November 24, 2023
I wish my readers a happy Thanksgiving, though it will be slightly belated when this newsletter appears. Unfortunately, however, the mood of Americans in general seems to be distinctly thankless. The mood of the country is sour, pessimistic—the word that comes to mind is “peevish.” To me, that word expresses the defiant attitude, “I’m unhappy, and you can’t make me happy.” In Dylan Thomas’s play for voices Under Milk Wood, a henpecked husband says to his wife, “Here’s your tea, dear.” She snaps at him, “Too much sugar.” “You haven’t tasted it yet, dear.” “Too much cream, then.” That is peevishness, and that is where we are this Thanksgiving season. The goal of this newsletter is to push back against such passive peevishness and speak of valid reasons for hope, which is also the purpose of the new book by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Heather Cox Richardson, America Awakening: Notes on the State of America, which I warmly admire and recommend despite a few qualifications, which I will get to later.
Of course, there are many things wrong today, starting with two tragic wars, and it’s not as if we should all be as happy as kings. But the bitter national mood predates and has little to do with the horrors of Gaza. The public is angry about its own condition, not that of others. The mood is so stubborn, and is so disconnected from actual reality, that it has started to puzzle the commentators: any number of articles have appeared trying to account for it. Some will immediately point to the lies relentlessly poured out by the right-wing media about a country that is supposedly disintegrating due to inflation, rising crime, and a tide of immigration. But why is the public so quick to credit those lies when it dismisses as out-of-touch those who point to data disproving them? Some people seem eager to be negative, and a year of high inflation gave them an excuse that they are now clinging to, reluctant to relinquish it even though it is increasingly at odds with the facts. Every time that economist Paul Krugman writes an article in the New York Times saying what other economists are saying, that inflation at this point is basically under control, he is barraged by discussion board comments attacking privileged intellectuals whose heads are said to be in a world of abstract numbers, about GDP and the like, but have no idea how hard it is for ordinary people to live. Yet the facts are these: yes, inflation has been a hardship for many people on a temporary basis, and there are no doubt people who are struggling to survive. But the larger picture is that wages have been rising along with prices, aided by the amazing rebirth of the union movement, and people on Social Security got an 8.7% increase in their benefits. Prices have come down, though by no means universally: the price of gas in Ohio hovers around $3.70 a gallon. There are some things, then, to be at least moderately thankful for?
By no means: Americans are said to live paycheck to paycheck, and would find a $400 extra bill in a month a painful crisis. You do not have to be a Nobel-Prize-winning economist like Krugman to take this with a grain of salt. I do not lack sympathy for those our economy has left behind: it is the chief reason I have shifted in recent years to calling myself progressive rather than liberal. Still, I question the economic explanation for those who repudiate Bidenomics and at least claim on surveys that they are actually reconsidering Trump. For one thing, this replays the Trump illusion, when we discovered, too late, that the average MAGA supporter was not an out-of-work coal miner or blue-collar worker but more likely a middle manager or small business owner with an income around $72,000. I read about the paycheck-to-paycheck Americans, and then I drive to the mall. In the traffic, I look around me and realize I am surrounded by SUV’s and large pickup trucks. As a Kia owner, I happen to be aware that Kia is ceasing production of the Rio due to lack of demand, leaving only one other sub-compact car on the American market. Why? If so many are struggling financially, would there not be at least some interest in an inexpensive car with great gas mileage? But no, we must have our large and expensive vehicles. In the mall area, all the restaurants are packed. When I was growing up, we rarely ate out because it was too expensive.
At sporting events and concerts, people pay hundreds of dollars for tickets and $10 for a beer. Young people, who claim their generation is the hardest hit economically, paid how much for those Taylor Swift concert tickets? People are traveling, people are switching jobs, as if they were in a healthy economy. Recently, Krugman defended himself by publishing graphs showing that, whatever people claim on surveys and discussion boards, consumer spending is booming.
What is going on here? Are there two Americas? Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or The Two Nations spoke in 1845 on behalf of an impoverished English working class. In 1854, Stephen Foster published his song “Hard Times Come Again No More” with the following lyrics:
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay, There are frail forms fainting at the door; Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say Oh! Hard times come again no more.
Should we imagine, at the doors of all those restaurants, frail, fainting forms of those who can no longer afford the inflated price of bread? As we shall see a bit later, there may be a qualified truth to this: it was the thesis of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America in 2001.
