I published this on My Left Wing and stirred up some lunacy. Why not here?
Whose Country Is It, Really?
Birthers, Tenthers, 9/12’ers, and all the contemporary manifestations of the John Birch Society or the Ku Klux Klan all claim that they want their country back. Those on the Left, secure in the evaluation of their claims as the ravings of ignoramuses, racists, and nuts, wonder how an essentially liberal society like the United States could produce such lunacy.
The Right and the Left in the United States can both trace their lineage back to the very founding of the English colonies in what Europeans called the New World and to the founding of the Republic which sprung up about150 years later.
The Puritans who invaded the continent starting in 1620 did not do so for the purpose of establishing a society centered upon the free practice of just any religion. They went on their “errand into the wilderness” to establish their one true religion and to do so by outlawing the practice of any other. They fled the “popery” of the Continent and the abomination of the fornicator Henry VIII, the Anglican Church, in order to establish a beacon of true religious light for the illumination of the benighted of Europe. They came to a “new” world, but their focus was the old Europe. Of course, when they arrived in North America, they did not in fact find a wilderness, but had to create one through genocidal policies practiced against the indigenous population. It was important to the Puritans that they establish their “city on a hill” in a wilderness so they could symbolically replicate the journey of the original Chosen People into the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt. In this way the Puritans in America could, as many fundamentalist sects do today, claim that they were the saving remnant of the Chosen People and therefore still enjoy that original covenant with God.
Americans who think the Puritans were stodgy, funny looking geeks dressed in goofy black clothes miss the point. The Puritans who came to America were the Taliban of their day, existentially equivalent in their conviction that they were doing God’s Work and that they were so righteous in their “errand” that they could murder with impunity. God said it was okay. Their 21st century descendants think so too. Except for perhaps John Brown, all homegrown terrorism in the United States has come from the Right.
The non-Puritans who invaded what became the colonies of Virginia and others to the south brought their own European universe of the mind. The essential feature of this universe was the European invention of race. There are, in fact, no human societies – whether tribes, clans, villages, cities or countries – that self identify as either “Negro” or “Indian.” These are racist symbols created by Europeans in the late 15th century to describe the people they were “discovering” in Africa and the Americas. What makes these symbolizations racist is not the fact of noticing difference, but the denial of a common humanity. “Negroes” and “Indians” were, for the Europeans by definition, part of nature, not civil society. This fact makes the European distinction racist and pernicious. Our word barbarian comes from the Greek “Barbaroi” which for Greeks meant foreigners or aliens, but to the Greeks these foreigners were still human beings with a civilization. Only after the European invention of race did the word come to mean a barbarian, someone living without the benefits of civil society.
Two of the most important English political thinkers that influenced the American Founders, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, used a hypothetical (and false) distinction between civil society and “the state of nature” in which life, as Hobbes comically described it, was “nasty, brutish and short.” They were mistaken. No human being has ever lived in the state of nature. As Aristotle put it, human beings are by nature political animals, that we are naturally communal not isolate because we are born into families, clans, tribes, villages, poleis, and states. There is, in fact, no such thing as a state of nature. However, this symbol allowed the Europeans who founded the colonies that became the United States to populate this false notion with two other European fictions, Negroes and Indians, that were useful tools in their twin enterprises of slavery and the extermination of the indigenous population in the Americas. If Africans were part of nature and not civil society and therefore not sharing a common humanity, it was perfectly okay to enslave them. If “Indians” are “denizens” of the wilderness, “beasts,” and defined as part of the natural wilderness as if they were wolves, or bears, then it’s okay to wipe them out completely to make room for implanting the “city on a hill.” These definitions were not rationalizations to justify conquest and theft, although they certainly were used for that purpose by conquistadors and entrepreneurs. The European pundits of the day filled voluminous writings of the time debating the issue, the most famous of these “debates” occurring between Sepulveda and de las Casas in Spain on the humanity of Indians.
We like to think of Thomas Jefferson as the original liberal, the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence, the guy who said that liberty needed to be watered by the blood of tyrants every so often, and of course to our minds paradoxically a slave owner. This was not a paradox to Jefferson. He was a believer in the state of nature fiction. It was perfectly consistent, in his own mind, to own slaves (who were not part of human civil society) and speak that “all men are created equal.” How could he do this?
