Back in the spring of this year, I had the pleasure of reading Harvard historian Jill Lepore's highly ambitious, yet riveting single-volume of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). In These Truths, Lepore takes a critical look at the American project and asks if it has lived up to its "truths," or the tenets of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" of a country's citizens before the law, and their accession to a governmental authority to protect those rights, respectively (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Of course, the government didn't initially look out for all of its citizens, namely Native Americans, African-Americans, women, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ community. Essentially, American history has been the story of America's gradual rectifying of past injustice (mind you, not exactly a linear process), with much work remaining today to ensure the continuance of such rights and protections for as many as possible.
Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.
How did we get to this point?
Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).
However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.
What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.
In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Friday, August 16, 2019
Friday, August 2, 2019
Book Review: Adam Gopnik's "A Thousand Small Sanities"
Is liberal democracy dead? A considerable amount of literary, journalistic, and scholarly attention has been expended in trying to answer that question in an era of rising partisanship, demagoguery, and the increasing prominence of no-longer-ignorable global issues like climate change and mass-migration. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik adds his two cents to the discussion, saying that the rumors of liberal democracy's death have been greatly exaggerated, but that without a resurgence behind the embattled system of governance from the grassroots and up, we could very well lose it if we're not careful. In this vein of trying to rekindle a popular embrace of a governing concept that is increasingly being attacked for its reliance on compromise and incremental change from both the left and right wings, Gopnik takes readers on a journey through history to rediscover liberalism in A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).
Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).
At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.
Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.
Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).
All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.
An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.
Works Cited:
Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.
Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).
At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.
Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.
Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).
All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.
An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.
Works Cited:
Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Book Review: Jared Diamond's "Upheaval"
What can we learn from other countries in regards to how they have solved crises that seemed insurmountable in the moment? Historian and author Jared Diamond, known for works such as Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and Collapse (2004), looks at seven countries and how they have overcome--or somewhat overcame--major national problems in the past in his latest, Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis (2019), in order to glean insights into solving the problems of our present moment.
Borrowing from a psychological therapeutic framework used for helping individuals overcome crises, he applies this process analogously to the seven nation-states of Australia, Chile, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Underpinning nations' resiliency in moments of fast or slow-moving crises are twelve factors: recognition of a problem, accepting responsibility, the separation of problematic cultural/national values from useful ones, seeking help from allies, adopting of useful models from abroad, sense of national identity, honest self-appraisal, knowledge of past crises, ability to deal with failure, flexibility, core values, and degree of freedom from geopolitical constraints (Diamond, 2019, p. 50).
Of course, our seven countries have dealt, or are dealing with in the present, differing problems of a national scale with differing degrees of success. Some nations, like Chile and Indonesia dealt with primarily internal problems (coups and counter-coups in 1965 and 1973, respectively), while others were shocked by external forces to begin a process of national reckoning (Australia during WWII with the threat of Japanese invasion; Meiji-era Japan, forced into trade with the world in 1853 at gunpoint by US Commodore Perry; Finland by its partial invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940).
What happened to these nations? Many of the more successful--or partially successful--nations, reached as much as a consensus as possible at a national level (countries are composed of many competing groups and individuals tied together by a national identity) that there was a crisis needing fixing, and figured out what national attributes worked for them and which did not, and adjusted accordingly, achieving what Diamond terms "selective change" (Diamond, 2019, p. 6):
However, the US today faces a more interconnected world and global problems like climate change, potential nuclear war, ecological degradation, inequality, and more. Geography does not insulate some nations as much as it has in the past. National borders do not halt the spread of people, goods, ideas, or problems.
Ultimately, Diamond is neither an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the question of if the U.S. can learn from others, face its problems, and step up to help solve more global issues. Mostly, that is because his individual psychological framework does not translate neatly over to national (i.e. group-involved) crises in all domains (like the assumption of a clear national consensus), and as a result, can't give clear-cut predictions or solutions either way. (In any case, I do applaud his interdisciplinary narrative style, showing intriguing connections between the psychology of leaders and nations and historical outcomes.)
Diamond concludes that it is up to Americans to not squander the considerable blessings we have in our favor, and to work constructively internationally to solve humanity's biggest challenges. He notes that America was able to make the leap of selective change in the past, discarding limiting isolationism post-WWII in favor of engagement with the world and reforming to chip away at various forms of discrimination.
Can we do this again? Nationally, and internationally? Stay tuned...
Works Cited:
Diamond, Jared. (2019). Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Little, Brown and Company: Little, Brown.
Borrowing from a psychological therapeutic framework used for helping individuals overcome crises, he applies this process analogously to the seven nation-states of Australia, Chile, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, and the United States. Underpinning nations' resiliency in moments of fast or slow-moving crises are twelve factors: recognition of a problem, accepting responsibility, the separation of problematic cultural/national values from useful ones, seeking help from allies, adopting of useful models from abroad, sense of national identity, honest self-appraisal, knowledge of past crises, ability to deal with failure, flexibility, core values, and degree of freedom from geopolitical constraints (Diamond, 2019, p. 50).
