In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, our need to understand the US feels more immediate than ever.
What sort of society is America? Can it, in fact, even be regarded as a society? The country has an exalted view of itself as a land of democracy, freedom, liberty and progress. But Nick Bryant, who has devoted most of his career to reporting on events in the United States, wants to debunk such notions. He sees an America riddled with countless disputes and problems, including attacks on democracy, violence, demagoguery, racism, guns, culture wars, book banning and declines in civility. He also sees Republicans and Democrats isolating themselves in bubbles from what is going on. Such discord is not a contemporary problem:
Little, if any, of the American story is safely in the past. Indeed, the present-day United States is confronting a problem of historical overload. It is buckling under the weight of problems from yesteryear which have never been resolved.
The Forever War engages with different understandings of American history: differences between what happened and the meaning of what happened – or what was believed to have happened. Bryant quotes Hilary Mantel: “History is what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you.”
Bryant’s general approach is to provide contemporary information on a particular issue and to then place it in its historical context. One of the telling points he makes is that the United States has never really sorted out the nature of its “union” following the War of Independence. He notes that the Declaration of Independence refers to “A Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America” rather than just “the United States”. The founding states, and those subsequently admitted to the Union, have sought to assert their individual sovereignty and independence from each other and, more importantly, from the federal government.
From the very beginning of the Union, the states have resisted federal legislation and decisions by federal courts not to their liking. The best way for a state politician to enhance their career is to mount an attack on Washington elites interfering with states’ rights.
Bryant also points out that the framers of the Constitution were not supporters of democracy. They feared the masses and instituted various rules to limit voting to well-heeled white men. Women were not granted the vote until 1920. There is also the long history of denying the vote to African-Americans and other minorities such as Mexicans, Asians and Native Americans. The states control voting in federal elections, including presidential elections, and in recent years have enacted legislation to suppress voting rights and enable gerrymandering, practices aided and abetted by decisions of the Supreme Court.
There is also America’s history of slavery and discrimination against African-Americans. While the Declaration of Independence asserted it was “self-evident, that all men are created equal”, 25 of the 55 framers of its Constitution were slave-owners. Bryant quotes the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which found that because the framers of the Constitution regarded enslaved people as property, slaves were therefore:
… beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Following the Civil War (1861-65), which killed 750,000 Americans, the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery and grant (birth right) citizenship and civil and voting rights to all citizens. Such “progressive legislation” induced a counter-revolution among some states with the institution of Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation, and attacks on voting and other rights of African-Americans. The worst example of violence visited on African-Americans occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Bryant writes:
Tulsa was the site … of one of the country’s worst hate crimes, when a white supremacist mob tore through the city’s predominately Black Greenwood district, killing perhaps as many as 300 African-American residents … An entire section of the city … was razed to the ground, including a hospital, a theatre, a newspaper office, a library, a number of churches, more than 600 Black-owned businesses and some 1250 homes. Tulsa is also thought to have been the first American city ever to come under aerial bombardment.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt deferred action to aid African-Americans in his New Deal for fear of alienating Southern states. In 1954 the Supreme Court passed Brown v Board of Education of Topeka which ended de jure, but not de facto, segregation. This led to a racist backlash and civil unrest as Southern states opposed desegregation. In the 1960s the government of Lyndon Johnson passed civil rights legislation that led to another round of racist clashes, including the assassination of leading African-American activists, such as Martin Luther King. More recently, race relations have become prominent over police killings of unarmed African-Americans and the Black Lives Matter campaign.
These battles in the streets have also had a cultural resonance with the development of Critical Race Theory. In 2019, the New York Times published what it called its “1619 Project” which, Bryant says, “made no bones about its historiographical intent”:
It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of the national narrative.
The response from parents to the teaching of Critical Race Theory has turned school meetings “into shouting matches, frequently requiring the presence of police”:
Conservative-minded parents fear their children are being indoctrinated to hate America, and taught they should feel shame and guilt for sins committed before they were born. Liberal-minded parents believe that schools should teach an unadulterated version of history, showing how the country has fallen short of its ideals.
Similar culture wars have developed over abortion rights, feminism, gender identity, LGBTQIA rights and gun control, with respective protagonists denouncing the legitimacy of their opponents.
There have been determined attempts at the state level “to bring in educational gag orders, in an attempt to dictate how topics such as racism, sexism and American history are taught”. Florida governor Ron DeSantis sees himself as the spearhead of the “war on woke” with the passage of his Stop WOKE Act (Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act).
These and other culture wars are played out in mainstream and social media as protagonists interact with like-minded persons and become increasingly shrill when challenged.
As a lad in Birmingham, England, Bryant became enamoured with America, especially that “handsome, youthful-looking man”, the American president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Bryant subsequently revised his thinking after travelling to America and completing a PhD on Kennedy entitled The Bystander, which gave him “a fuller and more deprecatory account of his presidency”.
Many Americans have an exalted view of of their country: that it is the best country in the world, the home of freedom and democracy. The Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself fundamentally challenges this Pollyanna view:
So often we fall back on the comforting idea, derived from Enlightenment thinking, about the inevitability of progress, that America is moving, albeit haphazardly at times, towards becoming ‘a more perfect union’ … So often we have wanted to focus on the best of America and push its more unsightly characteristics to the periphery … The great American melting pot could so easily become a toxic stew, poisoned by the hatred of nativism. American democracy was more vulnerable to demagoguery than we assumed, and demagogues had periodically raised their heads.
How should we interpret what is happening in America today? In Bryant’s telling, it is the continuation of a long-term trend of a place that uses spin and hyperbole to mask whether it is in fact a nation of united states, or a nation that does not know what it is. Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Or is the US heading into darkness at an ever-faster rate?
Nick Bryant’s The Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself provides a masterful account of historical and contemporary developments in America, drawing on a lifetime of reporting on and thinking about a society that has fascinated him since his youth.
If you read only one book about America, what drives it and what pulls it apart, make it this excellent work by Nick Bryant.
First published in the Newtown Review of Books newtownreviewofbooks.com.au
Nick Bryant The Forever War: America’s unending conflict with itself Viking 2024 PB 416pp $36.99