(Written over the course of 2022, from Arizona to Colorado to Idaho, this is my most major essay yet. It is intended as a more in-depth intellectual justification for the Great American Novel Project in the context of American nationalism and American ideals. It is long and deals with a lot of different topics, from history to media to psychology and beyond; if you’re an impatient reader, feel free to skim parts that don’t speak to you until you find something that does, although everything here is quite relevant to our current national situation. We need to recreate the myth of America in the 21st century; this is the call to do so.)
THE UNFINISHED FICTION OF THE NATION
A ‘nation’ is primarily a fictional (or mythological) creation, and it has great power when individuals believe in it. This fact about the nature of nations can be used for negative or positive purposes. In this sprawling essay I will discuss many issues relating to the history and future of the American national myth, including the nature of fiction, the history of nation-states and nationalism, the unique situation of the American national myth, the pros and cons of different forms of nationalism, the best way to handle nationalism moving forward, what happened when intellectuals abandoned the idea of the nation in a world still made up of nations, the potential of an achieved America, the ideal of democracy itself, the essence of American philosophy, the way modern parties and media have broken our modern national fiction, and the creation of a new national fiction. If this interests you, read on. And if it does not interest you, or if you are automatically turned off by discussions of ‘the nation,’ well, sadly I think you should still read on. National mythmaking is, at least currently, an inescapable part of modern human life; nations are powerful superorganisms, and they have huge impacts on all of our individual lives in ways we simply cannot avoid. Luckily, we can do something about it by embracing it. Only by being actively conscious of national mythmaking can we both use it as a force for good and effectively resist attempts to use it for evil. This is of utmost importance for our ability to thrive on this planet— not just as a nation, but as a species.
Fiction is Fact
When I say that the nation is a fiction, I do not mean to imply that it is false, or unreal, or somehow less than true. Fictions, stories, myths, are inherently true by their very existence; they are true forces on the courses of our lives; they inform our sense of who we are and how we can relate to the world; they cause us to act in different ways through the power of ideas, and thus have real impacts on outcomes; they touch us and change the way we touch. Fictions are social facts. Stories are an essential part of what it is to be a human being. Humans as we know them have always lived as parts of larger social superorganisms, tribes. These tribes were often based on loose kinship groups of relatives, and these tribes told stories that bound them together. In telling the story of a tribal ancestor to young tribe members, the important thing is not whether all of the children are genetically descended from the mythical great-great-great-great grandfather; it is that they share the story, that the myth becomes part of their sense of self, a self individually bound to the tribe and its story. Myths, when shared, have this essential power to bind us together; they create shared context through the intersubjective force of language; they orient us to the world in a way that allows us to share perspective. Myths make many one.
All stories and myths are inherently fictional. The story of the mythical ancestor may indeed be more powerfully believed if it is closely tied to a genuine genealogy or etiology and other accessible ‘facts’, but what ultimately matters is whether or not it is believed as true. By being believed, it becomes true for those whose lives are bound together and informed by it; belief in a story, and passing it along intersubjectively, makes it a social fact. While the ‘true’ past undoubtedly affects the present in many unknown ways, it is the story of the past as we understand it in a given present that impacts our actions and choices in ways that we can understand, work with, and potentially change. We live in a perpetual present; this present is ever-emerging and ever-novel; as humans, we try to orient ourselves to the ‘world out there’ through our intersubjectivity; unlike most animals, we use intersubjective categories of language, time, space, causality, etc to orient ourselves in a shared world, to triangulate between the world, ourselves, and other people with whom we desire to communicate about ourselves and the world. Thus, we construct pasts to explain our presents. It is as if we are perpetually born anew in a novel present, and are forced to ask ‘How did we get here?’ While surely there is some ‘true’ past at our backs, we can only ever access or experience that past in the form of a story reconstructed in the present; in so reconstructing or creating the story of our pasts from a distance, we are creating fictions. These fictions may be improved in accordance with some ‘true’ etiology through rigorous intersubjective refinement, as represented by the work of history or science, but ultimately they remain in the form of fiction, the form of a story or myth, and remain subject to all of the laws and forces relevant to such.
Elements and arcs that make stories compelling, such as the archetype of the hero’s journey found across all cultures, are part of what it is to be a human being and part of how we understand the world; they do not necessarily require fealty to the reality outside the social world in order to work. Human brains simply like to think in the structure of stories; stories are the way we make sense of experience in ways we can learn from and remember; stories seem to be the structures human neurons like to form. We have evolved to understand the world narratively, mythologically. As inherently social beings, as cells in superorganisms, our understandings of the shared past take the form of fiction. Even our understanding of our own individual past is a fiction. We experience ourselves as we are in the present, and imperfectly remember bits and pieces of past experience; we imperfectly stitch together a fictional past out of these bits and pieces to hypothetically explain our present self to others, and to gain understanding of our present self. The self, ego, identity, individual, at least as we understand it, is a story. Storytelling is one of humanity’s core modalities of knowledge; it is the way we make sense of ourselves, of others, of the tribe, and of the world. Thus, even memoir is a form of fiction. History is a form of fiction. Even so-called ‘non-fiction’ is a form of fiction. From our limited human vantage point, we are always putting together stories to understand the world from within Plato’s cave; we never have all the information, and we are stuck always stitching together disparate bits into stories that feel coherent. In the act of stitching together inherently imperfect information, we reorganize, we fill in gaps, we connect things, we ignore things, we unconsciously and inescapably allow the myriad biases and peculiarities of our minds to shape the story as we understand it, and to shape the language as we share it. Even when we are striving to approach some sort of ‘objective truth’, we turn everything into a story the minute it passes through the lens of the mind; and, certainly, when we use language to write or speak about what we have learned, it inevitably takes the form of stories, of fiction.
A Very Brief History of the Fictional Idea of a Nation-State
When modern nation-states began emerging, starting with the revolutions at the end of the 1700s and hitting their stride in the 1800s, they had to create national histories and fictions to tie the people to the state and to one another. They had to create ‘nations.’ The ‘native’ in ‘nation’ implies shared origins, common descent by birth, but just as with smaller tribes telling the story of the mythical ancestor, this is primarily a fiction. Nation-states came to exist messily, often emerging out of former city-states, kingdoms, or empires. Jill Lepore’s book “This America: The Case for the Nation” does an amazing job of explaining the origins of the nation-state. They were a radical, progressive development; liberal revolutionaries believed “that the peoples of the world are naturally divided into nations, that the most rational means of government is national self-rule, that nations are sovereign, and that nations guarantee the rights of citizens” as a political community governed by laws. This was a powerful new fiction. The king is toppled; the ‘will of the nation’ is now the principle of sovereignty; now, the ‘nation’ must be defined. Whether or not the peoples of the world are ‘naturally’ divided into nations becomes irrelevant, because the peoples of the world in practice become divided into nations over the course of two centuries. People believed in the fiction of the nation, and new superorganisms became unbelievably real. Because nation-states often emerged out of kingdoms and empires which covered large amounts of newly bounded territory and many different kinds of people, the powers of fiction required to fuse these peoples into a ‘nation’ were considerably larger than those required to fuse together a 20 person tribe. When the state falls into the hands of a people, all of the people within the borders of the state must become a new kind of tribe.