Of course, our seven countries have dealt, or are dealing with in the present, differing problems of a national scale with differing degrees of success. Some nations, like Chile and Indonesia dealt with primarily internal problems (coups and counter-coups in 1965 and 1973, respectively), while others were shocked by external forces to begin a process of national reckoning (Australia during WWII with the threat of Japanese invasion; Meiji-era Japan, forced into trade with the world in 1853 at gunpoint by US Commodore Perry; Finland by its partial invasion by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940).
What happened to these nations? Many of the more successful--or partially successful--nations, reached as much as a consensus as possible at a national level (countries are composed of many competing groups and individuals tied together by a national identity) that there was a crisis needing fixing, and figured out what national attributes worked for them and which did not, and adjusted accordingly, achieving what Diamond terms "selective change" (Diamond, 2019, p. 6):
- Australia built up its military defenses, aligned itself closer with Asia and the U.S. rather than their historical partner in the U.K. (itself more or less Europe-oriented now after the loss of the British Empire) in the recognition of both countries needing to act in their mutual interests.
- Chile overcame right-wing coups against what it viewed to be an insurgent left-wing, economic uncertainty, and oppressive military dictatorship to achieve a mostly-balanced democratic government today, seeking to peacefully negotiate between the left and right.
- Finland adopted a new foreign policy that sought to instill trust between it and the Soviet Union (now Russia), and when invaded in 1939-1940 (the Winter War), got the Soviet Union to back down against overwhelming odds in a war of attrition, making any further Soviet gains incredibly costly in terms of personnel and materiel.
- Germany overcame defeats in both WWI and WWII by confronting the painful legacy of Nazism and pragmatically reforming until the achievement of reunification in 1990.
- Indonesia threw off the Dutch colonial yoke, overcame disastrous coups and leadership blunders into unwarranted military invasions of its neighbors to forge a national identity and adapted Western economic tenets and a semi-democratic form of government (but corruption remains and the threat of a military coup still lingers, not to mention the legacy of a consciously unmentioned slaughter of communist and leftist-sympathizers in retaliation for the 1965 coup that targeted generals).
- Meiji-era Japan built up its economic, military, and political strength by borrowing heavily from Western ideas and institutions whose values most closely aligned with Japan's.
However, the US today faces a more interconnected world and global problems like climate change, potential nuclear war, ecological degradation, inequality, and more. Geography does not insulate some nations as much as it has in the past. National borders do not halt the spread of people, goods, ideas, or problems.
Ultimately, Diamond is neither an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to the question of if the U.S. can learn from others, face its problems, and step up to help solve more global issues. Mostly, that is because his individual psychological framework does not translate neatly over to national (i.e. group-involved) crises in all domains (like the assumption of a clear national consensus), and as a result, can't give clear-cut predictions or solutions either way. (In any case, I do applaud his interdisciplinary narrative style, showing intriguing connections between the psychology of leaders and nations and historical outcomes.)
Diamond concludes that it is up to Americans to not squander the considerable blessings we have in our favor, and to work constructively internationally to solve humanity's biggest challenges. He notes that America was able to make the leap of selective change in the past, discarding limiting isolationism post-WWII in favor of engagement with the world and reforming to chip away at various forms of discrimination.
Can we do this again? Nationally, and internationally? Stay tuned...
Works Cited:
Diamond, Jared. (2019). Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis. Little, Brown and Company: Little, Brown.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Book Review: Peter Frankopan's "The New Silk Roads"
There is no shortage of literature and media coverage out there about China's astonishing rise and the shift of economic and political gravity to the East. It was a staple of my undergraduate international relations curriculum, reviewing such works as Martin Jacques's When China Rules the World (2012)--imagining a scenario in which China has changed the rules of the game by virtue of being the new economic superpower of the world--to Charles Kupchan's No One's World (2012)--heralding a coming multipolar world in which the current powers of the West, especially the unipolar power many would argue the United States has been for most of the post-WWII era, must reconcile and power-share with the rising powers of the East, like China and India.
Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford, joined this debate with works like The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and continues this story in his latest, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018), reframing the conversation by showing the East and not the West has historically been the power-center of the world, perhaps explaining the latest power transition.
Reading more like an epilogue to The Silk Roads--or as a more updated edition to the latter--The New Silk Roads provides an Eastern perspective to events shaping geopolitics since its predecessor's 2015 publication, focusing on headlines showing China's increasing rapprochement with its neighbors in the "One Belt, One Road" initiative in contrast with the West's rising isolationism, inconsistent foreign policy, Trump, diplomatic brain drain, and Brexit problems (Frankopan, 2018, p. 17).
