized government is pure authoritarian ideology. Trump has at least hastened the imminent collapse of the civic religion. With that there’s hope people begin to accept the idea of other people doing their own thing.
Any study of history will show that the ideals found in textbooks have been threatened, stretched, bent, overlooked, and subverted in every decade since the Constitution was signed. Immigration, isolationism, and fear of the Other are endemic to U.S. history. You just think this is different because it’s the loudest thing in the room. A few decades from now, nobody will remember.
The United States will go on because pretty much everybody in the country except Will wants it to. And pretty much everybody in the country who voted for Trump also believe in representative government, rule of law, personal liberty, and egalitarianism. (They say that it’s the left who doesn’t.) You’re confusing means with ends.
I think the real underlying political ideal is that this is the* nation where people who wildly disagree with each other, including being allowed to do so in public, nevertheless choose to live together without, for the most part, murdering each other.
And I don’t think we’ve, for the most part, lost that one yet; though I agree that it’s somewhat in danger. It’s been in danger before, however. This mess isn’t new, it’s a recurrence (though the exact details of the symptoms, of course, vary.)
The ideology of the people of the United States is liberalism, as you described. The founding principles of this nation, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, are almost universal values among the American people. Indeed, to question the basic tenets of liberalism is un-American. Tocqueville recognized such in his Democracy in America (1835):
"*Democratic republics extend the practice of currying favor with the many, and they introduce it into a greater number of classes at once: this is one of the most serious reproaches that can be addressed to them. In democratic States organized on the principles of the American republics, this is more especially the case, where the authority of the majority is so absolute and so irresistible that a man must give up his rights as a citizen, and almost abjure his quality as a human being, if te intends to stray from the track which it lays down.
In that immense crowd which throngs the avenues to power in the United States I found very few men who displayed any of that manly candor and that masculine independence of opinion which frequently distinguished the Americans in former times, and which constitutes the leading feature in distinguished characters, wheresoever they may be found. It seems, at first sight, as if all the minds of the Americans were formed upon one model, so accurately do they correspond in their manner of judging. A stranger does, indeed, sometimes meet with Americans who dissent from these rigorous formularies; with men who deplore the defects of the laws, the mutability and the ignorance of democracy; who even go so far as to observe the evil tendencies which impair the national character, and to point out such remedies as it might be possible to apply; but no one is there to hear these things besides yourself, and you, to whom these secret reflections are confided, are a stranger and a bird of passage. They are very ready to communicate truths which are useless to you, but they continue to hold a different language in public.
If ever these lines are read in America, I am well assured of two things: in the first place, that all who peruse them will raise their voices to condemn me; and in the second place, that very many of them will acquit me at the bottom of their conscience."*
I do not make such a blanket judgement upon the Trump-approving American populace. Just because a survey respondent “approves” “the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president”[SUP][1][/SUP] doesn’t mean said respondent condones authoritarianism or ethnic nationalism.
But I do think there are many authoritarians to be found in this country, particularly in the ideology and religion known as evangelical Christianity. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (from their point of view at least), but it is a thing. Probably 10-20% of Americans identify as evangelicals (too lazy to cite).
I agree. There is no movement calling for any broad change in the way the country is run. Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders gets elected in 2020, they will still adhere to most of the same basics. Virtually nobody is saying we should abolish Congress or make the Presidency a lifetime office or eliminate private property or take the vote away from women.
Yes, but their proposals were designed to retain Congress but make it *more *representative rather than less. That’s the exact opposite of the OP’s comment as well as Little Nemo’s.
You know, I originally wrote “Nobody is saying we should abolish Congress or make the Presidency a lifetime office or eliminate private property or take the vote away from women.” But then I thought that while the meaning was clear, somebody was going to point out an example of a person somewhere who had proposed one of these ideas. So I changed it to “Virtually nobody”. And then I thought that somebody is going to ignore the word virtually and go ahead and argue about it anyway.
I’ll admit the use of a dead person to make the argument caught me by surprise.
What democratic institutions will be hollowed out? The only ones mentioned in your OP were “representative government, rule of law, personal liberty, and egalitarianism.”
Everybody here (none of whom are MAGA supporters to my knowledge) keeps saying that these are not at risk to any greater extent than all the other times they’ve already been at risk.
Do you have a different set of institutions in mind? Do you have any evidence that this period is actually different from all the other periods? Can you prove that Trump supporters are an existential threat to democracy?
All I’ve read is an extremely vague generalization about nothing concrete.
That’s a little one-sided. More like one side that emphasizes the common good, even to the point of restricting and/or removing individual rights to that end, and another side that views those rights as paramount, even when they conflict with the greater good.
It’s really emphasis on different things- both of which are virtuous in their own way.
But the real problem is that we have TWO Overton windows that only overlap a little bit these days. What’s reasonable for one group is unthinkable for the other in a lot of ways. I think in the past, the two windows overlapped enough that they basically appeared to be one window, but not anymore.
In my 50+ years on this planet, I have never known Rs to have even the same definition for those words as the rest of the population and have most often seen them act to restrict, rather than enhance.