A nation can be bound together and defined by a number of shared characteristics: a state, a language, an ethnicity, a territory, a culture, a history. A nation is a slippery noun, because no one of these things is essential. Sometimes, in the formation of a nation-state, a powerful majority will purge itself of minorities, like the Catholic monarchs of fifteenth and sixteenth century Spain. But, more often, writes Jill Lepore, “they instead incorporated all the different people living in newly bounded territories, and the best way to do that was to invent a common history, telling tales about a shared past, tying together ribbons of facts and myths, as if everyone in the ‘English nation’ had the same ancestors, when in truth they were everything from Celts to Saxons. Histories of nation-states are stories that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.” Thus, Catholics and Protestants and Parisians and Basques and Alsatians and Jews all become “French,” with a shared language, culture, and history. Once that ball got rolling, groups of people who were connected by shared language, culture, history, contiguous territory, and semi-believable claims to shared birth descent began to fight to form their own nation-states. Nationalism— the belief that the world should be divided into nations coupled with a particular emotional identification with your own— was born; it began to shape the world as a powerful force, or myth, of its own. Thus, in the 1800s, through wars of conquest and assimilation, a German nation-state was born out of many smaller states and groups; the state of Italy was born, and it became necessary to create Italians.
A Fictional History of American Nationhood
The birth of the American state was a bit unique, and thus the creation of a nation of ‘Americans’ was also unique. America was formed out of 13 different former colonies which very much thought of themselves as distinct states with distinct cultures. They shakily united to fight off a common foe, England, but their first government, the Articles of Confederation, was explicitly oriented around separate states rather than a single nation. When this wasn’t working, the elites want back to the drawing board, and came up with the US Constitution. At the time, a loosely federated government of sovereign states was much more popular than a singular, unified national government. So, the handful of intellectuals such as Alexander Hamilton who, for various reasons, did want a national government wisely published their arguments for the new Constitution as ‘Federalists,’ even though they were nationalists, forcing their opponents, who actually wanted a federal (as opposed to national) government, to labor under the label ‘Anti-Federalists’ (Lepore). The so-called ‘Federalists’ won, and a new national government was formed. The new national government assumed state debts as Hamilton wanted, Washington became president of the new nation, and the South was given disproportionate power in exchange for going along with everything. The devil’s bargain was made, and Hamilton had birthed a massive nation unlike any the world had ever seen, for better and for worse.
Thus, the United States began uniquely as a state-nation rather than a nation-state. Over the next 70 years, people continued to think of the United States as a plural, rather than singular, noun: the United States are, not the United States is. But, despite the United States’ dominant localism and sectionalism, a national identity began to slowly form. This was partially due to the efforts of certain people who set out to craft such an identity, who saw value in the idea of binding together a nation with shared stories and culture. Jedidiah Morse published ‘American Geography, Or, a View of the Present Situation of the United States of America’ to cultivate national feelings; Noah Webster published his ‘American Dictionary of the English Language’ to give the new state its own national language, distinct from the British nation we’d separated from; we dropped ‘favour’ for ‘favor’ (Lepore). Between 1834 and 1874, George Bancroft published the first major history of the American nation, the ten-volume ‘History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent to the Present.’ All of these works helped create the idea of ‘America’ as a distinct whole, as a singular nation, as a story with a past and a future. To write history is a form of modern mythmaking, similar to the way smaller tribes have long told stories about tribal ancestors. It was even more of an uphill battle to create the American nation than, say, the English, due to its origins as a loose collection of former colonies composed of immigrants from different backgrounds. Yet myths are powerful things, and identification with the American nation became possible without pretense of shared ancestry. Believing in American ideals and absorbing American myths became sufficient for membership in the nation. Anyone who reads the story gets the right to write it.
It is around this time, the middle of the 19th century, that we see the ‘American Renaissance.’ This was a time of great cultural output; Ralph Waldo Emerson made a declaration of American intellectual independence, and American artists and writers began producing more and more uniquely American works. No longer were education and art seen as exclusively European affairs; American writers took their own nationality seriously, and participated enthusiastically in its early self-creation. The new nation, having survived the most dangerous decades of childhood, now saw itself as having a past, a present, and a future, a story and character all to itself. This story could be consciously created, written, or at least guided and edited by those caught up in it. Walt Whitman called the United States ‘essentially the greatest poem,’ because of this autopoetic quality of consciously co-creating a new myth. The United States became a metaphor for self-creation itself, with ever-widening open vistas of democratic possibility stretching away from the smash of differences in all directions. Artists and thinkers who recognized the possibilities were inspired by the chance to participate in telling the new story of a New World. The works of these artists, such as Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain became essential parts of the American myth. The relationships between man and nature, the individual and society, freedom and order, the town and the forest, Ahab and the White Whale, and Huck and Jim are all universal themes that have been explored by the American consciousness in unique ways, shaped by the individual artists who have inflected their particular storytelling into the broader cultural dialogue. They had a privileged place in the early development of the American national myth, and, like one’s friends in high school, have therefore had a large influence on its future growth.
The early fiction of the nation clearly influenced the actual development of the nation in ways that cannot be ignored; most famously, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced the nation to face some of the horrific realities of slavery in novel form. Human empathies were marshaled by the power of storytelling to get people to genuinely care about the plight of humans different from them. While of course the Civil War happened for larger reasons than one novel, there is no doubt that Uncle Tom’s Cabin altered the direction of history. It was the bestselling novel of the century, and people adopted ideas from it. Our ideas about the world become part of our understandings of the world, part of our internal map of our environment, the environment as we perceive it, the environment we adapt to match. This invisible environment causes tangible change in the world by influencing our actions. Ideas have real impact; they are consequential; they influence the material world through us. Many more people cared much more deeply about slavery due to Stowe’s fiction than would have otherwise; what may have been a slight or abstract opposition to slavery was made sharp, emotional, empathetic, real. People became more willing to sacrifice in war than they would have been otherwise, and a difficult civil war was fought, in part, for high moral reasons; certainly, at least, these moral values kept morale higher than it would have been otherwise, especially halfway through the bloody conflict. Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered to a war-weary nation, was another attempt to inject meaning-making into the struggle, to add to the fiction of the nation by clarifying and positing values to unify behind. As Nietzsche knew, human beings are the greatest sufferers, willing to suffer almost anything if they believe it is meaningful. Of course, it is not only war that can be altered by autopoiesis; the value-creating storytelling of those who have contributed to the American national myth has also led to major legislation, protest movements, cultural shifts, and the organization of important institutions. Ideas create concrete. Fiction can craft fact.