This ambitious economic and infrastructure development plan treads the old land and sea routes of the ancient Silk Roads connecting West-East, but also seeks to make new ones in areas like Africa and Latin America, the latest chapter in a larger discussion of the forces of globalization shaping the 21st century, but also the latest entry in the saga of the Great Games of history, calling to mind American and European imperial strategy in the 17th-20th centuries (Frankopan, 2015). In addition to ports, rail lines, oil pipelines, data sharing, and more, China is also building up military outposts to safeguard its investments and engaging in various bilateral trade talks with its neighbors.
Instead of the silk and spices of old, the eponymous New Silk Roads today are trade routes of people, ideas, natural resources (oil and mineral wealth), arms, data, and modern technology (AI, drones, missile defense systems, etc.). With the West going through the convulsions of Brexit and Trump, developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (even some of the US's erstwhile allies in Europe and Australia) are viewing Beijing with increasing favor and as a potentially more reliable, stable alternative to Washington and London, with the capital to back up its ambitious vision for a prosperous and harmonious new world.
Notwithstanding the rivalries that will need to be dealt with--that of India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, to name a few--pragmatists of all parties have realized that a new strategy is needed to secure their prosperity and national security against the disguised flailing of the West--see the "controlled unpredictability" strategy of the U.S.-- and other threats, such as poverty and climate change (Frankopan, 2018, p. 127). It seems that the pressure applied by US sanctions on Iran and Russia and tariffs against China are doing more to push unlikely parties together to serve as bulwarks against Western influence, and China and friends are taking advantage of the gaps left by the political and economic flux of the West by cementing existing and new channels of engagement that circumvent established Western ones.
All in all, while critics may assail The New Silk Roads as being overly optimistic about the sustainability of China's and other Eastern diplomatic and infrastructure projects, Frankopan balances out the rosy visions of prosperity promised by the One Belt, One Road investments with an aside about the real issues standing in the way of realizing this vision and testing newfound alliances: China's debt load, some instances of predatory lending practices imposed on African nations in exchange for foreign investment, and the larger issues of climate change and environmental degradation, the migration crises, and the looming threat of automation in the public and private sectors. Not to mention many of the countries of the Silk Roads are not democratic by any means, discouraging dissent, controlling media, and limiting other human and political rights.
While the changes underway cannot be easily halted and the array of forces driving geopolitics are many and seemingly magnified, Frankopan concludes that along with the "fragilities and dangers" of our current moment, there are just as many opportunities for "cooperation and collaboration" on the part of the West with the East to aid a peaceful transition to the future (Frankopan, 2018, p. 194). Will we rise to the occasion?
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2019, May 10). A Quick Guide to the US-China Trade War. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45899310.
Frankopan, Peter. (2018). The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Frankopan, Peter. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Jacques, Martin. (2012). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books.
Kupchan, Charles. A. (2012). No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peter Frankopan, professor of global history at Oxford, joined this debate with works like The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015) and continues this story in his latest, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018), reframing the conversation by showing the East and not the West has historically been the power-center of the world, perhaps explaining the latest power transition.
Reading more like an epilogue to The Silk Roads--or as a more updated edition to the latter--The New Silk Roads provides an Eastern perspective to events shaping geopolitics since its predecessor's 2015 publication, focusing on headlines showing China's increasing rapprochement with its neighbors in the "One Belt, One Road" initiative in contrast with the West's rising isolationism, inconsistent foreign policy, Trump, diplomatic brain drain, and Brexit problems (Frankopan, 2018, p. 17).
This ambitious economic and infrastructure development plan treads the old land and sea routes of the ancient Silk Roads connecting West-East, but also seeks to make new ones in areas like Africa and Latin America, the latest chapter in a larger discussion of the forces of globalization shaping the 21st century, but also the latest entry in the saga of the Great Games of history, calling to mind American and European imperial strategy in the 17th-20th centuries (Frankopan, 2015). In addition to ports, rail lines, oil pipelines, data sharing, and more, China is also building up military outposts to safeguard its investments and engaging in various bilateral trade talks with its neighbors.
Instead of the silk and spices of old, the eponymous New Silk Roads today are trade routes of people, ideas, natural resources (oil and mineral wealth), arms, data, and modern technology (AI, drones, missile defense systems, etc.). With the West going through the convulsions of Brexit and Trump, developing nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East (even some of the US's erstwhile allies in Europe and Australia) are viewing Beijing with increasing favor and as a potentially more reliable, stable alternative to Washington and London, with the capital to back up its ambitious vision for a prosperous and harmonious new world.
Notwithstanding the rivalries that will need to be dealt with--that of India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia and China, to name a few--pragmatists of all parties have realized that a new strategy is needed to secure their prosperity and national security against the disguised flailing of the West--see the "controlled unpredictability" strategy of the U.S.-- and other threats, such as poverty and climate change (Frankopan, 2018, p. 127). It seems that the pressure applied by US sanctions on Iran and Russia and tariffs against China are doing more to push unlikely parties together to serve as bulwarks against Western influence, and China and friends are taking advantage of the gaps left by the political and economic flux of the West by cementing existing and new channels of engagement that circumvent established Western ones.
