The New American Secession

I drove past the National Mall the other day. It was quite a sight.

The Mall is being transformed by platoons of workers busy assembling the staging for Freedom 250—the grand commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, two and a half centuries of the boldest political experiment in human history.

Many of the workers, of course, are Latinos, in keeping with the demographics of the building trades. The irony of that fact is lost on this administration, which has unleashed an immigration enforcement program that has terrorized and brutalized Hispanic neighborhoods across the country, sweeping up hundreds of documented American citizens in the process.

But the workers keep at it, and they are giving us a huge, neo-neo-classical stage to celebrate and reflect on our country’s journey, and where we are today.

Here’s what Freedom 250—which is the Trump-created, public-private partnership formed to sideline the congressionally authorized America250 organization and let Trump dictate the entire celebration—has planned for the Mall. They’re calling it the Great American State Fair:

I just asked Johanna, my wife, if she wanted to go to see this Fair. Not if it celebrates Trump, she told me. I understand, up to a point. But I’ll probably go regardless. I’ll go as a reporter—to see what’s been done in our name—but as a citizen, too. I love our country, and I don’t want to let Trump’s warped understanding of it and his predictable abuse of the occasion in order to glorify himself ruin this moment.

Also—there’s bound to be some fun there, right? There will be fireworks and flyovers, speeches and spectacle. The traditional forms of civic celebration will all be observed, and much of it will be sincere and normal.

But. “Normal.”

Is that even possible any longer in our country?

A new survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, released as the bunting goes up, tells us what is happening beneath those traditional forms of celebration.

That’s what seems to be the problem, right? The defining civic emotion of the Age of Trump is anger. No matter which side we are on, our blood boils when we consider our country and the people who are on the other side of the great political and cultural divide that has opened up in America in our time.

And yet what the AP uncovered is far more deeply disturbing. It is not anger. Anger, at least, is a form of caring. What the poll measures is something colder: a quiet secession of the American heart from the American project.

Consider the central, sorrowful finding. Five years ago, 80 percent of Americans said that a democratically elected government was highly important to our identity as a nation. Today that figure has fallen to about two-thirds.

Read that again. Not two-thirds of us who think democracy is working well; we have known for years that almost nobody thinks that. Two-thirds of us who think democracy is part of who we are. The other third has begun, consciously or not, to imagine an America that could be America without democracy. A non-democratic America.

And among the young, the secession is further along. Only about half of Americans under 30 say democracy is a key element of the country's identity. Among those over 60, the figure is 81 percent. That thirty-point chasm between the generations is the most important number in American public life right now.

Because here’s the thing: the young are not wrong about what they have seen.

Imagine a 24-year-old American woman. (And think, for a moment, when you were 24, and what your hopes and expectations for our country were.) This young American has lived her entire adult life in a country where the institutions failed her, one after another, year after year, in sequence, like dominoes.

She was a child when the best-credentialed people in America assured the nation that the financial system was sound, just before it collapsed and the architects of the collapse were rescued and got richer while ordinary families lost their homes.

She came of age amid a pandemic in which public health authorities damaged their credibility, mostly through ordinary human frailty in the face of a dangerous and complex emergency. But the understandable errors and overreach have had significant consequences.

She witnessed an insurrection in which a defeated president attempted to overturn an election, unleashing a mob to attack the Congress and our Constitution itself. Before that, and even more since then, she watched as a political class responded to each catastrophe by entrenching itself further.

She has watched the Supreme Court conduct the nation's business through a shadow docket, watched a president treat the federal government as a family business, and watched a war launched and prosecuted with the same confident deceptions her parents' generation heard about Iraq.

Derricka Wall is that 24-year-old woman. She’s from Alabama, and when she was asked about our democracy, she told the AP that, “I feel like our Founding Fathers would be kind of disappointed about how it is now.”

Notice what Derricka is not saying. She is not saying the founders were frauds, or the Constitution a con, or the whole project rotten from the root. She is saying the generations that have been in charge have failed. That’s us. The stewards betrayed the trust.

What Derricka is expressing something deeper than anger, and you can’t call it cynicism, either. More like disappointed love. And while disappointed love, unlike contempt or cynicism, can still be answered—it will not wait forever.

There’s a second finding in the AP 250 poll that bothers me, and it should bother you.

The AP asked respondents whether the United States stands above all other countries in the world. About half of Republicans say yes.

Among Democrats, the figure is 7 percent.

Seven percent. Let that settle in.

That is shocking to me. And contrary to much of what liberalism and progressivism once stood for.

American exceptionalism—the conviction that this nation, whatever its sins, carries a distinct promise for humankind—was once the shared faith of our politics.

It was the faith of Abraham Lincoln, who called America the last best hope of earth while it was tearing itself apart over slavery. It was the faith of Frederick Douglass, who hurled the Declaration like a thunderbolt at the slaveholders precisely because he believed its words were true. It was the faith of FDR and of King, of the labor movement and the civil rights movement, which did not reject the American creed but demanded America honor it.

The left's greatest victories were all won under the banner of exceptionalism—the insistence that this country had made unique promises and could be shamed and summoned into keeping them.

When Pew asked a version of the same question in 2011, about a third of Democrats affirmed the idea of American exceptionalism. But that’s gone now.

Somewhere in the last generation, much of the left seems to have talked itself out of the faith that our country has a special mission and place in the world.

Now, faith in this country should not be blind faith. Of course we are a sinful nation. All nations are sinful nations. Only fools deny that. And there is no competition or ranking in sinfulness. There is only the overcoming of it. That is the only thing that matters.

Obama delivered this truth in 2004, in the great speech he gave to the Democratic National Convention, the speech that inspired a nation:

“In no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

And in his speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 2015, Obama identified the hard, spiritual process that makes our country exceptional, that proves the truth:

“What greater form of patriotism is there than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?”

Many Democrats, especially on the left of the party, now seem to have rejected Obama and his understanding of American exceptionalism. They associate it with naive idealism, empty rhetoric.

This process took a generation and more, and it precedes Obama’s arrival on the political scene. Part of it was a reflexive iconoclasm in the academy, where too often students were taught that the national story was primarily a crime scene; that pride in your country—one of the most natural and honorable human emotions—was gauche at best and complicit at worst; that the canon of our cultural heritage, the civic creed of our people, and the flag that represents all of us—somehow it all belongs to oppressors, not liberators.

Yes, some of this critique was necessary and healthy. History that is merely triumphal history is dumb history, and that kind of history erased the full humanity of the enslaved, the dispossessed, the excluded.

But history that is merely iconoclastic history is also dumb history.

And politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

When one half of the country walked away from the flag, the other half picked it up and wrapped it around whatever it pleased—including, eventually, around a movement that holds our actual constitutional inheritance in open contempt, all the while monopolizing its symbols.

So the question in that poll is not just about our system of government. It’s also asking each one of us a deeper, hidden question. It’s about us.

Not only: Is democracy important to America’s identity?

But: Are we still the kind of people who are willing to do the work to make it so?

—Terry