Still, the truth is partial. The same determination to make vinegar rather than lemonade applies in other contexts. A crime wave? Some forms of crime are on the increase, such as Internet fraud and theft of checks out of the mail, to which we may add the new hobby of carjacking Kias by 16-year-olds. But in terms of violent crime and property crime, rates are at least somewhat declining after an increase clearly caused by social dysfunction during the pandemic, except for certain areas and cities. Politically, it is realistic to be anxious about the possible catastrophe of Trump winning the 2024 election, and the antics of the nutballs and grifters in Congress may understandably give the impression of a country coming apart at the seams. But it goes around in a circle: the only reason Trump’s poll numbers are so good is the disaffected body of swing voters who say they might vote for Trump, or not vote at all, as a kind of protest vote. Otherwise, Trump would not be a viable candidate, because he only truly appeals to members of his cult. And this may change. Once Trump gets the Republican nomination, his increasingly psychotic behavior will become the focus in a way that is not the case right now: the media are too busy being distracted by the clown act in the House of Representatives.
Moreover, the idea that a rising authoritarianism is sweeping over the Western world and may spell the end of democracy everywhere is not borne out by the facts. Putin has shot himself in both feet; Orbán is increasingly unpopular in Hungary; Bolsanaro is out in Brazil; the right-wingers have been defeated in Poland. In England, Boris Johnson has finally been extracted from the Prime Minister’s office, and the Tories are on track to lose the next election resoundingly. Domestically, the Democrats are wringing their hands in despair even as they just got done winning all sorts of electoral races. There is a strong and increasing backlash against book-censoring crazy parents of the Moms for Liberty variety, who lost many school board races. Here in Ohio—of all places!—we just passed a referendum inserting abortion rights into the state constitution and legalized marijuana while we were at it. Whether or not God is in his heaven, all is not right with the world. Nonetheless, to say we have nothing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving would reveal us as a spoiled bunch of whiners.
Widespread moods of bleak pessimism have occurred before in modern history, most notably after World War I, expressed in Modernist works such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). I still remember a moment from the first upper-level literature class I taught at Baldwin-Wallace College, Modern British and American Poetry. At one point, a fellow raised his hand and asked one of those unguardedly honest questions that I wish students would risk more often: “Didn’t they ever write any happy poems?” I thought for a moment, then said, “Nope.”
More strikingly pertinent to the present moment was Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech on July 15, 1979. Inflation was 12%, and there was a gasoline shortage resulting in rationing because Arab nations imposed an oil embargo on any nations that supported Israel. The national mood was dyspeptic. Carter went into retreat for ten days, reportedly read, among other things, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and produced the speech titled “A Crisis of Confidence.” It has come to be called the “malaise” speech, although it did not actually use the word “malaise,” but said that “All the legislation in the world cannot fix what is wrong with America,” because “owning and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.” Although the initial public reaction to the speech was positive, within a year the Iranian hostage crisis made Americans feel demoralized and humiliated. So they elected Ronald Reagan by a landslide, because he promised to “make America feel great again”: that phrase originated in Reagan’s 1980 campaign. Carter, possibly the most decent-minded president of my lifetime, had been elected to heal the American psyche of the ugly wound of Nixon and Watergate. But he was mocked for decades as a weak and ineffectual president in a way that reminds me of the present-day mockery of Joe Biden.
In his place, America elected a con artist who had honed his technique as a media star, whose presidency was marked by the rise of the yuppies and of income inequality produced by tax cuts for the rich sold to the public by means of the snake-oil pseudo-theory of “trickle down economics.” In other words, Trump’s schtick is right out of the Reagan playbook. Reagan was almost 78 when he left office, but he hid the evidence of his age with hair dye and Hollywood actor makeup. Trump will be 78 if he wins the 2024 election, but he too dyes his hair and wears makeup. I have never seen one comment suggesting that Trump is too old to be president. I wonder what the effect would be if someone produced a picture showing what Trump would look like with his natural hair color and without makeup? Especially if they put the picture next to a picture of Joe Biden, who does not try to hide his age. Even more especially if the pictures captured their typical expressions: Trump’s perpetually brooding, scowling distraction next to Biden’s bright-eyed attentiveness. Trump is loud and reactive, which to some people makes him seem young and energetic. Of course, a three-year-old throwing a tantrum is also young and energetic.