All in all, while critics may assail The New Silk Roads as being overly optimistic about the sustainability of China's and other Eastern diplomatic and infrastructure projects, Frankopan balances out the rosy visions of prosperity promised by the One Belt, One Road investments with an aside about the real issues standing in the way of realizing this vision and testing newfound alliances: China's debt load, some instances of predatory lending practices imposed on African nations in exchange for foreign investment, and the larger issues of climate change and environmental degradation, the migration crises, and the looming threat of automation in the public and private sectors. Not to mention many of the countries of the Silk Roads are not democratic by any means, discouraging dissent, controlling media, and limiting other human and political rights.
While the changes underway cannot be easily halted and the array of forces driving geopolitics are many and seemingly magnified, Frankopan concludes that along with the "fragilities and dangers" of our current moment, there are just as many opportunities for "cooperation and collaboration" on the part of the West with the East to aid a peaceful transition to the future (Frankopan, 2018, p. 194). Will we rise to the occasion?
Works Cited:
BBC News. (2019, May 10). A Quick Guide to the US-China Trade War. Retrieved May 12, 2019, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45899310.
Frankopan, Peter. (2018). The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World. London: Bloomsbury.
Frankopan, Peter. (2015). The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. New York: Vintage Books.
Jacques, Martin. (2012). When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order. New York: Penguin Books.
Kupchan, Charles. A. (2012). No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friday, June 14, 2019
Book Review: Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide an Empire"
When you think of an empire, what comes to mind? For many, probably Britain first, the country the colonies fought in order to gain their independence. Perhaps the Axis Powers in WWII, Germany and Japan. Or our WWII ally turned Cold War foe, the Soviet Union. What these examples show is that for many Americans, empire has a decidedly negative connotation, associated with autocratic nation-states that eschew democratic values of self-determination and consent of the governed, and impose their rule without regard to the well-being of its subject peoples. So there's no way that the home of the free and land of the brave was (is) an empire in its own right? Right? Turns out we were and are. Historian Daniel Immerwahr takes us on a tour of the American territories whose stories, despite their centrality to American history, have been relegated to the periphery of the national consciousness in his 2019 book How to Hide an Empire.
How did we get to where we are today, with the United States occupying virtually every corner of the world in its 800 bases and outposts? Well, it all starts with the familiar story of the western frontier and manifest destiny in the 19th century, whereby the United States achieved its familiar lower-48 dimensions by the forced removal of Native Americans from prized lands. Once it had secured Alaska and Hawaii to bring the total to 50 states, America continued to look outward, equal parts eager to gain international prestige on par with the European imperial powers and also to claim critical economic and military footholds in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Before the post WWII era of rapid technological progress allowed for the streamlined movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world (the advent of the radio, telegraph, and Internet, various logistical technologies, standardization and more), there were overwhelming geopolitical incentives to hold sway over as much land as possible. One was control over the sources of (and markets for) critical raw materials not yet amenable to duplication in a laboratory setting, like arable land, rubber, palm oil, and even bird guano. (Yes, bird guano. Turns out that it's a decent fertilizer.) Second, with enough territory comes the ability to secure critical military outposts, used to protect the imperial borders, quell the on-and-off insurrections, cow external threats (i.e. other imperial powers), and better control the movement of both people and trade within one's borders. Lastly, the more land and peoples under your country's sway, the better the opportunity to spread your economic and cultural values into as many hearts and minds as possible.
Thus began the second wave of American imperialism, bringing various archipelagos and islands like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the less well known Guano Islands into the fold, inextricably tying their economies and political identities closer to the mainland. Over time, the inhabitants of the territories gained at the very least the status of U.S. nationals and statutory citizenship and the fundamental rights that come with it. However, the Insular case (1901) rulings established U.S. colonial doctrine that allowed only the territories that the government deemed on the path to statehood the full protection of the Constitution, while citizens in territories not on the statehood path were left vulnerable to a repeal of their statutorily granted status as a U.S. national or citizen and only had partial protection of the Constitution. Oh, and they don't have official representation in the Congress that had the power to revoke or alter such statutes. This legal limbo led to carte blanche medical experimentation in territories like Puerto Rico and the unfettered architectural redesign of the Philippines' main island.
Surprisingly though, after WWII, the United States suddenly and rapidly decolonized in a moment of postwar ascendancy that many countries would have taken full advantage of to expand their power and territorial holdings. While there probably was some altruistic sentiment underlying it, relating to U.S. values surrounding self-determination, Immerwahr shows that the U.S. did this for overwhelmingly selfish, yet pragmatic reasons.
