Tradition – America’s Vice

*Opinion Piece

Source: Unsplash.  

The American Dream; new money, social mobility, total freedom, and a blind determination to ignore atrocities born in the name of tradition.  

The ‘great nation’ of America doesn’t lead the world in anything much anymore. Not healthcare, not education. Except by number of school shootings, America has fallen behind the rest of the Western world, and watching the culture wars of America regress into a dangerous and childish ‘he started it’ rhetoric, is like watching an echo chamber implode. 

Part of the problem is the divisive and polarising two-party system. Part of the problem is religious interference in policy making and state law. Part of the problem is America’s stubborn, traditionalist refusal to move from the imperial system to the metric system. Part of the problem, is American freedom was founded on slavery, and when America laudes ‘freedom for all’, they still have to quantify what ‘all’ really means 

Modern America is a kind of self-reverential cocoon, where most people have never had to face the aftermath of America’s military budget, see a city bombed, or asylum refused. 

According to Nathan Robinson, of Current Affairs Magazine, “this may be why we do not really grasp the full extent of the horror signified by phrases like ‘children killed by a drone strike.”  

Even when the deadly consequences of foreign policy and military movement are covered by American media, disturbing and violent pictures on the news are carefully censored, and Iraqis, Afghans, Palestinians, all become a distant and abstract Other, whose pain doesn’t register on the American consciousness.  

There is a defined and straightforward hierarchy of lives, and how much we value them, in the media, and especially in the American press. European and American victims of crimes and natural disasters are without exception given far more time, valued in the media above the lives of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern victims of crime or tragedy. 

Even just across the border in Mexico, American policy and drug consumption has fuelled violence, but the things happening on the other side of the same continent, might as well be happening on a distant planet. 

To understand atrocities, is to understand that to the people perpetrating them, they often don’t seem like atrocities at all. John Stuart Mill, 19th century English philosopher, famously condemned the violent interventions of other countries in global affairs, but thought the British empire was a shining exception. Mill believed fundamentally that the British were a model people, whose colonial conquests were conducted for the benefit of the colonised.  

Mill failed, as many have and many will, to see through the dehumanising, racist myths, used to justify and rationalise imperial conquest, and contemporary American rhetoric is similarly oblivious. Both, too close to the violence to really see it, too close to the factory making bombs, that they are blinded to watching them drop. 

Even American education falls short. Prescribed school textbooks have had white supremacist assumptions built into them for generations, with the violence of slavery, Native American genocide, and European colonialism, simply excluded from the curriculum. 

Since the 60s, when members of marginalised American groups began seriously demanding that subjects like black history and women’s history be treated seriously, there have been few very necessary and very unpopular efforts to correct the propaganda which has dominated educational norms and curricula.  

A familiar argument, the rise and fall rhetoric appears in the 1776 Commission Report, formed by then President Donald Trump, to provide an opposing narrative to counter the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, an honest and accusatory series of essays which highlighted the legacy of slavery in America’s coloured history.  

The 1619 Project was an effort to tell American people the truth, about the ugly, racist parts of American history, and it should tell us all something, that the effort to publicise the basic factual truth of America’s slave history, has been met with a massive right-wing backlash. In response, the Trump administration launched the 1776 Project, which according to Robinson, “in a desperate attempt to keep history well-whitewashed”. 

The 1776 Commission report lists ‘progressivism’, alongside slavery, communism, fascism, and “racism and identity politics”, as principal, ideological, and historical threats to the Constitution, feuling conservative fears that liberal progressivism directly contradicts the original, traditional, wishes of the ‘wise founders’.  

America is so painfully traditional that it has crippled itself.  

George Washington once warned that a two-party system would destroy America. He was right. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the Constitution should be continually revised, overhauled and updated. He was right. And now the Constitution, originally designed to change as time does, has become a load bearing document of misplaced tradition. 

And then, the Constitution stagnated. And so did America. 

The two-party political system solidified, and somehow, the Constitution became sacred. 

There are not one but two Americas, or so we are told. There are Harris voters and Trump voters, centre-city urban Americans and rural Americans, CNN devotees and Fox News loyalists, BLM supporters and MAGA advocates, and, of course, Blue states, and Red states.  

Everything and everyone passes through the filter of partisan allegiance. American life is dictated by political factions, not just how you vote, and what you watch, or read, but who you know, where you live, or shop, what you say. Hatred of the evil and ambiguous Other, and fear of being misidentified, form the basis of America’s political cultures. 

According to Burns, even “if they have quibbles with their own side, partisans are sure about one thing: Evil is on the other side”. In Aotearoa, ‘the grass is always greener’, but in America, that grass over there has it worse. 

Even as traditionalism becomes entrenched in American life and culture, it has become increasingly difficult to gain perspective on contemporary politics through the study of US history. The American past, a history filled with atrocity, which ought to be filled with lessons, has become a proxy battlefield for contemporary conflicts.   

Americans today are hashing out the same battles that 18th century election campaigns were founded on, and according to Burns, contemporary challengers to conservatism often take their opposition to the contemporary right wing as a starting point, then walk backward through the American past, to identify past culprits for contemporary ills.  

It is a flawed genealogy, but it retains some merit all the same. America was built on a manner of grievous ills, is it any wonder that they still prop the modern culture up? 

Though most American political commentary in the mid 20th century celebrated the continuity of the Great American Story, there is undeniably a tragedy in American homogeneity. America has festered, the nation has gone stagnant, and the world is watching. 

The factional logic of American political discourse disciplines dissenting voices, profoundly and publicly. Traditionalism is an avid promotion of ‘sameness’, and there is a fundamentally American desire to unify by means of a broom and a rug, and a ‘traditional’ coat of whitewash. 

America is obsessed with America. A self-reverential nation which fails to look inward, failing in introspection, in accountability, and succeeding almost exclusively in blind patriotic spirit. 

American global discourse is contained to America only. As in the years of the colonial Empire, the British could only ever see how they looked to each other, never how they looked to the Irish, who were starving to death under their rule. And Americans are lamenting a ‘potato famine’ that was fabricated by their own nation. 

Tradition is the greatest vice of contemporary American culture, and the Devil went down to Georgia for a reason. Misplaced tradition, misused religious iconography, misplaced polarity, are fundamentally American. More than Washington, more than confederacy. More than freedom. 

Modern American culture is dystopian, a battle between warring political cliques, which has turned the American democracy into a popularity contest, and the Presidential election into a fight for Homecoming Queen. 

Great, free, modern, America is a myth. A storybook tale, sold to children and weapons manufacturers, who both have something to lose.