A Tale of Two Nationalisms
In telling the story of American national storytelling, it is important to linger a moment longer at the Civil War, because the Civil War can be seen as the clash of two national stories. These two conflicting national stories are emblematic of two philosophically distinct flavors of nationalism which are at war in America and around the world to this day. Of course, the North in the Civil War represents a form of nationalism, since they wanted to uphold national will over Southern sectional resistance, and literally remain a united nation. They wanted to do so in order to live in accordance with their national fiction, their civic story, their purported values as spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln argued that there is no reason to believe that ‘All Men Are Created Equal’ excludes African-Americans. He wanted America to live up to their myth. This is an example of what we can call ‘civic’ or ‘liberal’ nationalism; it is based on a shared code, shared values, shared story, shared ideas; membership in this kind of nation requires only absorption and affirmation of the shared code, values, story, ideas. Civic or liberal nationalism is American nationalism at its best, the world’s first and greatest experiment in composite nationality, diverse nationality, the universal refuge, the open home to all who embrace the American fiction.
But the Confederacy, which represents what we think of as sectionalism, actually represents the first, arguably older form of nationalism: illiberal nationalism. ‘Illiberal,’ or ‘ethnic,’ nationalism is based on exclusion, blood, birth and race. It demands that the fiction of the nation be strongly tied to an existing tribe defined by common ancestry (which, of course, becomes more fictional the more you look at it.) Alexander Stephens delivered a speech in Savannah in which he conceded Lincoln’s point that the US Constitution “rested upon the assumption of the equality of races,” but that the new Confederate government “is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” (Lepore). Illiberal nationalism has a long and bloody history; it seems that, when you attempt to define a limited group of people as ‘the people’, there often tend to be other people around, and ‘the people’ often become united in aggression towards these outsiders. Genocides, wars, ethnic cleansings, and interpersonal violence of all kinds are typically the result whenever illiberal nationalism rears its ugly head.
Illiberal nationalism seems to keep popping up like a weed in history, and its staying power seems to be due to its one great advantage over liberal nationalism— its psychological simplicity. Illiberal nationalism is based on the same basic human tribalist psychology that liberal nationalism is based on, but one level of abstraction down; the illiberal nationalist seems unable to abstract the idea of the nation away from its ‘native’ root. They believe the fiction too rigidly. It is very easy to convince people that those who look like them are good and those who don’t are bad, that those they grew up near are good and those who didn’t are bad, that the way things are is good and change is bad. These simple lines of us/them hack into our basic tribal psychology, our most psychologically salient biases of group formation, evolved millions of years ago to help us survive smaller tribal conflicts. They are much more psychologically simple and powerful tools for group creation than something abstract like ‘human rights,’ a ‘Constitution,’ or a story of shared values. These abstractions require complex rational thinking on an individual level, the kind developed by education, especially but not exclusively through thought modalities engendered by the typographic medium. This is one reason why periods of communication medium market share shifts disrupting the dominance of typography (think introduction of radio, or television’s surpassing of typography as the metamedium of American discourse in the late 60s, or Trump on Twitter) can be associated with periods of resurgent illiberal nationalism.
Of course, liberal nationalism is healthier long-term than illiberal nationalism, in the same way that mutts are healthier than purebreds, a diverse genetic history is healthier than incest and inbreeding, and a robust public discourse of varying perspectives is healthier than an echo chamber. But while liberal nationalism is better long-term, illiberal nationalism has a short term advantage due to its ability to hack our basic animal psychology, and thus makes it a valuable tool for would-be leaders who are motivated by reasons other than the long-term health of the tribe. This simplistic animal psychology is why illiberal nationalism tends to appeal most to people who are either less intelligent or who live in more homogenous environments, although make no mistake— illiberal nationalism appeals to everyone on some level deep in the psyche. This simplistic animal psychology is also why the actions of illiberal nationalists tend to be more aggressive and violent than the actions of liberal nationalists, although many liberal nationalists are historically far from innocent either. In other words, while liberal nationalism is the ‘good’ nationalism and illiberal nationalism is the ‘bad’ nationalism, we must be careful not to fully believe such oversimplified terms. Of course, you probably don’t need me to tell you that, since it seems the dominant drive of academic thought these days is precisely this urge to complicate oversimplified terms. Yet there is also value in simplifying things for the purpose of taking net-positive action in a messy world; I believe a lot of the impotence of modern progressive movements can be traced to this. Given a world rife with nationalism, we should be making every effort to support the ‘good’ nationalism over the ‘bad.’
The Neverending Story (Endless Civil War)
Although the north won the Civil War, these two conflicting ideas of nationalism have continued to battle for the last 160 years. The primary fights have been over black rights, indigenous rights, and immigration. For the sake of brevity in this essay (there are more important and original points to be made about the future of the fiction of the nation), I will speed through broad strokes of the next 100 years of the 1860s to 1960s, although lots of interesting stuff happens year in the battle between the two American nationalisms. For a deeper look, I recommend Lepore’s short book, which takes us on a tour featuring a wide array of diverse stories of activists and politicians fighting over who can be American, many of whom don’t fit nicely into either camp.
In summary, both kinds of nationalism remain present and active for the next 100 years, with the opposing teams rising and falling in terms of prominence and success, but neither ever disappearing. There are ebbs and flows: with victory in the Civil War, liberal nationalism is concretized by the 14th and 15th Amendments’ attempt to reconstruct American citizenship, and is championed by people like Frederick Douglass. There is, of course, resistance, and eventually Reconstruction is sold out by white northern businessmen content to conveniently re-fictionalize the story behind the war. Black Americans spend the next hundred years fighting for America to uphold its civic fiction as enshrined by these Amendments. Meanwhile, the Amendments brought debates about Chinese citizenship, Indigenous citizenship, and more to the fore. The 1880s backlash took the form of Jim Crow laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and rebukes of Indigenous citizenship. The two nationalisms get quite mixed up in the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, exemplified best by the figure of Woodrow Wilson; he was paradoxically a white Southerner, a noted racist and sexist who opposed female suffrage, a fan of Birth of a Nation and believer in Nordic supremacy, while at the same time emerging as the face of liberal nationalism coated with high-minded sounding democratic ideals during World War I. Of course, these ideals (like self-determination) mostly failed in the face of imperial interests at Versailles, and at home the Treaty was rejected; reaction to the war led to resurgent isolationism and illiberal nationalism. In the early 1920s, the reborn Ku Klux Klan had higher membership than ever, and the illiberal nationalists finally succeeded in passing the 1924 Immigration Act, which barred Asian immigration, and sorted the restricted European immigration by national origin along eugenicist lines.