Nationalist movements capitalized on the postwar devastation of their imperial overlords, asking for self-determination and independence in exchange for helping fight in the war. At the same time, the need for countries to hold large swaths of territory was diminishing with the development of alternative mechanisms of power projection and control, backed up by the improved ability to synthesize necessary raw materials combined with vast improvements in telecommunications, transportation and logistical technologies. Also, it's very expensive to hold large territories. All in all, these factors made it more pragmatic to hold smaller swaths of land in key zones of national interest, backing up economic clout with military power where necessary.
Therefore, the U.S. dropped many of its territories in exchange for investing in a vast worldwide logistical network of smaller swaths of land containing military bases and outposts that we see today. Immerwahr sees this as a new kind of empire, a kind of third wave of imperialism, borne of the realities of globalization, but without many of the overtly negative markers associated with traditional models of empire building. Many other powers seemed to have adopted this model of power, for better or worse, like China.
All in all, what does this mean for the United States going forward? For Immerwahr, it means that the mainland can no longer ignore the crucial role that U.S. territories and military outposts play in continuing to exert U.S. power around the world. As a country, we've largely been expansionist, and continue to be, despite our protestations; we crave territorial influence, but without the baggage associated with having formal political dominion over large swaths of territory and peoples. Our decisions on how to project power had consequences in the past and will continue to do so into the future, especially in our present age of globalization and inter-connectedness. Through this entertaining and riveting jaunt through history, Immerwahr makes it clear that U.S. foreign policy needs to keep these territories and outposts in mind in order to better secure U.S. interests and spread U.S. values without provoking devastating military conflict.
Works Cited:
Immerwahr, Daniel. (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
How did we get to where we are today, with the United States occupying virtually every corner of the world in its 800 bases and outposts? Well, it all starts with the familiar story of the western frontier and manifest destiny in the 19th century, whereby the United States achieved its familiar lower-48 dimensions by the forced removal of Native Americans from prized lands. Once it had secured Alaska and Hawaii to bring the total to 50 states, America continued to look outward, equal parts eager to gain international prestige on par with the European imperial powers and also to claim critical economic and military footholds in the Pacific and Caribbean.
Before the post WWII era of rapid technological progress allowed for the streamlined movement of people, goods, and ideas around the world (the advent of the radio, telegraph, and Internet, various logistical technologies, standardization and more), there were overwhelming geopolitical incentives to hold sway over as much land as possible. One was control over the sources of (and markets for) critical raw materials not yet amenable to duplication in a laboratory setting, like arable land, rubber, palm oil, and even bird guano. (Yes, bird guano. Turns out that it's a decent fertilizer.) Second, with enough territory comes the ability to secure critical military outposts, used to protect the imperial borders, quell the on-and-off insurrections, cow external threats (i.e. other imperial powers), and better control the movement of both people and trade within one's borders. Lastly, the more land and peoples under your country's sway, the better the opportunity to spread your economic and cultural values into as many hearts and minds as possible.
Thus began the second wave of American imperialism, bringing various archipelagos and islands like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the less well known Guano Islands into the fold, inextricably tying their economies and political identities closer to the mainland. Over time, the inhabitants of the territories gained at the very least the status of U.S. nationals and statutory citizenship and the fundamental rights that come with it. However, the Insular case (1901) rulings established U.S. colonial doctrine that allowed only the territories that the government deemed on the path to statehood the full protection of the Constitution, while citizens in territories not on the statehood path were left vulnerable to a repeal of their statutorily granted status as a U.S. national or citizen and only had partial protection of the Constitution. Oh, and they don't have official representation in the Congress that had the power to revoke or alter such statutes. This legal limbo led to carte blanche medical experimentation in territories like Puerto Rico and the unfettered architectural redesign of the Philippines' main island.
Surprisingly though, after WWII, the United States suddenly and rapidly decolonized in a moment of postwar ascendancy that many countries would have taken full advantage of to expand their power and territorial holdings. While there probably was some altruistic sentiment underlying it, relating to U.S. values surrounding self-determination, Immerwahr shows that the U.S. did this for overwhelmingly selfish, yet pragmatic reasons.
Nationalist movements capitalized on the postwar devastation of their imperial overlords, asking for self-determination and independence in exchange for helping fight in the war. At the same time, the need for countries to hold large swaths of territory was diminishing with the development of alternative mechanisms of power projection and control, backed up by the improved ability to synthesize necessary raw materials combined with vast improvements in telecommunications, transportation and logistical technologies. Also, it's very expensive to hold large territories. All in all, these factors made it more pragmatic to hold smaller swaths of land in key zones of national interest, backing up economic clout with military power where necessary.
Therefore, the U.S. dropped many of its territories in exchange for investing in a vast worldwide logistical network of smaller swaths of land containing military bases and outposts that we see today. Immerwahr sees this as a new kind of empire, a kind of third wave of imperialism, borne of the realities of globalization, but without many of the overtly negative markers associated with traditional models of empire building. Many other powers seemed to have adopted this model of power, for better or worse, like China.