The “men” Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration did not include women of any race, it did not include “Negroes” or “Indians” and it did not, in fact include white males who were not property owners. The “men” of the Declaration are white men of property who fit the republican definition of a citizen. To republicans going back through England and even to the Italian city states of Machiavelli’s time, a citizen was someone who was economically self-sufficient through the ownership of property, preferably land, and was therefore free of the economic influence of others and capable of making political decisions and actions based upon criteria other than what’s in it for me. And, equally important, a citizen was one who could and would take up arms to defend the republic. These were the only men who were created equal.
When Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other lunatics of the Right say they want their country back, this is the country they want. When Justices like Scalia and Roberts speak about original intent, this is the country they want. They want the America as it was before the Civil War. They want a society that does not include African Americans, Native Americans, women, or people with little or no economic means as citizens. Oh sure, they know they need these Other People to drive their cars, mow their lawns and watch their kids, but they don’t want to share their citizenship with them, and they don’t actually want to recognize a common humanity. To their minds, The Other may be used to serve us and provide for our physical comfort, but they are not Us. The Right’s America is a smelly mix of Puritan self righteousness and European notions of race and citizenship. It is the America of Us and Them.
For the lunatics who have taken over the Republican Party America must unilaterally dominate in international relations because America is Us, and all other countries Them. In domestic affairs, these descendants of the Puritan Saving Remnant define liberals, feminists, ACLU members, homosexuals, immigrants or their descendants, etc. etc. as Them and not part of their America. And within the Republican Party, they are now turning on themselves so that someone as far to the right as Lindsay Graham is no longer an Us, but one of Them, a traitor, a “sissy.” What will each individual that lives in this fantasy world do to themselves when they discover an independent thought outside of the orthodoxy of their ideology? They will become a Them to themselves. This actually happened to the Puritans in Massachusetts and manifested itself in the Salem witch trials. But that’s another story.
What’s the other America? It’s the America that would include everyone as citizens, even the people who would deny that citizenship to others. This America is actually the America that arises as the descendants of the original invaders of North America overcome and transcend the European universe of the mind they brought with them. It’s the America that continually expands the definition of “men” in the Declaration to include all those originally excluded. It’s the America that James Madison dreamt of when he said that unless the new states in America could separate church from state they would simply repeat the previous three centuries of European religious war and strife.
It is also the America “invented by Abraham Lincoln.” One of the reasons Barrack Obama sees Lincoln as a paradigmatic President is because Lincoln in his own life went through the transformation that America must go through in its public life with respect to how it defines who is an American, who is one of the “men” of the Declaration of Independence.
Lincoln, like Jefferson and the other Founders, was a republican. But Lincoln expanded the notion of republican virtue being rooted in land ownership to include owning one’s own labor which meant, in Lincoln’s words, that “the man who labored for another last year, this year labors for himself, and next year he will hire others to labor for him.” Labor can provide the entrepreneur the freedom to become one of the men-who-are created-equal of the Declaration. So how did Lincoln expand this definition to include African American slaves?
Lincoln was born into a racist part of a racist state in a racist country during a racist period of that country’s history. That he would start out his life with commonly held racist beliefs cannot be a surprise to anyone. For Lincoln, African Americans still didn’t share a common humanity with him and his white fellow citizens. He said in 1858 in his debates with Stephen Douglas. “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]–that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”
But Lincoln also stated that even though “Certainly the negro is not our equal in color–perhaps not in many other respects; still, in the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands have earned, he is the equal of every other man, white or black.” (Emphasis added).
Lincoln was for all of his public life opposed to slavery (he stated that he was against slavery as much as any Abolitionist) but that fact didn’t free him from the universe of the mind that infused the America of his time. Lincoln’s notions of free labor demonstrate how he eventually came to overcome his time. In a speech at Chicago in 1858, Lincoln pleaded: “Let us discard all this quibbling about…this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position,” and instead “once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.” And by the Second Inaugural, Lincoln said that the evil of slavery was that it took the “unrequited toil” of the slave, and that the slave owners were “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”
By recognizing the right to the fruit of one’s labor, and in good republican tradition, by recognizing that African Americans who fought for the Union deserve to be citizens of that Union, Lincoln transcended his time and place and changed the meaning of Jefferson’s “all men are created equal.” And is so doing expanded the American notion of citizenship.
The America of the Left is the America that seeks to include rather than exclude what is meant by Jefferson’s famous phrase.