The pendulum swings the other way again during the nationalizing FDR period into World War II, and appeals to liberal nationalism as the ‘true’ Americanism become more widespread, although illiberalism remains strong (after all, FDR did imprison an entire people based on ethnicity). Here we get FDR’s Four Freedoms, public radio broadcasts about the value of immigration, and Norman Rockwell vibes. America’s liberal tolerance became an essential part of its propaganda, especially in reaction to the racial atrocities of the Axis. By the highly unified and prosperous 1950s, intellectuals begin arguing that liberalism was the dominant intellectual tradition in America, offering expansive liberal accounts of US history. However, at the same time, illiberal reactions to the Civil Rights Movement were gaining in intensity, leading to domestic terrorism in order to uphold white supremacy in the South against federal action. The 50s-60s Civil Rights Movement is an exemplary battlefield between liberal and illiberal nationalism. Ultimately, liberal nationalism seemed victorious, with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended the discriminatory quota system from the 1924 Immigration Act. However, illiberal nationalism never went away, and as the foreign-born American population skyrocketed from 5% in 1970 to 11% in 2000, anti-immigrant sentiment grew. The issue of immigration is perpetually an issue upon which American politics turns, because it gets at the fundamental root of what America is and what a nation is, while playing into all of the associated tribal psychology. I hardly need to describe here the liberal nationalism of Obama, or the illiberal reaction to it which brought Donald Trump to power. Suffice it to say that the conflict between liberal and illiberal nationalism is an essential thread, perhaps the core thread, in the story of the American nation.
Bet You Thought You’d Seen the Last of Me
While the 60s may seem to mark the apotheosis of liberal nationalism in this story, it is also the beginning of the unravelling. The story of liberal nationalism unravels the way all complicated stories do: people stop telling them, retelling them, reimagining them. The crime of the Vietnam War, which violated the fundamental American principle of a people’s right to self-determination, coupled with the establishment’s failure to appropriately deal with American racism, disillusioned many American intellectuals from the entire project of the American nation. Intellectuals began to see nationalism itself as inherently evil, and it is understandable why they felt this way; nationalism tore the world apart and caused unimaginable death and suffering in the two World Wars; the ease with which nationalism was coopted by bellicosity and chauvinistic patriotism for the purpose of rallying Americans to war in Vietnam further damned nationalism in the minds of academics. Academics abandoned study and embrace of ‘the nation’ out of disgust, and fears of complicity with atrocity. Thus, where 19th century Americans had actively created an American national story for the purpose of unifying the new nation, intellectuals in the second half of the 20th century dedicated themselves to critiques of the nation, if they talked about ‘the nation’ at all, which increasingly they did not. Instead, historians began to focus either on global narratives (culminating in Fukuyama’s famous ‘End of History’ thesis) or on the stories of smaller groups within the nation, divided by race, sex, class, or other marginalized identities that had previously been ignored by white male historians (culminating in modern day debates over ‘identity politics’ in academia). This trend was made possible by the opening-up of the academy in the 1970s, when we started seeing many more women and marginalized racial groups represented in academia. These intellectuals studying and writing global or group-based stories did great work, and their scholarship has been a benefit to the world, providing desperately needed perspectives that had been missing from earlier scholarship. I want to emphasize that these developments were primarily positive, and that we have a much more robust understanding of the world because of them.
However, the concomitant abandonment of national mythmaking by intellectuals went too far, and ended up being quite costly. Intellectuals felt safe abandoning the nation because they felt nationalism was on its way out anyway. Liberal capitalism was ascendent, the world seemed to be remaking itself in positive ways through the United Nations, and in general it seemed that we were on our way to an interconnected, cosmopolitan world which would eventually do away with the anachronism of nation-states. By the end of the Cold War, western intellectuals were intoxicated with this ‘end of history’ vibe; they felt that global liberal capitalism would take care of everything, and that the future was pretty much safe. Intellectuals, protected by the bubble of the ivory tower, became so detached from the reality of nation states that by 1998, the year I was born, the president of the American Studies Association questioned the very “notion of a bounded national territory and a concomitant national identity deriving isomorphically from it” (lol) and whether “the perpetuation of the particular name, ‘American,’ in the title of the field and in the name of the association continue surreptitiously to support the notion that such a whole exists.” You couldn’t invent a better parody of the disconnected, self-loathing, over-academicized, wishful unreality of late 20th century academia if you tried. Of course nations do exist, and nationalism has great power whether or not academics choose to ignore it. Nationalist genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda should have warned us of this; 9/11 and the doomed wars in the Middle East should have warned us of this; but by and large the American academic establishment sleepwalked their way through a few decades, only to wake up to a world trending in a decidedly illiberal nationalist direction, with the rise of Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, Hungary’s Orban, England’s Johnson, France’s Le Pen, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and, of course, America’s own Trump. Nationalism never went away; American intellectuals simply stopped looking at it, which makes it much more difficult to combat when it rears its head.
People inherently crave tribal belonging, a sense of group identity. This is deep in our evolutionary psychology. In a world atomized by runaway capitalism, Americans are more disconnected from one another than ever, and more desirous of a sense of group identity than ever. Various corporate, cultural, political, and religious identity groupings are weak attempts to fill a vacuum in people’s lives, and they are often destructive. Whether intellectuals want to face it or not, Americans crave stories to bind them together; they want common narratives, they want shared values. It used to be that American historians, poets, authors, public figures, and intellectuals would try to actively create this shared identity as a nation. But when intellectuals began abandoning this enterprise in the 60s, that doesn’t mean that the desire for shared identity disappeared for the other 95% of the American population. People want national stories, and if they don’t get them from smart people, they’ll get them from stupid people; or, even worse, if they don’t get them from smart and honest people, they’ll get them from smart and crooked people. The hole left by intellectuals’ abandonment of anything that smacks of nationalism has been filled by Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. These people have been able to wield the immense power that comes with national mythmaking, and they have wielded it in destructive, illiberal ways. If intellectuals, artists, and historians aren’t willing to provide people with national fictions, then corporations and demagogues will instead, typically for evil purposes.
I admit I find it admirable to dream of a world that goes beyond nations, and I can even entertain these hopes; my dreams of democracy involve some sort of transcendence of national boundaries. That’s the interesting paradox of ‘liberal nationalism’; each of those two terms contains the seeds of the other’s destruction. Of course, I ultimately want to see liberty triumphant over nationalism. However, for the time being, the most practical way to guarantee liberalism— as in, equal rights for all people in pursuit of free human flourishing— is through a nation of laws. A transcendence of nation-states is, for now, far in the future. In the present, the only time we can actually act, the world is organized into nations, and they aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. We are all currently bound up with our own nation, its past and future, its triumphs and failures, and its actions which affect all citizens. Our destinies are inescapably intertwined, and this implies responsibilities. One of these responsibilities is to deal with the reality of nation states, and the immense power they still wield.
Achieving Our Country
Richard Rorty’s excellent little book ‘Achieving Our Country’ lifts its title from a quote by James Baldwin, which goes “If we– and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others– do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.” The idea that America is still something yet to be achieved is fundamental to what America is. America is an ongoing project, towards an ever-evolving utopian ideal of democracy which has not yet ever fully existed, but which promises a future world of unthinkable diversity, richness, and freedom. America is a story still being told, something the writers of the mid-1800s American Renaissance were very aware of, and sadly something which modern Americans seem to have forgotten. Yet it is still the case; we are still writing the story of America, or, as Rorty says, creating the image of America: “I say image rather than myth or ideology because I do not think there is a nonmythological, nonideological way of telling a country’s story. Calling a story mythical or ideological would be meaningful only if such stories could be contrasted with an ‘objective’ story. But though objectivity is a useful goal when one is trying to calculate means to ends by predicting the consequences of action, it is of little relevance when one is trying to decide what sort of person or nation to be. Nobody knows what it would be like to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s country really is, what its history really means, any more than when answering the question of who one really is oneself, what one’s individual past really adds up to. We raise questions about our individual or national identity as part of the process of deciding what we will do next, what we will try to become” (Rorty). This quote quite nicely illustrates what I said at the beginning about the fictionality of the self and the fictionality of the nation. This is a powerful thing; we are not bound by the weight of the past; America is not set in stone; it is an ever-evolving image, and we are the artists.
