Log in
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has arrived at a moment of some embarrassment for the Republic. The United States of America, established to overthrow a mad king, has elected, 250 years later, a mad king of its very own. America is setting itself on fire at its birthday party. It always had a dramatic streak.
In 30 or 40 years, scholars of history, if they exist, will want to know how the richest country in history, with the world’s most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research capacity fuelled by the talent of the world, chose to throw it all away.
I have been closer than most to some kind of answer. For my book The Next Civil War, I interviewed hundreds of experts, trying to fathom the underlying causes and structures of the decline. I met with extremists on the left and right. I argued that the dark dawning was coming. And yet, in some part of me, I didn’t really believe they would do it. The American self-destruction, I can only inform those future historians, is a mystery to us, too.
When did it all go wrong? Most of the researchers into political collapse that I spoke to blamed 2008, the financial crisis that crippled the dream of social mobility, but others brought up 1980, when income inequality first spiked and trust in institutions began to crater, and yet others 1876, the end of reconstruction, and those with even longer memories back to the civil war, or to the War of 1812.
But that was before Trump 2. It’s become obvious, since he took office again, that the crisis America currently faces has been there from the beginning.
From the beginning, the most intelligent Americans understood that their origin contained, within itself, the seeds of its own destruction. George Washington’s Farewell Address predicted, with startling precision, the hyperpartisanship currently ripping apart the nation he founded.
Abraham Lincoln prophesied: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher … as a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” His prophecy has come true.
The semiquincentennial is an opportunity to reconsider the American project, and not just because it has provoked a reconsideration of the revolution itself. The American experiment has ended, and the beginning must offer at least some clue to its ending.
Like those of any creation myth, the details of the Revolution are fuzzy but the impressions indelible. A boy stands beside a hack-down cherry tree. A man rides through the dark, waking villagers. Men hurl tea into a harbor. Women stitch stars into a flag. The events surrounding the revolution exist half in a dream space. History bleeds into the shades of myth.
One of the earliest signals of the sudden and rapid American decline has been the intellectual whiplash of its understanding of its own history. During the grand iconoclasm of 2020, mostly devoted to the desecration of civil war generals, protesters also tore down statues of Jefferson and Washington.
In response to the radical critique of US history, both Florida and Texas have rewritten their school curricula on the revolution, to promote more conservative viewpoints. In Florida, they have called their alternative to AP history the Florida Advanced Courses and Tests, or Fact, proving that somebody still has a sense of humor.
Its vision of the founding focuses on “American civilization, as well as its deep roots in English and, more broadly, Western civilization”, which is a bit rich. If you wanted English civilization, you wouldn’t have become Americans in the first place. But agenda-driven histories of the revolution, on both left and right, shouldn’t be taken seriously as an account or a reckoning. They’re vibes: America’s, like, gross. Or, America’s, like, the best.
There have been works of more substantial history to coincide with the 250th anniversary. Ken Burns’ The American Revolution is of the same quality and depth as any of his other documentaries but less satisfying. In his works on the civil war and jazz and baseball, he expanded and informed the broad strokes of widely known histories with vivid detail and rich storytelling. But the revolution is so mythical already that learning what it was actually like diminishes it somehow.
In his telling, the founders weren’t heroes. They weren’t monsters. They were men in the mess of history, a stew of ideals and venality and interests, living in the middle of situations and mixed loyalties and physical necessities. They committed brutalities occasionally. They shone with bravery occasionally. They were stupid occasionally. They were brilliant occasionally.
Burns bares the contradictions of the revolution, but they’ve already been well established. The founders’ love of liberty derived, directly, from their practice of slavery. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while a valet who was the son of his slave and his father-in-law served him tea. “The crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights,” George Washington wrote, “or submit to every imposition that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us as tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”
The American Revolution began with propertied men desiring no limit on their property, but it was fought mostly by men who owned nothing. The Revolution was a civil war as much as a struggle for liberation. Benjamin Franklin’s son was a loyalist.
But this was all well-established if not well-known. The revolution contained contradictions, just as the United States contains multitudes. What was unique in the founding of the United States was neither the violence nor the idealism. It was the capacity to turn the violence and the idealism into a mythology. The most revolutionary effect of American independence was that it created a sense of the United States as a unique country, an exception to history.
