America Might Be A Self-Destructive Project

I’ve been reading a book by Immanuel Wallerstein called The Decline of American Power.

It’s a strange book that went to print one month before the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Writing during that blurry, highly propagandized period of time between the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq invasion, Wallerstein details why US hegemony had been on a slow decline since the 1970s, and why the then-new Global War on Terror would accelerate it, ushering in a generation of untold political chaos for the US.

Putting aside that his perspective was wildly unpopular at the time, with the benefit of hindsight, he looks incredibly prescient. I’ll have much more to say about all this soon, because his analysis is close to mine but much more sharply expressed. And the predictions that follow from his analysis are sobering.

But what I wanted to immediately share was a passage from the book where he says something profoundly true about the United States, something that’s easy to lose sight of:

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There is no single American tradition nor single American set of values. There are, and always have been, many Americas. We each of us remember and appeal to the Americas we prefer. The America of slavery and racism is a deep American tradition, and is still very much with us. The America of frontier individualism and gunslinging desperados is an American tradition, and is still very much with us. The America of robber Barrons and their philanthropic children is an American tradition, and is still very much with us. And the America of the Wobblies and of the Haymarket riots, an event celebrated throughout the world except in America, is an American tradition, and is still very much with us.

The America that welcomes immigrants and the America that rejects them are both American traditions. The America that unites in patriotic resolve and the America that resists militarist engagements are both American traditions…There is no essence there. There is no there there.

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The book contains a thousand other stimulating statements and ideas—not all correct—which I’ll get to. But if what he’s saying in this passage is true, if America has no singular essence, then we have to take seriously a few things that may be quite discomfiting to acknowledge:

• The United States will struggle to shed the predatory frontiersman ethos that permeates US history;

• The United States will never be a nation at peace if it cannot synthesize the contradictory forces of inclusion and exclusion or capital and labor, and that’s a tall order;

• The world cannot count on the United States to be any one thing, and there’s great danger in other nations designing policy around fixed images of what America stands for.

Everyone knows Trump and MAGA are firmly within the American tradition. It’s just that some of us are embarrassed and fearful about that fact while others relish it.

Part of me sees the inherent, contradictory variety that comprises American identity(ies) and recognizes that the deck is stacked against the American project continuing in anything that would be recognizable to us. It’s hard to see how this experiment sustains itself.

But another part of me sees something hopeful in our multiple valences—the future is unwritten. Wallerstein bemoans (for reasons I’ll explain later) that we are in the early phases of 50 years of tumult and cataclysmic violence. But what emerges on the other side of our disorder is anyone’s guess. It depends on us, as Wallerstein says:

in terms of the transition as a whole…precisely because its outcome is unpredictable, precisely because its fluctuations are so wild…even the slightest political action will have great consequences. I like to think of this as the moment in historical time when free will truly comes into play…it is a moment when we need to unify knowledge, imagination, and praxis.