Far from a special place: Trump sinks the last US myth
Commenti
By John Torpey*
When I started college, now nearly a half-century ago, I was assigned to read a book called The Liberal Tradition in America by a prominent scholar named Louis Hartz. The book was then regarded as a crucial contribution to the story of “American exceptionalism”, the idea that the United States had a special place in human destiny and, especially, in the global spread of political and religious freedom. According to an influential early pilgrim, John Winthrop, America was a shining “city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us”.
Given that supposed shiny uniqueness, “consensus” historians of the mid-twentieth century widely thought that “it” – fascism – “can’t happen here.” That view is, at best, under serious strain today. What will historians of the future make of the idea of American exceptionalism now that large numbers of masked paramilitary forces of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been detailed, without obvious cause, to besiege our cities in the name of “America First”?
Since the 1960s, historians have been sharply critical of the notion of American exceptionalism, especially on the grounds that the making of the United States was rather more about expropriation, enslavement, and exploitation than it was about fair-minded “trucking and bartering” on the path to our modern prosperity. The Indian wars were quintessential Americana, central to the country’s self-understanding and reflected in the prevalence of the film Western; slavery and racism, the 1619 Project and others argued, were said to be in our cultural DNA. Even before the 1960s, novelist Sinclair Lewis had punctured the country’s self-satisfaction with a book dismantling the notion that It Can’t Happen Here. From these perspectives, the United States didn’t seem so exceptional after all.
The irony is that while the Trump administration has sought to reverse the “critical” understanding of our past on display in official venues such as schools and the Smithsonian, the administration has done its level best to turn the image of the United States into that of a country at war against non-white non-citizens and, if need be, against citizens protesting immigration detention efforts. Indeed, Bloomberg reports that ICE has been on a $45 billion “buying spree” acquiring warehouses for use as holding facilities, some of them containing as many as 5,000 beds each. The stories of mistreatment of detainees have fostered an image of the United States not as the city on the hill, but as carceral El Salvador writ large, vindicating the critics’ dismissal of Hartzian history.
It should be remembered that, during two terms as president, Barack Obama deported some three million people, more than any previous president. But the brutality, cruelty, and disregard for human dignity that marks the Trump administration’s approach to immigration control has undermined Americans’ support for his immigration policies, even if half the population endorses the basic goal of immigration control. There seems little doubt that the administration’s approach has encouraged immigrants to self-deport or not to come to the United States in the first place. It has also given the United States a reputation as an immigrant-unfriendly place.
This unappealing image is problematic at best because, like many wealthy countries, the United States faces declining fertility rates and a need for immigrants to fill labor shortages in hotels, restaurants, construction, landscaping, health care, elder care, and other areas of the economy. Without the cheap labor on which their employers have relied in recent years, we are likely to face inflation caused by gaps in labor power. President Trump, whose friends among the employer class confront these labor shortages directly, is said to try to make sure they do not get in the way of the functioning of their businesses.
Moreover, despite his efforts to deport large numbers of criminal aliens, Obama didn’t seek to turn ICE into a Praetorian guard for the administration, ramping up the intimidating presence of heavily armed quasi-military troops. Immigration control was historically carried out mainly at the border by agents trained to secure the borders. Now, however, immigration apprehensions are taking place far from the southern border (which has been largely shut down), implicating mainly blue American cities in the process.
The second Trump administration’s signature policy, mass deportation of racially profiled and allegedly illegal immigrants, thus seems hellbent on persuading a reasonable observer that the United States is a rapacious, white-supremacist frontiersman. The backlash against its heavy-handed immigration enforcement is reinforcing for the Administration how little time it has to carry out its anti-immigration agenda. It seems they want to turn the clock back to the 1950s on the ethnic composition of the American population, which of course has been (unintentionally) profoundly transformed by the immigration legislation of 1965.
Against this background, one imagines future historians – and Americans more broadly — viewing more favorably the critical history the Trump administration is currently seeking to dispel. The more the administration clamps down on illegal immigrants and their supporters, the less appealing their view of history becomes. The more despotic and dangerous the administration’s policies, the more the present becomes a realization of the critical view of our past. Call it a historical Catch-22, or being caught on the horns of a historical dilemma. After Trump, American exceptionalism will look naïve and pollyannaish – surely not the way he wants to be remembered.
* John Torpey is Presidential Professor of Sociology and History and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