We artists of America in the 21st century have a responsibility to create a new, better fiction for America. There is no doubt that the fiction of America influences what America becomes; there is no doubt that the stories and values believed by Americans ends up shaping individual and collective actions; that has been argued earlier in this essay. I would now like to argue the need for a new National Fiction in the 21st century, to be created by artists of all kinds; I believe a new National Literature is essential to this, but it will be supported by music, television, movies, and more. If this new National Fiction is to be successful in encouraging Americans to take positive actions towards achieving our country, then it will need to encourage a healthy form of national pride. National pride is a tricky subject, and many people who are skeptical about nationalism’s fraught history understandably shy away from embracing or encouraging national pride. But national pride does not need to be blind; it does not need to ignore or minimize the bad parts of the American story; it does not necessarily need to lead to arrogance, ignorance, or jingoism. National pride is a complicated thing, but given the inescapable realities of nation-states and their power, and of the psychological cravings people have for national group identification, it is something we must deal with and work with. If cultivated in an intelligent and careful way, national pride can be a powerful tool for positive change. Rorty says that “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely. Emotional involvement with one’s country– feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of its history, and by various present-day national policies– is necessary if political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame.” National pride is an essential tool for national improvement. As much as our democratic system has been corrupted, the mechanisms for change based on popular belief and popular action are still in place, however difficult they now are to activate and leverage. If we can get Americans to believe in a new National Fiction, and identify with a new, future-oriented national pride, we can actually make change happen on scales not seen since the 30s or 60s. This occurs both by influencing elite decision-making and by influencing the beliefs of the masses, which creates bottom-up actions while also pressures representative elites to take actions. Right now we are a nation of pessimists, but I truly believe that a new and better America is possible. We first need to change our attitudes, and for that we need a new National Fiction which inculcates a new kind of National Pride— a pride not only of our past, but a pride in what we could become.
American Pragmatism and American Idealism
I can easily make two different arguments about the need for a new National Fiction: a pragmatic one and an idealistic one. I believe in both. The pragmatic argument is this: the American government has grown too large and too powerful in the last 100 years, and now its actions deeply affect everyone in the country and the world. It makes decisions every day with enormous consequences for the environment, the economy, and many other things that impact people’s day to day lives. These decisions have grown increasingly divorced from the explicit consent of the governed as the state has grown bigger, become more of a thing unto itself with its own systems and inertia and root desire to continue ‘living.’ It is now, arguably, the most powerful agency in the world. There is no power in the world strong enough to take it on singlehandedly. However, previous generations of patriotic Americans have built into the structure of this government mechanisms by which the beliefs, fictions, ideals of the American people can change the government. While these mechanisms have been rusted and clogged up by decades of selfish elites abusing power, they are still there, and they could still work. And, the thing is, they are the only thing that could still work. The masses of people on the left and the right who are disillusioned by the corruptness of our system, and who therefore don’t vote or take other forms of action, are forgetting that, as flawed as it is, democracy is still the largest power we can work with to make things better. It’s the best shot we got. It’ll need to be overwhelming to work, given the gunk, but it still can work if enough people across the spectrum can unite on common issues. And despite the gaslighting of the corporate media telling us otherwise, there are actually many issues you can get 60% or more of Americans to agree on. The disillusioned masses sitting out pragmatic political participation because of how messed up our system is are actually doing just what the people destroying our country want, because if we were united we would be unstoppable. If we were united, we could save and restore the environment; we could get money out of politics; we could fix some of the flawed aspects of our political economy; we could reshape American society in a more truly democratic way; we could make the world more peaceful; we could better develop our economy, our energy, our transportation, our healthcare; we could avert wars, bioweapon mistakes, nuclear holocaust. The American government in the 21st century is a runaway freight train with nukes strapped to the top. It is a moral and practical imperative that the people on board storm the engine and take over the train in order to avert disaster, not only for themselves, but for the human species, and for Life itself.
There is also an idealistic argument to be made for the new Fiction of the Nation, one based not out of fear of what would happen if we don’t but rather hope for what could happen if we do. The dream of America has long been the dream of democracy— and the ideal of democracy implies a lot more than just a political system, although one of our first goals of course ought to be the creation of a more democratic political system. The great democratic philosopher John Dewey said that “Democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature.” The ideal of democracy is based on the metaphysical truth that all things touch, that the many are one; that all things have their say, their own intrinsic authority; that this pluralistic universe is always becoming, expanding like the Big Bang, and that the more different parts interact the more creation happens; that this creation is Good; and that thus, evermore diversity, novelty, interaction, dialogue, collision is the way of the Good. This metaphysics is the philosophical basis for the democratic assumption that, if enough people engage in discourse on something in an ideal way, their dialogue will refine towards truth. The ideal of democracy not only resonates at the metaphysical and political levels; there is also symmetry at the biological level in between. There is, of course, the obvious metaphor of the various biological levels all working in harmony to create a person (cells, tissues, organs, Bob); there is also a metaphor in the ways all parts of a given ecosystem interact.
But it goes deeper than this. The late sociobiologist E.O. Wilson wrote a little book humbly titled ‘The Meaning Of Human Existence,’ in which he identifies the root of the core tensions in the human condition in evolutionary biology, specifically in what he calls humanity’s ‘imperfect eusociality.’ Eusociality is a sort of evolutionary level-up accomplished by only about 26 or so out of the billions of known species on earth; a species becomes eusocial when superorganisms are formed out of many individuals, individuals who place the collective over themselves. Bees, termites, ants, and surprisingly certain naked mole rats are all eusocial. A tell-tale sign of a eusocial species is the building of a hive, colony, or other home structure which become a sort of skeleton or metaphor for the social whole. Another tell-tale sign of a eusocial species is the willingness of its members to die on behalf of the whole, the queen, the colony, the tribe, the nation. The wickedly interesting thing about eusocial species is that they literally unlock an entirely new level of evolution, an entirely new kind of natural selection: group-level natural selection. In other words, eusocial species compete in nature on both the individual level and collective level; if you outcompete me and eat all the food, I die while you survive and pass on your successful genes; but, if a neighboring tribe is stronger and more cohesive, that neighboring tribe may massacre our whole tribe; the neighboring tribe will pass on its genes and its memes, reproducing itself as a superorganism while we have been selected out by group-level natural selection. The devilish detail here is that, on the individual level, selfishness is selected for and rewarded in competition; however, on the group level, altruism is selected for and rewarded. In other words, within a tribe the most selfish will be most successful; but in a eusocial context of many tribes, the tribe that has the least selfish and most altruistic, group-minded, united members will outcompete the tribe with more free riders. Thus the core tension of the human condition: within us we have both selfishness and altruism selected for over uncountable generations, and they are inherently in conflict. We are the site of evolution’s greatest drama, a struggle with itself. We are inherently superorganisms, inherently social, interconnected, interdependent; we are a species before we are individuals; the ideal of democracy is the ideal of embracing our eusociality, of forming ever larger and more interconnected wholes; it’s not hard to extrapolate this out and see that the destiny of democracy is to make a tribe of the species.
