None of the usual patriotic sentiments, no matter how ambivalently expressed, feel remotely appropriate this year. What exactly July 4 symbolizes in 21st-century American life is hard to say: a moment of rest and reflection, a communal celebration momentarily elevated above politics. It was probably always an illusion, but in the summer of 2020, the pandemic summer, the summer the statues fell, the summer of the amazing and growing ugliness of the President of the United States, that illusion is no longer sustainable.
Last year, my teenage children and I joined thousands of people of all possible races, origins, and nationalities on FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan to watch the massive Macy’s fireworks show, performed from a series of barges in the East River and from the Brooklyn Bridge. Did it feel, even then, as too much, as an attempt to show that the nation’s largest city, at its worst, so infamously impersonal, had a spirit that rose above the Trumpian implosion of America? Well, it’s easy to say that now, but that’s certainly how I feel looking at the photos I took that night.
I don’t need to explain why we didn’t attend something like this this year, and why neither do you. The Macy’s show boiled down to a series of pop-up fireworks displays in various New York neighborhoods, at locations not previously announced. We were in a small northern town about 160 miles away, lighting some fireworks at a discount store in our backyard. We could hear a handful of our neighbors doing the same thing, for about an hour after dark, but it was over pretty quickly.
If the skies were largely silent over the United States over the holiday weekend, except for Donald Trump’s aggressively flashy celebrations, first at Mount Rushmore and then in Washington, there have been ground-level fireworks for weeks, both literally as figuratively. In fact, it seems that we have moved to a realm where the metaphor has become reality, or perhaps the other way around. To borrow the language of critical theory, the signifier and the signified, whose meanings are always intertwined, have become the same thing.
“I can’t breathe” turned out to have been the well-certified (or almost final) final words of numerous blacks killed by police officers. It is also a rallying cry and a metaphorical declaration of protest against claustrophobic oppression that transcends skin color or geography. “Black lives matter” is both a simple declarative statement and a metaphorical construction that requires a context and a story to unpack.
The statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, or indeed George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, etc., are dumb physical objects, shrouded for decades in vague veneration, and statements about American history, with authors. . and scheduled hearings. They are words and deeds, manifested in physical space in a coded form intended to represent all eternity. Of course, they never do.
To cite Trump’s deeply strange and deeply absurd executive order calling for a New monument called “National Garden of American Heroes”, announced during his Friday night address on Mount Rushmore, statues of historical figures are “silent masters in solid form of stone and metal.” That is true, although almost certainly not in the sense that the president intended. Like Karen Cox, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, he told the Washington Post, historical monuments are always “a reflection of who put them on. It is not so much about the past as it is a reflection of our values and ideals in the present. “
But even that more nuanced understanding is not enough to capture the energy of this moment. What is being disputed now is not what those “silent masters” meant to those who erected them, and in the case of Confederate monuments dating from the early 20th century, that is not mysterious, but what they say About us, at this time, and about the fact that most Americans of all colors agreed to pretend to forget what they stood for and why they were there.
I hesitate to attribute too much agency, and too much importance, to Donald Trump, who seems to me primarily a channel or vector for the tar pit beneath American society and culture, a human chemical reaction, inevitably produced by the collision of certain unpleasant elements. . But going over the top, it’s surprising to have a president at this obvious turning point in our national history who makes absolutely no effort to unite the public or even pretend, and who remains tirelessly dedicated to inflaming the most paranoid racist impulses among his supporters, even though that increasingly resembles the path to electoral Armageddon.
One of the most important pieces of America’s decoding that I read over the holiday weekend was that of Paul Rosenberg Salon interview with Jennifer Mercieca, historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M and author of new book “Demagogue for President: Donald Trump’s rhetorical genius“
Mercieca argues that Trump knows exactly what he is doing, whether consciously or instinctively, with his ingenious and manipulative use of several different rhetorical strategies. It’s a fascinating argument and worth taking seriously, especially if we acknowledge that it’s silly to describe Trump’s 2016 election victory as purely an accident or a fluke (or an “aberrant moment,” in Joe Biden’s phrase). But here is the passage in Paul’s interview with Mercieca that really stopped me:
I have been concerned with two phrases in the last five years: “the age of catastrophe” and “it is later than you think.” The first is Description of the historian Eric Hobsbawm the era between the Great War and World War II, a period of massive social, political, and technological transformation and the collapse of elite leadership. The second is from journalist Max Lerner, who wrote about how to reform American democracy during the first era of catastrophe.
I think we are in a similar moment and that it could be later than we thought. Lerner teaches us that demagogues like Trump are empowered by inequality and social dysfunction. If we want to stop inexplicable leaders like Trump, then we have to remake society according to what Lerner calls the “majority principle.” In 2016, we distrusted, polarized, and were frustrated with our government. Trump did not cause those conditions, but he does build the rhetoric to make them worse. …
The big picture is that we need to remake our political and economic culture to prevent demagogues like Trump from taking power in the first place. … We need an economic and political system that works for the people and not for the elite. The political project of our time is to defend democracy.
That’s a sharp recipe, but one that probably won’t go far enough. Whether you think Black Lives Matter or the statue protests are just causes or the revolutionary terror of self-justice (or somewhere in between) is not the real question. And while I understand the obsessive fascination with voting Trump out of office, and sharing it, at least on occasions, that’s also less important than it sounds. Perhaps the real problem is not “defending democracy” but finding out if we still have one, or if we ever had it, and if we can build or rebuild a democracy that really works as such.
In another urgently needed article of the moment, historian Rebecca L. Spang argues in the Atlantic that the “unexpected and growing coalition” calling for action against racism, stretching from George Floyd’s first wave of protests in Minneapolis to a range of established politicians, suggests that we may indeed be in a revolutionary moment, but also that we can’t know that for sure. What we see around us, Spang writes: “they are pro-democracy protests that are difficult to recognize as such because they are taking place in a country that has been widely regarded as a leading site of liberal democracy. “My criticism of that: Yahtzee!
To rebuild rather than simply destroy, Spang suggests, we cannot look behind us at “missing certainties”, whether that means a Great Man cast in bronze astride a horse or a revolutionary iconography drawn from the Jacobins, Bolsheviks or black panthers. We can only hope for “uncertain possibilities,” a phrase that certainly captures the mood of this strange and moderate Independence Day, as we struggle to declare our independence from the past.
