Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.
In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.
In the days ahead, the US origin story will be told again with fanfare and at great expense, dressed in the garb of Christian nationalism and gaudy militarism, but drained of its narrative power as a world-making event – the idea that “the cause of America”, in the words of Thomas Paine’s 1776 revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, “is the cause of all mankind”. It is easy in the current context to forget that not long ago, this redemptive idea still resonated. On the night of his election to the presidency, Barack Obama framed his victory as an event that decisively narrowed the gap between the nation’s democratic ideals and its often flawed reality: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”