All this talk of hair dye and decibel levels would be trivial and irrelevant except that the obsessive fixation on Biden’s age becomes more explicable if we think of it psychologically. In an essay called “Saplings in the Storm,” Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, says, “Adolescents still have some of the magical thinking of childhood and believe that their parents have the power to keep them safe and happy. They blame their parents for their misery” (285). Speaking of teenage girls who have been raped, she says, “Ironically, girls are often angrier at their parents than at the rapists. They feel their parents should have known about the danger and been more protective; afterward, they should have sensed the pain and helped” (285). I think the fixation on Biden’s age and the angry impatience with him derive from the same kind of magical thinking. He is Daddy, and he has failed to solve all the problems. He has failed to make it all go away. Jung told the story of a dog who bit him when he got his paw caught in a door. “Some of my patients are like that,” he said with gentle ruefulness. I am not simply scornful of the American people. They are traumatized. There has been simply too much for too long. The 2008 financial meltdown. The Trump presidency. The pandemic. The January 6 insurrection and its unending aftermath. Friends, acquaintances, and family members lost to us, turned into zombies, their brains eaten by paranoid conspiracy theories. Fascism is a search for a Daddy strong enough to put down all the enemies who frighten us. Good old uncle Joe does not project toughness and power. So people are angry at him, and lash out.
What does all this have to do with the imagination, the ostensible theme of this newsletter? To say that the imagination is a realm apart in which we can escape from the political is to fall into the aestheticist delusion. Its equal opposite is the delusion that the imagination doesn’t exist at all, that reality consists, to quote Warren Zevon, of “lawyers, guns, and money.” In reality, to use the precise phrase, all political crises are crises of the imagination. Politics is a duel of contending visions. Heather Cox Richardson knows this: her phrase “America awakening” is not much different in its tenor from my “expanding eyes,” which I in turn took from William Blake, the Romantic poet who saw his poetry as taking part in what he called “the day of intellectual battle.” Richardson’s enormously successful Substack newsletter, which was the original inspiration for my own, owes its success to her gift for writing for a wider public without dumbing down. As a historian, she brings her scholarly knowledge of post-Civil War American politics to bear upon current developments, showing, day after day, how what might seem shockingly unprecedented expressions of anti-democratic elitism and authoritarianism are actually new manifestations of an old autocratic ideology going all the way back to the founding of the country, an ideology that is the vehicle of a dark vision driven by the will to power. And it has succeeded in drawing to itself new adherents because Americans are traumatized and demoralized. Richardson does not mention Carter’s “malaise” speech, but in fact it was prophetic. Parts of it seem as if they are talking about the present:
The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America….The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the last five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote….As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance but it is the truth and it is a warning. These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.
Today, we revere Jimmy Carter as a patriarch who is over 100 and yet still clear-headed, a contradiction of our agism. But Ronald Reagan won election by ridiculing Carter’s earnestness. When Carter pointed to Reagan’s hostility to the social safety net, Reagan quipped, “There he goes again,” and the crowd loved it. It was Reagan who said that government was not the solution to the problem: government was the problem. We have no use for dour, puritanical messages, Reagan said. It’s morning in America, at least for those who rationalized their belief that “greed is good” as American individualism, the ethos of the cowboy—as opposed to the collectivism that wants to give your hard-earned money to “those people,” the welfare queens and the like. A generation ago, social scientist Stephanie Koontz, in The Way We Never Were (1992), showed that the supposed rugged individualism of the American West is a fabrication: the West was settled only through the sale of cheap government land, upheld by government subsidies, the building of railroads and the clearing of Native Americans off their land. There is no such thing as a self-sufficient individual, rugged or otherwise, though immature males like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos keep up their mixed martial arts training to maintain the pretense. We are an interdependent species, and we are all in this together, for better or worse. That is called democracy, and the only thing new recently is that a number of people are dropping the mask and admitting that they do not believe in it. They believe in the rule of the superior and the strong. Namely, themselves.