All in all, what does this mean for the United States going forward? For Immerwahr, it means that the mainland can no longer ignore the crucial role that U.S. territories and military outposts play in continuing to exert U.S. power around the world. As a country, we've largely been expansionist, and continue to be, despite our protestations; we crave territorial influence, but without the baggage associated with having formal political dominion over large swaths of territory and peoples. Our decisions on how to project power had consequences in the past and will continue to do so into the future, especially in our present age of globalization and inter-connectedness. Through this entertaining and riveting jaunt through history, Immerwahr makes it clear that U.S. foreign policy needs to keep these territories and outposts in mind in order to better secure U.S. interests and spread U.S. values without provoking devastating military conflict.
Works Cited:
Immerwahr, Daniel. (2019). How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Monday, June 3, 2019
Book Review: Jill Lepore's "These Truths"
What is America? Who is America, what do Americans believe in, and how does one define an American way of life? The answer to these questions go beyond America's demarcation on a map as one of 194 recognized nation-states around the world, a republic of 325 million people, composed of some 50 states and five territorial outposts. Author and professor of history Jill Lepore is one of many in a long line of scholars that attempts to answer these difficult questions by way of an ambitious 932-page volume of America's history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Here, the epic saga of American history is explored not just by the time-honored practice of rote chronological recitation of major events, but also by the examination of their ideological and philosophical underpinnings, forces and debates that continue to drive the complicated and ever-evolving American experiment forward.
To understand where we are today, Lepore takes us way back to the 16th century to show that, above all, we are a country of contradictions, and have been from the beginning. A nation that started from the chaos of revolution naturally will have its fits and starts. In an age of postmodernism, where truths seem few and far between or up to interpretation, Lepore begins her examination by asking if American history has lived up to its lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (i.e. America's "truths").
From the time of Columbus landing in the Bahamas to the colonial era, European colonizers and explorers brought their ideas of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" (see the Magna Carta, for example) with them (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Despite believing in these higher-truths, they did not necessarily apply them to the Native Americans they encountered, who appeared backwards to them in their darker skins, practice of pagan religions, and seeming inability to cultivate (read: build/develop/own) their lands in the ways of modern societies. These were not necessarily new ideas, as the conquerors, in their debates over what they were doing in the New World was right, dug up Aristotle, who believed in a natural hierarchy, where some were born into slavery and others into the ruling classes. Stable societies needed hierarchies, that's just how it is.
Those precedents seemed like biological truths rather than the products of sociopolitical realities and would serve, for a time, to sustain certain oppressions in the United States alongside almost utopian conditions of freedom and equality in governance.
Add a new technological revolution with both the potential of unity and division among a growing electorate. Shake. Rinse, repeat. As a result of this turbulent national environment, both conservatives and liberals have taken turns being either the champions of or opposing reactionaries to reforms such as emancipating the slaves (result: the Civil War) to the regulation of labor conditions, legislation of civil rights, and equal rights for women. The echoes of these fights remain with us today, giving us such partisan philosophies as identity politics and creeds of law and order that threaten to undermine the continued fights for the realization of true equality.
In the end, Lepore spares no one in her critiques of the past, showing how peoples of all political persuasions are complicit in either the nation's successes or failures, and that ultimately, the nation is better off for having brought in more of its people underneath the big tent of citizenship (and all of its accompanying obligations). She pushes for continued improvement of the American experiment, taking pride in its successes and asking us to learn from our past grievous errors. Because of the ongoing nature of our national experiment, an epic tale Lepore tells with elegance, no definitive conclusion can be reached on whether or not our nation has, in fact, realized its fundamental truths for all of its citizens. Of course, this means that there is more work to be done, a new generation that needs to wrestle with its history and take the nation into the future.
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
To understand where we are today, Lepore takes us way back to the 16th century to show that, above all, we are a country of contradictions, and have been from the beginning. A nation that started from the chaos of revolution naturally will have its fits and starts. In an age of postmodernism, where truths seem few and far between or up to interpretation, Lepore begins her examination by asking if American history has lived up to its lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (i.e. America's "truths").
From the time of Columbus landing in the Bahamas to the colonial era, European colonizers and explorers brought their ideas of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" (see the Magna Carta, for example) with them (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Despite believing in these higher-truths, they did not necessarily apply them to the Native Americans they encountered, who appeared backwards to them in their darker skins, practice of pagan religions, and seeming inability to cultivate (read: build/develop/own) their lands in the ways of modern societies. These were not necessarily new ideas, as the conquerors, in their debates over what they were doing in the New World was right, dug up Aristotle, who believed in a natural hierarchy, where some were born into slavery and others into the ruling classes. Stable societies needed hierarchies, that's just how it is.
Those precedents seemed like biological truths rather than the products of sociopolitical realities and would serve, for a time, to sustain certain oppressions in the United States alongside almost utopian conditions of freedom and equality in governance.
