The Myth of America
On Telling Yourself Fairy Tales to Make Them True
America’s founding documents are beautifully told stories of fundamentally human desires for freedom and justice. They are the expression of lofty ideals using soaring rhetoric that have set the hearts of Americans, and people who want to become Americans, and people who just plain love freedom, aflutter for generations.
They are also a lie.
Or rather, they are a myth.
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” is really great if you are a white man. It’s clearly aimed at you, written as it was by other white men. In the late 18th century, “voters” meant white property owners over the age of 21. Even for census purposes black folk didn’t count as a whole person, let alone as someone with standing before the law (the infamous Dred Scott Decision, so recently cited by the state of Kansas in a bizarre riposte to an amicus brief, denied citizenship and personhood to black people). When the Tea Party and its authoritarian descendants long for the greatness of America, they specifically mean this early time when the only people who counted were white men. They long for a time when the myth was window dressing for oppression; they do not long for the truths buried in the myth.
A funny thing happened along the way. The people that the Constitution didn’t protect at the time it was written, those folk who knew very well they weren’t considered part of the “We” in “We, the people.” Black folk in chains and women, explicitly excluded at the start of it all in 1776, among others, knew, first hand, that the promises of America were not literally true. Many of those people chose to believe in something beyond the status quo. They believed, passionately, in the possibility of their own liberty and freedom and they hammered away at the consciences of those in power to ensure themselves access to the freedoms that the Constitution originally guaranteed only to white men. These heroes treated an unjust reality as an obstacle to be overcome in their pursuit of happiness and justice. They believed a complete fairy tale in order to create a new reality.
For a long time, the story of America fulfilling its promise was a constant battle that went, oh so slowly, toward the side that dreamed of a more inclusive set of freedoms. “Universal suffrage” managed to add 21 year old men, regardless of how much land they owned. Black people were freed from the shackles of slavery (then oppressed again, so two steps forward, one step back). Native Americans perished in vast numbers, but they refused to vanish from the face of the earth and they eventually became citizens of the United States (where they are still treated disgracefully, this battlefront cries out for more resources). Women gained the right to vote. Black people were actually granted the reality of the franchise and not just the notion of it. People being sent off to die in the fields of battle could also decide the fate of the leaders who would be sending them into those battles. It all seemed inevitable and noble: the American fairy tale, an outright lie for so many when it was first told, was becoming ever more true over time.
And then white America, aghast at the erosion of their privilege, elected Donald Trump as President of the United States. The man who was elected President refuses to even pretend to be interested in telling our national myth. Trump never asserts that America is unique because it is good or that it is exceptional because of its clarion call to freedom for all people. Trump is not interested in what America can do for the world by practicing inclusion and demonstrating the value of pluralism for a skeptical world. He does not disguise his nationalism with even the window dressing of equality before the law or justice for all (he’d rather jail defeated political opponents — only time will tell if Hillary is going to end up in the docket because of Trump). Donald Trump is not interested in America’s fairy tales. He talks only of power and greatness and toughness. To Donald Trump, America is not different than Russia, whose leader he admires for his ability to get things done (which includes having journalists who oppose him killed and, wait for it, jailing his political opponents). For Trump, America is not different than China, who recently chortled at the corrupt farce of an election that unfolded over the the past year and a half. China and Russia’s reactions to Trump’s election have shades of Lester Burnham seeing his wife with her lover in his drive-through: “You never get to tell me what to do. Ever. Again.” For the first time, America has elected a President who doesn’t even pay lip service to the stories that have driven people to make America better than they knew it actually was, who strove to make the story of freedom more real. The bottom drops out of my stomach every time I contemplate this fact.
What’s worse is the current (and God willing temporary) ascendancy of a political party that has abandoned even more fundamental myths and stories about democracy itself, stories like the social compact, the consent of the governed, and the responsibilities of the majority to the minority. The Republicans have come into the most complete form of power available to the American republic, with control(ish — it is still Trump we are talking about) of the White House, both houses of Congress, a majority of states, and soon the Supreme Court. The great story of democracy is that while the majority may rule, it is supposed to do so to the benefit of all of its citizens and not merely its own voters; being in power is not a license to ignore the will of the many people who did not vote for you. The Republican Party has utterly rejected that story. In 2010, the angry white men of the Tea Party uprising captured state houses across the country just in time to draw up districts that were neither compact nor fair. In 2013, the Supreme Court decided that widespread voter suppression of the type seen since Jim Crow wasn’t really all that common anymore, so the Voting Rights Act’s vigilant eyes were removed and historically racist states no longer had to prove that they weren’t out to suppress minority votes. North Carolina promptly passed a law that a federal judge said “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.” A North Carolina GOP official said their law wasn’t racially motivated; it’s just that black people had the temerity to vote for Democrats. On Election Day 2016, they bragged about their success in suppressing the black vote. Indeed, several of the states that had already had federal court rulings handed down on their unjust voting practices helped elect Donald Trump as President, including Wisconsin, a state people associate with cheese more often than segregation and racism.
I am an optimistic fool (and a middle-aged white dude, so take this whatever amount of salt you feel necessary). I believed in the American myth before Trump and I cling to it all the more fiercely now. I will tell the fairy tale of freedom, equality, and justice for all to myself and to all who will hear in the hopes that by acting as if it were true often enough, it will become true, for everyone who would claim it, everyone, no matter their creed or color or ethnicity or gender (expression) or sexual orientation. The American idea will not die because of the incompetence, ignorance, and intolerance of one administration AS LONG AS those of us who believe in what America can become do not stop practicing belief in a story that isn’t true . . . yet. That is how we rise, that is how we shine in the coming darkness.
