What Book Was Let America Be America Again
Ed Simon is the associate editor ofThe Marginalia Review of Books, a channel ofThe Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, and is a regular contributor at several different sites. He is also a contributing editor at theHistory News Network. He can be followed at his website, or on Twitter @WithEdSimon.
They came from Washoe County, where once in 1865 the 1st Nevada Cavalry Battalion had massacred 29 Paiute Indians, and they bandage ballots by mail and in person. They came from Chatham Canton, a place where almost half of the population was in chains when William Tecumseh Sherman made his march of liberation to Savannah in 1864, and they voted to elect the first Blackness woman as Vice President. They came from Philadelphia County, where in 1844 a group of nativists rioted and burnt two Catholic churches to the ground, and they elected our second Irish Catholic president. And they voted in hundreds of similar places, from Nevada to Georgia, Pennsylvania to Arizona, and on what was a warm, sunny November 7th in the nation's capital they emphatically denounced the revanchist horror of the previous assistants – the racism, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia. They bandage out the gargoyles who have been enabled in this administration, similar Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Sebastian Gorka. They rejected the forced family separations, the anti-Muslim religious bans, the affection for dictators, the genocidal lack of response to a pandemic that's killed a quarter of a one thousand thousand Americans.
In the procedure they demonstrated that, for the fourth dimension being, American commonwealth survives for another solar day. More than confirmation of American institutions – which accept been weakened, only still hung on – it'south a confirmation of the American people (or at to the lowest degree of a slightly larger half). This victory doesn't erase those years, simply equally it doesn't change what happened in Washoe, Chatham, or Philadelphia Counties centuries agone, merely it speaks to how our history is a palimpsest, with triumph built upon tragedy, over and over again. It speaks to the potential for change, the potential for progress, the potential for promise. Ultimately November 7th isn't about the thankful and welcome election of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden as the 46th President of the United states, but rather it's well-nigh all of us, those (largely Black and dark-brown) voters in Washoe, Chatham, and Philadelphia Counties who, despite institutional and systemic hurdles, were able to wrest the nation abroad from the form of incipient authoritarianism, and in the process provide the world with a glowing infinite of possibility for how genuine people power tin can still reject tyranny.
The 21st century has seen a growing move of extreme right-wing illiberalism, a neo-fascism ensconced from Ankara to Budapest. Russian dissident and New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen writes in Surviving Autocracy that such governments are akin to "mafia states," which "proceed in three stages: autocratic attempt, autocratic quantum, and autocratic consolidation." Such a process has been repeated throughout the formerly autonomous globe; this week the U.s.a. halted our dangerous class before it could metamorphose into the final phase, then the new illiberal authoritarianism suffered its most spectacular defeat. Jair Bolsonaro has ruled Brazil since 2018, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been President of Turkey since 2014, Narendra Modi has consolidated his power in India since 2014, Viktor Orban has been Prime number Minister of Hungary since 2010, and Vladimir Putin has increasingly governed Russia as a Arbiter since 2000, and tonight all of them are sleeping a scrap less soundly.
For that thing and then are the fully domestic manifestations of this illiberalism, this neo-fascism, who were enabled and encouraged by the Trump administration only to witness the largest single group of votes in U.South. history go to his opponent, propelling him into the White House despite the antidemocratic nature of the Electoral College. Many things are notable on this celebrated day, but what shouldn't be ignored is that this is the most spectacular repudiation of the new absolutism that had been enveloping the world, accomplished in the most powerful and oldest democracy and through electoral means. That the agents of their defeat are Biden, who served as a loyal Vice President to this nation's commencement Black president, and Senator Kamala Harris, who will exist our first woman Vice President, our first Black Vice President, and our starting time Indian-American Vice President, only speaks to the profound joy of this moment.
Celebrate today for there is piece of work tomorrow. Vice President Biden and Senator Harris received more votes than whatever other entrada in history. The second highest number? Those received by Trump this ballot. Millions of Americans were witness to the panoply of cruelty which marked the last half-decade – the concentration camps for refugees, the Water ice agents interim with unconstitutional impunity, the mocking denialism of the coronavirus pandemic – and they whole heartedly begged for more. Such voters tin can no longer feign ignorance what a Trump assistants would practise, and we remain more divided now than at any point since the Civil War. The trends of which Trump was a symptom (rather than the simple cause) disturbingly remain. Inequity, corporatization, dominionism, neoliberalism, nationalism, white supremacy, and then on, remain equally a many-headed hydra. Reasons abound to be worried that Vice President Biden's innate centrism may limit solutions to these problems; that a desire for unity, or for a "normalcy" which has long since been nullified will render a caution that doesn't ascent to the struggle of this age.
If this worries you, then accept some solace in the noesis that Vice President Biden won't accept a choice merely to rising to this occasion. There is no going back to normalcy, no affair how much moderates and centrists may pray that at that place is. If Trump gifted us anything, it was the strange expletive and approving that norms don't need to be simply because they always accept. We shall return the favor, for I don't anticipate a government funded Trump library, a Trump portrait in the White House, a Trump stamp, and certainly not his attendance at the inauguration. Maybe this all seems like meaningless symbolism, but what it actually will be is an acknowledgement of the full harm of the Trump assistants, and it will preclude the grotesque rehabilitation of villainy which American civilization and media as well often excels at. Donald Trump will not have a post-presidential career charming people with paintings of dogs and babies – he's incapable of it. That's to our benefit. Such honesty volition do us all well as we take on the long and necessary struggle of expelling those devils from our national psyche.
I also can't help merely experience a bit of hope, for at the very to the lowest degree Biden'south goodness and decency (non to mention his painful and conversant fluency in the language of grief and mourning, which is also what is needed right now) speak to an unequivocal victory, equally does the President-Elect's ability to alter and admit past mistake. To take a president who is a good human will feel radical. Sometimes in that location is an undervaluing of presidential rhetoric every bit simply platitudinous, but if Trump has (ironically) proven anything, it's of the power of words, for his garbled and toxic mash of prejudice, invective, narcissism, and cruelty – which was directly responsible for the ascension in hate crimes and the threat of domestic terrorism – altered this country's spirit in ways that volition take a long fourth dimension to heal. To listen to Senator Biden'south victory speech is to recollect an alternative way of leadership, a dignified and empathetic fashion of leadership, which we had been on the verge of forgetting. At present of class begins the work of holding President-Elect Biden accountable from the left, as is the noble job of commonwealth.
But commencement, with the emotions of this cute day still fresh, let usa hold close to our hearts a hopeful image. People are dancing in the streets of New York and Philly, bells are ringing out in Paris and Berlin, fireworks erupted over the skies of London, a world jubilant an idea that many had feared was expressionless. This is the antidote to Trump's rallies, where he whips his followers into a frenzied trance. It is rather what Barbara Ehrenreich describes in Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy as what "we need more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the phenomenon of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration." Such spontaneous, collective, autonomous commemoration is – in its fraternity, its liberty, its ecstasies, and its joys – not the promised futurity, only it is a glimpse of it.
It'southward difficult to pick a nadir of these past 4 years, but when Trump had peaceful protestors gassed in Lafayette Square so that he could march over to St. John'due south Episcopal Church (against the wishes of its clergy) and hold up a Bible as role of a propaganda campaign is certainly a notable low. On November 7 in what the local authorities of Washington D.C. has rechristened Black Lives Affair Plaza there was no gassing of citizens, there was no clubbing of protestors, in that location were no fascist photograph opportunities. Rather at that place were women and men of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, genders, and faiths singing, dancing, and exorcizing that malignant spirit who occupied this space, for a scrap.
Source: https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/178399