"A nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history." (Lepore, 2018, p. 786)
So when the United States of America was established out of a bloody severance from Great Britain in the name of freedom and liberty, there were many groups of people left out of the promises of a truly democratic society, namely Native Americans, African Americans, women, poor and non-propertied white men (later on, immigrants and the LGBTQ community would be slighted as well in this regard and would agitate to secure their rights). These resulting frictions built up plenty of strain in the sociopolitical tectonics of the nation, with releases coming often as reactionary calamities and a halt or backwards regression of the expansion of equal rights, before another generation would come along and realize the error of its forebears and make corrections.Add a new technological revolution with both the potential of unity and division among a growing electorate. Shake. Rinse, repeat. As a result of this turbulent national environment, both conservatives and liberals have taken turns being either the champions of or opposing reactionaries to reforms such as emancipating the slaves (result: the Civil War) to the regulation of labor conditions, legislation of civil rights, and equal rights for women. The echoes of these fights remain with us today, giving us such partisan philosophies as identity politics and creeds of law and order that threaten to undermine the continued fights for the realization of true equality.
In the end, Lepore spares no one in her critiques of the past, showing how peoples of all political persuasions are complicit in either the nation's successes or failures, and that ultimately, the nation is better off for having brought in more of its people underneath the big tent of citizenship (and all of its accompanying obligations). She pushes for continued improvement of the American experiment, taking pride in its successes and asking us to learn from our past grievous errors. Because of the ongoing nature of our national experiment, an epic tale Lepore tells with elegance, no definitive conclusion can be reached on whether or not our nation has, in fact, realized its fundamental truths for all of its citizens. Of course, this means that there is more work to be done, a new generation that needs to wrestle with its history and take the nation into the future.
Works Cited:
Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Friday, May 17, 2019
Book Review: Greg Grandin's "The End of the Myth"
If there's anything as American as apple pie and baseball and the Fourth of July, it is the frontier. Today, we don't live in the age of Manifest Destiny, cowboys and outlaws racing ahead of the streams of wagons headed West to the Pacific coast. So politicians have to get more creative nowadays in evoking the cultural memory of the ever-expanding frontier, whether it be international markets or the stars, when trying to pass major policy initiatives. But what happens when politics takes a more insular turn, from the optimism of the seemingly infinite expanse to the pessimistic fortress-mindset represented by the Trumpian Wall? How did we get here? Historian Greg Grandin sheds light on our present moment in his 2019 exploration of the frontier's role in American history, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.
The frontier has always held a special place in American hearts and minds, serving as a basis for what we term today "American exceptionalism." Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner first invoked this idea in his "Frontier Thesis," wherein he argued that America's ability to settle such vast swaths of "free land"--not officially claimed by other recognized nation-states--allowed for the genesis of the "uniquely American form of political equality," premised on a fiercely "vibrant, forward-looking individualism" skeptical of centralized power that we've all come to know and love (Grandin, 2019, p. 1). Pioneers at the border needed to be hardy and adaptive when it came to settling in an unfriendly wilderness, encountering justifiably angry and dispossessed Native Americans--the latter pushed ever-westward by the U.S. government--harsh weather, and unfriendly wildlife, forming collective alliances when possible and thus creating outposts of freedom as bulwarks against an uncivilized frontier.
As Americans would come to establish themselves, from "sea to shining sea" and then move out into the world, whether by acquiring territories, opening new international markets, and fighting a long-line of world wars, the thinking went that America could serve as a sort of universal model for democracy done right, where the unceasing onward march would serve as a way to ameliorate social problems like racism or income inequality that plagued other crowded, border-bound nation-states. Why? Because those extremists, racists, and other problem elements and discontents were pushed ever farther away with the expanding frontier line. The best part was that the frontier was self-renewing, as a new frontier beckoned all the time, even after the mainland was thoroughly settled, keeping populational pressures low and divisions minimal, or minimized. Thus, a country could be knit together and political polarization kept at bay by promises of endless growth, an expansion of our universalist ideas, economic and political systems into the world short of imperialistic command and control.
Not surprisingly, there are problems with this Turnerian ethos. One, the world's resources are not infinite. National policy and our current model of troubled capitalism have not historically recognized this and are just starting to recognize our ecological and economic limits (at least on some fronts). (More liberal humanist perspectives, upon recognizing this, thus posit a more equitable societal arrangement to better share our finite resources, a model of social democracy. Others see limitations as an invitation to double down on an isolationist and racist mindset of domination and exclusion of non-whites from sharing in these benefits. The more dog-eat-dog model, if you will.) Secondly, this brand of American exceptionalism was founded in an era of contradictions, where unprecedented individual freedom (absolute freedom from restrictions in a world that does demand some restrictions on this freedom) only extended to whites and not African-American slaves, dispossessed Native Americans, or later immigrant peoples of color. Additionally, the government and not the rugged individual working collectively were able to open the doors wide for an unprecedented settlement and prosperity, pushing Native Americans and people of color out of the way of white settlers. Thus, these contradictions have remained, and have festered.