America Awakening is divided into three parts covering past, present (Trump’s presidency and its continuing aftermath), and possible future. Although highly readable, it is densely packed and concise. Its argument rests upon two thematic pillars, the first of which is what is called the “liberal consensus,” the value system that created and sustained American society, despite Cold War queasiness, through a remarkable period of sustained prosperity lasting from the end of World War II until roughly the time of Carter’s speech. The liberal consensus was an expansion of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The government on the one hand restrained the capitalist excesses that led to the corrupt inequality of the Gilded Age and then to the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. Income tax rates of up to 90% prevented the development of what we now call the 1%, and the workplace was regulated through the establishment of a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week, safety laws, workman’s compensation, and unemployment insurance. On the other hand, the government maintained a social safety net including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Finally, during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the government moved to end segregation and the “Jim Crow laws” that had been imposed since Reconstruction using the argument of “states’ rights,” and it made limited efforts to secure women’s rights through such innovations as Title IX. Eventually, the urge to inclusiveness began to include the LBGTQ+ movement, though it took a while: political realities kept Barack Obama from coming out in support of gay marriage during his first term.
Beginning with the Reagan administration, a collusion of big-time capitalists, racists, sexists, homophobes, and right-wing Christians, not to mention the wannabe fascist trolls who are always with us, hiding under their rocks, worked to undermine and undo as much of the liberal consensus as possible, with considerable success. The unexpected election of Donald Trump gave them their chance, and they have been trying to make use of it ever since, attempting to unravel the fabric of the American republic, putting in its place an oligarchy whose instrument of control would be a theocratic dictatorship.
Richardson is a teacher, and her newsletter and book are extensions of her teaching. She keeps up what must surely be a staggering workload, sustained by what is clearly a vocation. I was touched that, at the age of 60, she found the time to get married (she took a whole weekend off to do it!). It was fitting that she was asked to interview Joe Biden, who is clearly sustained by a similar vocation, and whose wife teaches, not at the elite universities that are all that the New York Times knows of education, but, as we academics say, in the trenches. I passionately value America Awakening’s pledge of allegiance to the liberal consensus, but I must register one significant qualification. Richardson writes as a liberal, and the narrative of her book is the epic struggle of liberalism versus the forces of reaction. What she entirely omits is anything that could be called “progressive,” and by doing so she omits the very factor that accounts for Trump’s victory in 2016. Sad to say, it was not such a clean-cut case of good versus evil. In the 1990’s, Bill Clinton and his New Democrats remade the Democratic party, retaining its social liberalism but transforming its economic philosophy from the liberal consensus into something much friendlier to laissez-faire capitalism, something now called “neoliberalism,” a word that does not appear in Richardson’s index. Neoliberalism espoused globalism, and championed NAFTA, the trade agreement that Ross Perot warned would lead to a “large sucking sound” of American jobs leaving the country. It allowed deregulation, and permitted the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that separated commercial from investment banking, thus making possible the debacle of 2008.
Most of all, it averted its face from the plight of the working class. Few people were willing to admit that the liberal consensus, high-minded as it sounded, depended upon the existence of good blue-collar jobs. As those jobs disappeared due to globalism and automation, some of the middle class adapted: they sent their kids to college to become what Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, called “symbolic analysts,” people with higher education whose jobs consisted of the manipulation of symbols, of words and numbers and, in the media, images. Lawyers, investment bankers, computer programmers, advertising executives, public relations people, workers in the entertainment industry: the symbolic analysts thrived in the neoliberal economy, and gradually formed an elite upper tier in the Democratic Party. The lower half, the non-college-educated working class, were promised “opportunities,” mostly spurious, to turn themselves into symbolic analysts when their jobs disappeared. These are the people studied by Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickeled and Dimed, and it is hardly a wonder that they left the Democratic Party for the Republican camp. Reich himself has become an eloquent voice in the progressive camp.
In the 2016 election campaign, Trump, canny con artist as always, struck the pose of the billionaire turned populist, taking up the cause of the little guy scorned by the “elites.” The Democratic Party could not have run a worse candidate against him. Hillary Clinton exuded smug neoliberal privilege, turning up her nose at “deplorables” while giving a 6-figure speech at Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, the Party regarded Bernie Sanders, who did champion those left behind, as a combination of Don Quixote and confounded nuisance. Bernie Sanders is also not in Richardson’s index. I do not want to be self-righteous. I voted twice for Bill Clinton, and do not regret it. In 1988, the Reagan revolution had been so successful, and Democratic candidates so consistently inept, that it seemed we were on the verge of permanent one-party rule, the Democratic Party shrinking to a splinter party like a European Green party, getting maybe 10% of the vote. Clinton made a deal with the devil in making it competitive again. But of course the devil always collects, and we are now paying, with interest.