What makes humans unique compared to ants and termites is that we are ‘imperfectly’ eusocial. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a worker ant, and I don’t want to blindly follow a queen bee, a human queen, or a pseudo-communist dictator. Humans, unlike ants and termites, have big individual brains; there is a lot more novelty, diversity, complexity, creativity, and possibility contained in each individual human body, which can put it at odds with the collective. We are not perfectly eusocial; that selfishness is there, and to a certain degree that selfishness can be wonderfully creative. This is where liberalism comes into the ideal of democracy. When I say ‘liberalism,’ I do not mean it in the confused and pejorative way used by the mainstream media, modern politicians, or people on Twitter who spend all day criticizing things. By ‘liberal’ I am referring to the classical liberal philosophical tradition from the Enlightenment which values the human individual, which believes all people have intrinsic value, self-authority, individuality, and rights which must be socially protected so that people can flourish in their own directions. When I speak of my ideal of democracy, I am really referring to an ideal of liberal democracy, an ideal of maximizing our individuality and maximizing our connectedness, maximizing individual flourishing and collective flourishing. By recognizing that a robustly interrelated, caring, productive society produces more robust individuals, and that in turn robust individuals produce a more robust society, we can get past false choices of individualism or collectivism, because the goal is really to optimize both.
A liberal-democratic metaphysics wants to maximize Muchness; we want to lean into the interactionary emergence of novelty on the individual and collective level, taking existence itself as the Good. With the bazillions of connections possible between neurons in every individual human body, individual humans can be highly creative, generative, introducing novel memes into the world and into the tribe. With the bazillions of connections possible between people in human societies, collections of humans can be even more highly creative and generative. And, since novelty is produced through interaction, a more dynamic and democratic society is capable of more and more generation; and, it is capable of producing more and more generative individuals, who become more creative by absorbing more memes, roles, ideas, and experiences from outside. A more generative, free, developed individual can, through refinement in the dialectic of the ‘democracy’ of their mind, produce more unique ideas on the level of the body, and then offer these preciously developed novelties back to the social whole. And on and on and on. I’m laying this on thick because I really want you to be able to see it, or feel it, an imaginary environment, to see orbs or nodes like stars of different sizes smashing together, and a new thing, a different color, blue, a crystal, emerging from the smash, rising, taking its place instantly in relationship to all things, reflecting and refracting the light of all things through its new shape, influencing everything that gave birth to it, all stars rearranging and making new connections and growing… the way all nodes growing makes all nodes grow. Due to the unique value of refining collisions within the individual human mind, and their relationship to collisions on the level of the social mind, it is important to cultivate free and powerful individuals as well as an altruistic collective if we wish to maximize generation, evolution, novelty, emergence, the Good, or, if you’d like to use my term, Muchness. To maximize Muchness we need to harness the creative tension between selfishness and altruism, which is the impulse behind the good parts of capitalism (the bad parts of capitalism arise when selfishness tips the balance too far in its direction due to limited thinking. Invert for communism). There is some sort of math, some sort of optimization, some sort of ideally generative balance to be found between the body and the tribe where humans can optimize individuality and sociality, can maximize the relationship between them. There is some evolving solution to the problem of mankind’s imperfect eusociality, this core evolutionary tension between selfishness and altruism, and the drive towards this solution of our biological situation is the ideal of democracy.
I believe it is worth romanticizing the utopian potential of a genuinely democratic humanity. Democratic humanity could be Muchier, richer, more interested, more interesting, more diverse, more novel, more exciting, more imaginative, more exploratory, more experimental, more daring, more loving, happier… more everything. More smash means more stuff. Rorty said that “Nietzsche to the contrary, democracy is the principal means by which a more evolved form of humanity will come into existence.” The point of society is to construct subjects capable of ever more novel, ever richer, forms of human happiness. Rorty also references Kenneth Burke, who said “characters possess ‘degrees of being’ in proportion to the variety of perspective from which they can with justice be perceived” before saying that “The citizens of a democratic, Whitmanesque society are able to create new, hitherto unimagined roles and goals for themselves. So a greater variety of perspectives, and of descriptive terms, becomes available to them, and can with justice be used to account for them.” Humanity down the path of ideal democracy will have more being, more Muchness. No past achievement will be authoritative, nothing outside self-reliance and freely achieved consensus will be authoritative. The future will widen endlessly with experiments in individual and social life that interact and reinforce one another. “Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free.” Imagine everyone with multiple different hobbies, jobs, roles, ways in which they contribute to society in their lives; imagine everyone with far more freedom than they have today, in so many different directions, freedom to do things we can’t even imagine are possible right now; imagine everyone with far more diversity of opinion, more sources, more friends, more unique insight, more imagination and creativity, more ways of expressing themselves. It is the romance of endless diversity, of unprotected poetic agon, of speeding up the course of the universe.
What the great prophets of democracy were able to do is tie the romance of democratic humanity’s potential to the idea of America itself. They tied the history of our nation-state to the ideal of democracy, to the meaning of human life itself. Due to a lucky confluence of historical events, material and ideal, including the unique situation of an invasive species of humans on a new continent, as well as the shared ideas of certain idealistic American philosophers who gained popularity, America is the historical setting where democracy, for a variety of reasons, has had its best chance, its most open playing field, its most significant developments. America has been the main character of the fictional story of democracy. This is not some predestined chosenness based on outside God-given authority; as the ideal of democracy teaches us, it is contingent, temporal, and self-creating; we can make it real, but failure is an option. “Both Dewey and Whitman viewed the United States as an opportunity to see ultimate significance in a finite, human, historical project, rather than in something eternal and nonhuman. They both hoped that America would be the place where a religion of love would finally replace a religion of fear. They dreamed that Americans would break the traditional link between the religious impulse, the impulse to stand in awe of something greater than oneself, and the infantile need for security, the childish hope of escaping from time and chance. They wanted to preserve the former and discard the latter… They wanted the struggle for social justice to be the country’s animating principle, the nation’s soul.” Hope for a casteless, classless, utopian America was to replace Heaven as the ultimate object of desire. Heaven, Eden, utopia, are ahead of us, in the future, our possible future selves and descendants, who could be unimaginably richer and freer than we are today. The ‘God’ language here is, of course, all metaphorical; striving for future utopia makes sense whether you believe in God or not. If you believe in a traditional God, then I can say without a shadow of a doubt that God wants us to form ever-richer connections, ever-freer peoples, ever-more novelty in His universe. If you do not believe in a traditional God, then the real possibility of contributing to the emergence of democratic utopia on earth for yourself, your grandchildren, and the species— however difficult, however distant, however imperfect its realization will be— can be something real worth believing in and working towards. Heaven can be here on earth. Heaven can be an achieved America. I have faith that this is possible, and that striving towards it, even while failing, is good.
