The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America

by Greg Grandin

The United States, in contrast, was created lonely and raised thinking it was one of a kind.

Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.

Many worried that the public was increasingly confusing freedom with debauched egoism.

The United States too had crowded cities and hungry workers, fighting efforts to subordinate their lives to mechanical routine. But instead of waging class war upward—on aristocrats and owners—they waged race war outward, on the frontier.

Became the mistress. Came into possession. It all floats by like a dream, as if the United States had empire thrust upon it.40

Still, in 1945, at the end of the war, the first significant physical barrier went up along the Mexican border: “4,500 lineal feet of chain link fencing,” ten feet high and “woven of No. 6 wire,” near Calexico, California.29 The fence’s posts and wire mesh had been recycled from California’s Crystal City Internment Camp, which had been used to hold Japanese Americans during World War II.

The battle flag became the banner not of a specific Lost Cause but of all of white supremacy’s lost causes.

America’s exceptionalism was born on a frontier thought to be endless. Now the only thing endless is history’s endless return, as veterans travel to the borderlands to rehearse how lost wars could have been won.

Instead of peace, there’s endless war. Instead of a critical, resilient, and progressive citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold. Factionalism congealed and won a national election.

This ideal of freedom as infinity was only made possible through the domination of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans, as slave and cheap labor transformed stolen land into capital, cutting the tethers and launching the U.S. economy into the stratosphere. And now, as we fall back to a wasted earth, the very existence of people of color functions as an unwanted memento mori, a reminder of limits, evidence that history imposes burdens and life contracts social obligations.

Coming generations will face a stark choice—a choice long deferred by the emotive power of frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.