Could liberalism have done anything differently? It is conceivable. One possibility would have been to do to white-collar and service jobs what was done to blue-collar jobs in the 30’s and 40’s: transform them, through unionization, a much higher minimum wage, and required benefits, into jobs that had security and a living wage, instead of the insecure slave labor that they have become under the auspices of the plutocrats. Another would have been to break with billionaire donors in favor of grass roots donations, as Obama began to do. But Obama was enough of a neoliberal to hire Larry Summers, of all people, to oversee the 2008 financial bailout, ensuring that the little people lost their homes while the perpetrators went scot-free. None of this, again, is in Richardson. But it is an important part of the story, and is why I began identifying as progressive rather than liberal, though I have little enough use for the culture-wars aspect of the progressive movement, which seems to me a popularization of the “theory wars” in academia from the 1970’s through the 1990’s. I note in passing that Richardson’s very title shows her rejection of “woke” usage. People outside academia may not know that we are no longer supposed to refer to our country as “America,” which some people in Canada, Central, and South America regard as an illegitimate appropriation. After all, they are American too. We are supposed to say “United States” instead. I learned about this by publishing a book through a Canadian academic press. Adhering to this stricture would in practice be quite clumsy, not least because there is no adjectival form: you cannot say “United Statesian.” Frankly, I ignore it myself, using “United States” some of the time as a gesture of good will and “American” as the adjectival form.
The omission of neoliberalism, though significant and, I think, regrettable, by no means invalidates Richardson’s book. Its greatest value only comes to fruition in its third part, where it expounds its other great theme: that American democracy is an evolutionary process unfolding in history. This is the “awakening” of the title phrase, which suggests the mythical figure of the sleeping giant form who is the collective identity of God, humanity, and nature, who fell, but who may rise again. It is the symbolic form of an ongoing revolutionary process. Milton used it in Areopagitica during the English Civil War to describe an England that might rise, “shaking its mighty locks.” Blake, influenced by Milton, who wrote poems depicting both the French and American revolutions in mythic form, employed the Biblical image of the “seven eyes of God,” seven historical periods of progressive expansion of vision. Richardson stresses how the Founding Fathers’ vision was breathtakingly radical for its time—and yet was still limited. All “men” were created equal, but that meant white, property-owning males—not women, not slaves, not Indigenous people. The progressive vision has worked throughout American history towards greater and greater inclusiveness, which means that American identity is permanently in flux, and this permanent instability demands what Abraham Maslow called a Heraclitean personality, Heraclitus being the Greek philosopher who said that we never step into the same river twice.
What does this mean in terms of the teaching of American history and literature? Those who want to censor the textbooks are angry because the idealistic vision of American history that they learned in school, as I did, is now attacked as a lie. Some on the left want to replace it with its mirror opposite, as in the 1619 Project, defining the United States as a white supremacist society domestically and an imperialist, neo-colonialist nation abroad. But that is an equal but opposite lie, and saying so is more than “white privilege.” What if we gave children, not to mention ourselves, credit for the ability to handle a complex truth? The nice Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 denoting harmony between the Indigenous people and the Pilgrims never happened, or never happened in that way, or…something. Scholarship has dissolved it into uncertainty. But it remains a beautiful image of an ideal that we could progressively approach in the future. In other words, we have to deliteralize the myths of American history as we have to deliteralize those of religion. To deliteralize them, however, is not to destroy them. Rather, the opposite: it sets them free to be potentially realized, not in the past, not even in the future, but here and now. Richardson quotes Langston Hughes describing America as “The Land that never has been yet—And yet must be” (169).
America itself is no longer young, is not the New World anymore. We are looking backward, no longer young, at all the mistakes we made, some of them tragic, at all we have lost or destroyed in consequence. At my age, you have been around the block any number of times, and, if you have been capable of learning from your mistakes, you remember, regretting what you did and did not do, regretting the pain you caused other people, forgiving them the pain they caused you in their own blindness. To use Blake’s terms, the growth from Innocence to Experience need not just be from naiveté to disillusionment. What we are most thankful for is the willingness to live, to make mistakes, to gain insight from them, and to begin again, and to do this not just as an individual but also as a nation, because we are all in this together. There ought to be a day set aside for the sake of this kind of thankfulness, if for no other reason than to calm our fretful peevishness.
References
Pipher, Mary. “Saplings in the Storm.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys, 8th Edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 278-87.
Richardson, Heather Cox. America Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Viking, 2023.