This faith is essential because the ideal of democracy is more of a shared faith than a fact. Ideal democracy is always resting in the future; it has never happened. We cannot undeniably prove scientifically that a classless society is more natural or rational than, say, feudal Europe: “All that can be said in its defense is that it would produce less unnecessary suffering than any other, and that it is the best means to a certain end: the creation of a greater diversity of individuals– larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” Although the symmetry between democratic metaphysics, biology, and politics is a clue to the goodness of democracy, and the success of past democratic movements in increasing human freedom (think abolition, the expansion of the vote to women, MLK’s Civil Right Movement, etc.) give us reason to think more democracy will be even better, it is not something provable in advance. We must believe in it and act on it in order to bring it about; we must have faith in it before we see whether or not it is true. The ideal of democracy is a self-creating thing; it is not verifiable based on past authority; it creates its own authority: “Great Romantic Poems like Song of Myself or America are supposed to break through previous frames of reference, not be intelligible within them. To say that the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem is to say that America will create the taste by which it will be judged. It is to envision our nation state as both self-creating poet and self-created poem.” To create America requires a faith in the possibility of an America that does not yet exist, faith in an expansion of the possible beyond all existing frames of reference into the unknown, faith in the emergent nature of the universe. A religious attitude towards democracy encourages social hope. Hope is necessary because failure is possible; the price of the self-creating freedom that comes with temporalization is contingency. I do not necessarily believe that the arc of moral history inherently bends towards justice; it may; but what I certainly believe is that the history of increasing freedom in this world indicates that humans can bend the arc of moral history towards justice if they choose to believe. They may succeed, or they may fail, but the only way to know if success if possible is to act as if it is. If they don’t, failure is certain.
Faith in achieving the ideal of democracy can be seen as the ultimate conclusion of the fusion of America’s two great philosophical inheritances, American Idealism and American Pragmatism. For an extremely simplified tour through the history of American philosophy, we can use Ralph Waldo Emerson, the greatest American philosopher of the 1800s, as the exemplar of American Idealism, and we can use William James, the greatest American philosopher of the 1900s (and, interestingly, Emerson’s godson), as the exemplar of American Pragmatism. One thing I find symbolic with regards to these two schools of thought in the real world is that Emerson was banned for life from Harvard after the ideas expressed in his Divinity School Address were deemed too controversial, whereas James chaired the Philosophy Department until his death. American Idealism tells us that we are part of something larger than ourselves, Nature, God, the Over-Soul, Truth, Freedom, etc, and that to align ourselves as much as possible with the forms of the ideals is good; aligning oneself with ideals of ultimate individualism or ultimate democracy are key examples of this. American Pragmatism tells us that truth is everchanging as we evolve and the universe evolves; truth is what works, a tool, a bet; “Truth as expression of satisfaction at having found a solution to a problem, which may one day be obsolete or misplaced.” Progress is a matter of solving more problems, and has no reference to something specifiable in advance. What matters is action, experiment. A key text of American Pragmatism is James’ excellent essay “The Will to Believe,” in which he argues that there are many important truths which require people’s belief in advance of proof in order to discover whether or not they are actually true. In other words, some hypotheses have human actions as one their preconditions; the experiment cannot take place unless someone acts as if they genuinely believe that the idea is true, what James calls a ‘live’ idea. Furthermore, James argues we should be willing to act as if certain ideas are true, temporarily and contingently, for the sake of experiment, even if we think there is only a small chance they really are true, as long as we are willing to bear the consequences of being wrong and change our beliefs accordingly. The reason for this is the existence of those possibly valuable truths whose realization depends first on human action, workable truths we can only discover if someone acts as if they were already proven true, if someone makes the choices demanded by a world in which this idea is true, if someone grabs the live wire of this idea and wears the uniform sincerely, if someone fakes it till they make it on behalf of the species. This is where faith comes into science, where idealism comes into pragmatism. We are stuck on a blizzarding mountain pass, with two obscured paths before us; we could freeze with indecision, or choose to believe in one of the paths and take action based on that belief.
The ultimate example of the ‘Will to Believe’ is the will to believe in the ideal of democracy, the will to believe in the possibility of utopia, and the will to take actions implied by that belief in order to bring about its potential realization, despite the possibility of failure. The great project of the American Dream, and of all the greatest American Dreamers, is this realization of the democratic ideal in the real America, this approach towards the meaning of human life in a concrete historical project. It is based in idealism and achieved through pragmatism. James, the great pragmatist, who struggled with severe depression his whole life, fought his whole life to convince his highly pragmatic self of Emersonian ideals of free will and democracy. Yet he still was able to say that “Democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to admit its failure. Faiths and utopias are the noblest exercise of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him will sit down fatalistically before the croaker’s picture.” Faith is reasonable. Idealism is pragmatic. Pragmatism in service of idealism, idealism pursued pragmatically, is the essence of all American philosophy. In order to live up to that legacy, we need to act pragmatically today to bring about utopia; we need the will to believe in democracy. I think the best way I can pragmatically pursue the ideal of democracy is by contributing to the recreation of the Fiction of the Nation. And, of course, I think a primary goal of such a fiction will be to deeply imprint a feeling for the ideal of democracy in the hearts of Americans.
National Fiction: Left, Right, Present
Fwoof. Heady stuff, huh? Don’t worry, you’re through the craziest part (my favorite part). We’re almost done, and we won’t end in the clouds; I’m gonna bring it back to concrete stuff, from history to the present. We’ll do a tour through the national fictions of the left and the right from the 60s to the present, and identify their failures. Then we’ll talk about the state of the current Fiction of the Nation. Finally, I’ll outline my vision for a new National Fiction in the 21st century. But before we dive into the home stretch here I want to say first that I’m really proud of you for making it this far. Seriously, thank you for reading this. Many Americans today don’t have the attention span to read an essay this long. The fact that you read this far means there is hope for democracy yet. Kudos to you, camerado.
Artists and activists creating a new national myth in the 21st century will need to learn from the mistakes of the last 60 years on both the left and the right. Since the two political parties compete for power over ‘America,’ they both offer their own competing versions of an American fiction, which have both been failures over the last 60 years when measured up against the ideal of achieving democracy. “Stories of what America has been and should be are not attempts at accurate correspondence to truth but rather attempts to forge a moral identity,” and can thus be changed to form different identities if the ones we have are insufficient, which is exactly the case today. Another way to put it is that “Arguments between left and right on how to interpret our history are better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forego.” Can we hope for a better America, and in what ways? We will begin with a discussion of the failures of the left, because the left is responsible for keeping the argument going; after all, the right never thinks anything needs to be changed; they think the nation has an existing identity that works and needn’t be improved, except perhaps to better approximate an imagined better past. They see the struggle for social justice as mere troublemaking utopian foolishness. “The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists that our nation remains unachieved.” The left is the active end of the dialogue, the ones most responsible for offering a national myth whose goal is to achieve a better country. And, since the 1960s, they have miserably failed this responsibility.
