Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

by Wilfred M. McClay

The example of Great Britain had convinced Kennedy that excessively high rates of taxation were actually counterproductive, stifling economic growth and thereby reducing the amount of revenue available to the national treasury. “An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget,” Kennedy declared, “just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits.” Slashing income tax rates both at the top and the bottom of income levels had a startling effect: over the next six years, personal savings and business investment both rose sharply, GNP increased by 40 percent in two years, job growth doubled, and unemployment was reduced by a third. Even Kennedy’s economic advisors who had opposed the tax cut, and whose advice he had overridden, were astounded and had to admit that he had been right.

The goal of nonviolent resistance was not, King said, the defeat or humiliation of the opponent but the achievement of reconciliation and fellowship with him.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

Together!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

Together2

Indeed, in some cases, such as the program for Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the net effect was to weaken families by disincentivizing marriage and family intactness, a development that would have especially disastrous effects upon minority families in urban environments.

First, the Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968, a fierce assault on American and South Vietnamese forces throughout the country, extending even to a brief occupation of the American embassy grounds in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, seemed to give the lie to the administration’s claims of steady progress. In large part, this impression was the product of inaccurate media reporting; in the end, the Tet Offensive was actually a military failure. But it was a public relations success, to the extent that it further depressed American willingness to press the fight.

He provides us with a good example of why it becomes more and more difficult to write about history with perspective and balance the more closely one’s subject matter approaches the present day.

Nixon

The Nixon Doctrine, which undergirded the philosophy of Vietnamization, posited that the United States would continue to assist in the support of allied nations, but not to the extent of committing its own military forces. The deciding factor in any foreign-policy commitment would be the national interest of the United States: “our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.” The effort to establish improved relations with both the Soviet Union and the Chinese flowed from that view.

He had been a liberal Democrat himself in his younger days, and even when he had come to reject many of the policies of the New Deal and Great Society, he never rejected the example of Franklin Roosevelt or neglected the great lesson of Roosevelt’s presidency: a democratic leader’s essential role, above all else, is to be a purveyor of hope and a prophet of possibility.

Historians will argue for many years about the relative importance of Reagan and Gorbachev in the vast improvement of Soviet– American relations. Both were transformational leaders. But in some sense, both needed one another. There had to be a man like Gorbachev, a reform-minded leader who was willing to break through the ossified structure of an inert and dehumanizing Soviet system to try for something better. But there had to be a Reagan, too, whose clarity and determination, and whose success in restoring the American economy and its military strength, limited the options that were open to Gorbachev.

If history teaches us anything, it is that we only rarely have the power to grasp the meaning of events as they are occurring. Live long enough, and you will find out how true that is.

In many ways, the action reflected a world picture that corresponded to the influential musings of political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who wrote in 1989, at the very time that the Cold War was ending, that its end marked an “end to history.” By this startling phrase, he meant not that all historical events were about to cease but that the long, steady process of historical progress, by which human institutions had moved through various phases of development, had now reached a terminal point, and that with the failure of Communism, all the possible alternatives to Western-style liberal-democratic capitalism had been exhausted.

He also argued that the widespread Western belief in the universality of the West’s values and political systems was naive and ethnocentric and that continued insistence on the imposition of democracy and other “universal” norms as a condition for participation in the world economy would have the opposite effect of stirring up resentment in those other civilizations.

The Gallup organization provided strong evidence in 2016 that Americans’ average confidence in fourteen key American institutions – Congress, business, television, newspapers, labor unions, the medical system, the police, banks, and educational institutions – has plummeted in the ten years since 2006 and overall stands at just 32 percent. It is significant, too, that, beginning in 2007, more Americans identified as independents than as Republicans, and by 2013, more identified as independents than as Democrats. By 2017, a full 37 percent of registered voters refused to identify with either of the mainstream political parties. There are many reasons for this disaffection, but distrust of both of the established political parties is surely chief among them.

Mindful of Herbert Butterfield’s insistence that the historian should strive to be a recording angel and not a hanging judge, I have tried my best to be guided by that dictum.

Love is the foundation of the wisest criticism, and criticism is the essential partner of an honest and enduring love. We live in a country, let us hope, in which our flaws can always be openly discussed, and where criticism and dissent can be regarded not as betrayals or thought-crimes but as essential ingredients in the flourishing of our polity and our common life.

“The nation,” Renan explained, “like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people.… A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”

As I’ve said, Renan strongly opposed the idea that nations should be understood as entities united by racial or linguistic or geographical or religious or material factors. None of those factors could account for the emergence of this “spiritual principle.” What binds them instead is a shared story, a shared history. The ballast of the American past is an essential part of American national identity, and it is something quite distinct from the “idea” of America. But it is every bit as powerful, if not more so. And it is a very particular force. Our nation’s particular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings – and our memories of those things – draw and hold us together, precisely because they are the sacrifices and sufferings, not of all humanity, but of us alone. In this view, there is no more profoundly American place than Arlington National Cemetery or the Civil War battlegrounds of Antietam and Gettysburg and Shiloh.

It is universal precisely because it is not universalistic, just as the love of one’s own parents or one’s family or one’s spouse is universal precisely in its particularity. All parents love their children, but my parental love and obligations are directed at my own. And that is as it should be.

And there is little else but images of land and echoes of Heimat in Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America” – “Land that I love!” and “My home sweet home!” – which has enjoyed a surge of popularity in the years since 9/11. Nearly all Americans love this song, but most of them have no idea that its composer, one of the formative geniuses of American popular song, was born in Tsarist Russia with the name Israel Beilin. This is, of course, both amazing and entirely appropriate. Even immigrants who shared neither descent nor language nor culture nor religion could find a way to participate in the sense of America as, not an idea, but a home, a place where they could be “born again.”

So there is a vital tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land. The genius of American patriotism permits both to coexist, and even to be harmonized to a considerable extent, therefore making them both available to be drawn upon in the rich, but mixed, phenomenon of American patriotism.

Abraham Lincoln showed an instinctive understanding of this complexity in American patriotic sentiment, emphasizing first one, then the other in his oratory, as circumstances dictated.