Whatever viewpoint an American takes on the revolution, left or right, it guarantees the conclusion that the United States is the greatest country in the history of the world. Even when Americans say they don’t believe it, they believe it.
American exceptionalism runs deeper than belief. It’s ingrained, bred in the bone. There is no America without American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism runs deeper than belief. It’s ingrained, bred in the bone. There is no America without American exceptionalism. And that exceptionalism began in the revolution.
The United States increasingly feels like a country overwhelmed by history, smothered by a past it can neither face nor overcome. As the US has declined, politically, economically, socially, culturally, it has turned back to its origin more than ever before, in a doomed quest to retain its conviction of its exceptionality.
At no point has America ever been more backward-looking. A recent Pew Research poll found that 59% of Americans believe its best years are behind it. And this is not some vague sense in the air. The distant American past, rather than the American future, is increasingly the basis of its political structure. The most pronounced, and most lasting, legacy of the Trump years is that it has turned originalism into the dominant framework of the American legal system.
The warping of its politics as a result of nostalgia has been extraordinary. Since Bruen, the decision in which the supreme court applied a historical standard to the second amendment, or the “nation’s historic tradition of firearm regulation”, US courts have been flooded with arguments, fundamentally unanswerable, about views of guns from 250 years ago.
That, of course, is only the beginning of the absurdities. They have also allowed racial gerrymandering to return. That, too, is a reflection of the national origin: gerrymandering was invented by Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts and founding father.
Donald Trump is the ultimate nostalgia act. I mean, they call it “make America great again” for a reason. Trump’s violation of political norms must be understood as fully consistent with a revolutionary country in which patriotism was determined, from the beginning, by the violent overthrow of established order.
“There’s a lot of people out there calling for the end of violence ... who say that any violence or aggression at all is unacceptable regardless of the circumstances.” Rush Limbaugh said this after January 6. He continued: “I am glad Sam Adams ... Thomas Paine ... the actual tea party guys ... the men at Lexington and Concord, didn’t feel that way.” The elected officials the rioters attacked have come to agree with their attackers. In the “anti-weaponization fund” Trump sought to create, which could have rewarded the latter-day rebels, he symbolically chose $1.776bn dollars as the total.
Here’s the thing about Trump. Nobody can say that he is un-American. He is all too American. Burns’ retelling of the revolution is clarifying: The motives of the revolution, so clouded over in the mists of Enlightenment idealism, were grounded in more or less pure greed. The crown had halted continental expansion over the Appalachian mountains; it had attempted to ban speculation and trade in lands which it considered to belong, by right, to Indigenous people.
After the Seven Years’ war, which had made North America British, the Empire was financially exhausted. The British subject paid 26 shillings of tax to one shilling of the colonists. That one was too much. The other harbinger of the revolution was the glee of mobs. Tarring and feathering of British officials was a grand amusement. The movement from subject to citizen was, as the documentary says, “a spectacle of violence”.
“Grab’em by the pussy” is perfectly consistent with the spirit of the revolution, every bit as much as “all men are created equal.” The founding fathers felt entitled to something for nothing, for work without paying for it. They humiliated and degraded anyone who objected.
The Americans are slouching back to their origin. Greed and spectacles of punishment define them.
Americans aren’t addicted to liberty itself, but the sense of liberation, the throwing off of shackles. They get high on it. The revolution rendered mobs overthrowing, by violence, political authority an explicit political good, the foundational political good. And it is pure poison. It is the American poison.
They are drinking their own poison. They are drinking it all the way down. And they’re dying of it.
American exceptionalism continues unabated. They still go about lecturing the world, claiming that their military’s sport killing is an activation of moral right. The United States’s entire foreign policy as a superpower, from the end of the second world war on, can be reduced to a single line from an officer during the Tet offensive in Vietnam: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
As the Americans return to their origin, to their primal urge, they are losing themselves. In a kind of atavistic dissolution, the originalists are rendering the constitution increasingly meaningless. The icons are desecrated. They paint over the granite of the reflecting pool. They have torn down the White House all on their own; the British didn’t need to burn it.
-
Stephen Marche is the host of the podcast Gloves Off