With the Great Recession of 2008 and draining Middle East campaigns under our national belt and income inequality rising (corporations have exploited the frontier mindset to the detriment of the commons raised on the unfettered idealism of the American Dream), pessimism has set in, with Donald Trump's election and Wall declaring the frontier closed and for America to start digging in the trenches. The safety valve of expansion seems to have failed, leaving no place for the fringe extremists and nativist elements to vent aside from internally directed violence against immigrants and people of color and a ramping up of polarization, starkly revealing the unavoidable social problems of modern life. More importantly, the realization is slowly setting in that the United States is like other nations, obligated to reckon with the latter problems just like everyone else.
We seem to have come down from the clouds, faced with the destructive impulses of a Trumpism that refuses limits, even when recognizing that the world is limited, an uneasy, destabilizing contradiction detrimental to the stability of our polity. While Grandin pulls no punches in his troubling assessment of our present and possible future of ever-greater polarization, he concludes with the cautiously optimistic hope that America still has time to recognize its limits in the Global Age and learn to thrive in a more balanced social democracy. This moment of reckoning will come, and we need to be ready for it.
Works Cited:
Grandin, Greg. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
The frontier has always held a special place in American hearts and minds, serving as a basis for what we term today "American exceptionalism." Wisconsin professor Frederick Jackson Turner first invoked this idea in his "Frontier Thesis," wherein he argued that America's ability to settle such vast swaths of "free land"--not officially claimed by other recognized nation-states--allowed for the genesis of the "uniquely American form of political equality," premised on a fiercely "vibrant, forward-looking individualism" skeptical of centralized power that we've all come to know and love (Grandin, 2019, p. 1). Pioneers at the border needed to be hardy and adaptive when it came to settling in an unfriendly wilderness, encountering justifiably angry and dispossessed Native Americans--the latter pushed ever-westward by the U.S. government--harsh weather, and unfriendly wildlife, forming collective alliances when possible and thus creating outposts of freedom as bulwarks against an uncivilized frontier.
As Americans would come to establish themselves, from "sea to shining sea" and then move out into the world, whether by acquiring territories, opening new international markets, and fighting a long-line of world wars, the thinking went that America could serve as a sort of universal model for democracy done right, where the unceasing onward march would serve as a way to ameliorate social problems like racism or income inequality that plagued other crowded, border-bound nation-states. Why? Because those extremists, racists, and other problem elements and discontents were pushed ever farther away with the expanding frontier line. The best part was that the frontier was self-renewing, as a new frontier beckoned all the time, even after the mainland was thoroughly settled, keeping populational pressures low and divisions minimal, or minimized. Thus, a country could be knit together and political polarization kept at bay by promises of endless growth, an expansion of our universalist ideas, economic and political systems into the world short of imperialistic command and control.
Not surprisingly, there are problems with this Turnerian ethos. One, the world's resources are not infinite. National policy and our current model of troubled capitalism have not historically recognized this and are just starting to recognize our ecological and economic limits (at least on some fronts). (More liberal humanist perspectives, upon recognizing this, thus posit a more equitable societal arrangement to better share our finite resources, a model of social democracy. Others see limitations as an invitation to double down on an isolationist and racist mindset of domination and exclusion of non-whites from sharing in these benefits. The more dog-eat-dog model, if you will.) Secondly, this brand of American exceptionalism was founded in an era of contradictions, where unprecedented individual freedom (absolute freedom from restrictions in a world that does demand some restrictions on this freedom) only extended to whites and not African-American slaves, dispossessed Native Americans, or later immigrant peoples of color. Additionally, the government and not the rugged individual working collectively were able to open the doors wide for an unprecedented settlement and prosperity, pushing Native Americans and people of color out of the way of white settlers. Thus, these contradictions have remained, and have festered.
With the Great Recession of 2008 and draining Middle East campaigns under our national belt and income inequality rising (corporations have exploited the frontier mindset to the detriment of the commons raised on the unfettered idealism of the American Dream), pessimism has set in, with Donald Trump's election and Wall declaring the frontier closed and for America to start digging in the trenches. The safety valve of expansion seems to have failed, leaving no place for the fringe extremists and nativist elements to vent aside from internally directed violence against immigrants and people of color and a ramping up of polarization, starkly revealing the unavoidable social problems of modern life. More importantly, the realization is slowly setting in that the United States is like other nations, obligated to reckon with the latter problems just like everyone else.
We seem to have come down from the clouds, faced with the destructive impulses of a Trumpism that refuses limits, even when recognizing that the world is limited, an uneasy, destabilizing contradiction detrimental to the stability of our polity. While Grandin pulls no punches in his troubling assessment of our present and possible future of ever-greater polarization, he concludes with the cautiously optimistic hope that America still has time to recognize its limits in the Global Age and learn to thrive in a more balanced social democracy. This moment of reckoning will come, and we need to be ready for it.
Works Cited:
Grandin, Greg. (2019). The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company.
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