All of America’s past great reform movements succeeded because they defined themselves as champions of a moral and patriotic nationalism rising against selfish elites who stood athwart progressive’s vision of a more virtuous society. They used the power of national myth positively to achieve a better America; they pitched their reforms as ways of realizing the ideals of America laid out in its founding. Lincoln framed Emancipation in terms of the Declaration of Independence; civil rights activists demanded that the nation live up to the promises made by the Reconstruction Amendments. Most relevantly, early 20th century progressives were remarkably successful in improving the material lives of average Americans by pitching their reforms as patriotic, as ways of achieving a more ideal America in line with the democratic vistas envisioned by Walt Whitman and John Dewey. American reformists didn’t even need Marx to articulate a vision of a fairer, more democratic political economy; Herbert Croly’s ‘The Promise of American Life’ argued that the dream of a classless, fluid, compassionate, rich political economy was the American Dream, and leftists successfully used such patriotic arguments to achieve real material concessions from elites and help America become a fairer country. The 8-hour work day, the minimum wage, holidays, the end of child labor, regulations on workplace safety, and the rise of unions all owed their success, in part, to effective use of national mythmaking; they were able to use positive images of an ideal America to arouse patriotic sentiments and actually get their concrete progressive programs accomplished. What America could be— that was what these patriots identified with, and they were able to convince millions of other Americans to go along with these ‘radical’ (now taken for granted) reforms, because they were able to pitch them patriotically. This is the only way radical progress has ever been successful in America.
The shift comes in the 1960s, in tandem with the shifts discussed earlier regarding intellectuals’ abandonment of studying the nation. The failure of establishment politics to appropriately handle Civil Rights and the disastrous Vietnam War led many New Leftists to reject the possibility of reform within the system. Jingoistic nationalism on the right led to the atrocities of Vietnam, which betrayed core ideals of the American project like self-determination. Vietnam made the left think America was unachievable, and they sort of just gave up. It’s hard to blame them, since Nixon jailed and persecuted many of their leaders with the full power of the US government, RFK and MLK were shot, and a majority of Americans were brainwashed enough by the military-industrial complex and television to give Nixon landslide victories.
Since the 1960s, leftist intellectuals have seen national pride and patriotism as complicit in atrocities, and their response has been to disengage from national pride entirely, content to see themselves as the morally enlightened few without actually doing anything about it. They abandoned the field of serious play, of pragmatic politics, which would require articulating visions of America that play into people’s feelings of national pride. Instead, they ironically and bitterly commented on the badness of America from the safety of the TV at the top of the ivory tower. “The difference between early twentieth-century leftist intellectuals and the majority of their contemporary counterparts is the difference between agents and spectators.” The left is supposed to be the active end of the political dialogue, the one offering actions to change the future. Thus, “[i]nsofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left.” This spectatorial Left allowed the old New Deal alliance between intellectuals and labor to break down. They sank into spectatorial, impotent nihilism and cultural pessimism as the Right began to dominate the remainder of the century. “Leftists in the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to public debate.” This sucked up all the public’s oxygen, hiding the fact that this New Left offered no concrete project to achieve a better America through building consensus for specific reforms. Rather than engage in the American civic religion as the primary battlefield to improve the nation, they dismissed the entire thing as somehow identical to narrow-minded chauvinist nationalism. While they were right to resist Vietnam, and identify toxic forms of nationalism as responsible for the catastrophe, it was self-defeating and sloppy thinking to abandon the entire field of American democracy as a result.
The left, in abandoning national pride, abandoned their ability to bring about a new America worth being proud of, as their predecessors had successfully done. They were understandably disgusted by what America had done; but disgust is useless if it doesn’t translate into effort towards giving America reason to be proud in the future. Sins don’t make America irredeemable, as James Baldwin believed in the face of great oppression. The authentic moral reaction to the realization of sin is to keep living as an agent so as not to sin in that way again, rather than to kill yourself or live in ironic and impotent self-disgust, as the left has largely done in recent decades. To get caught up in past failures is to abandon the view that the essence of America lies in the future. “Hopelessness has become fashionable on the Left– principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness.” Hopelessness is a form of nihilism, a declaration of meaninglessness, a way of giving up without starting. It is shameful, cowardly, and inhuman. At least those who kill themselves exercise agency. To live meaningful human lives we need to take chances, we need to act, we need to hope. The next American left, if it wants to make a difference, needs again to be the party of real hope for achieving a better America, and not hope just as a slogan, but hope backed up by actions. To do this, it will need to use the power of positive national images. That does not mean these images need to simply accept or erase all of the awful parts of US history; it means facing them, learning from them, and working with the tools we have to make sure they don’t happen again. The new national fiction must emerge from agon between the best and worst of the American inheritance; as long as we stay positively oriented towards creating a better future, we have nothing to fear from facing our past.
Indeed, our past is an essential resource for creating the future. It is the raw material for the process of creating fiction. That is why the Right, the party of memory, is at its best an essential partner to the Left, the party of prophecy. A left without a right would be in a state of endless revolution, lacking continuity or stability. The right is to society what the ego is to the individual; it is a necessary force for preserving identity, continuity, and reliability in relationships. Of course, as with the ego, there are risks involved when it becomes too strong and rejects the importance of new developments. A healthy conservative presence in society ensures the continuity of social memes which have proven to work well; quality social genes and codes are passed on, ensuring societal stability and giving it a base from which to flourish. At its best, conservatives ensure that the good ideas of the greatest minds in history never die; the words of great ancestors are re-read in different times, and their wisdom is able to influence the present. The new generation will conservatively attempt to propagate the old memes in the new world, and it will progressively reinterpret some of their experience with the texts in the context of the new world in order to advance progress where necessary. Somewhere at the heart of human life there is an optimal balance to be found between old and new, between fixity and change, between transmission and adaptation, between conservation and progression.
However, in a world whose essence is change, a fixation on fixity can lead to many traps. The national fiction of the right has been just as warped as that of the left since the 1960s, but in a different way. The goodness or badness of a given manifestation of ‘the Right’ depends on what exactly it is they are conserving, which varies widely. Are they conserving Edmund Burke, or are they conserving the British Crown? Are they conserving the ideals of the American Revolution, or are they conserving the ideals of the Confederacy? Are they conserving valuable folkways and cultural traditions, or are they conserving systems of oppression? Are they conserving the life-changing, edifying, emancipating power of the ideas expressed in the Great Books of the Western Tradition, or are they conserving an aristocratic gatekeeping of so-called high culture? The primary danger the right falls into is that, while “keeping things the same” in a world always changing is very psychologically easy to get people to vote for, they often forego nuanced analysis of each aspect of the package of things to be preserved. It is very easy to drown the baby in the bathwater. While the Left thinks America’s moral identity is an ongoing process still to be achieved, the Right “thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful– the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change.” Those in power have always been able to abuse conservative psychology in order to protect their narrow interests, often to the detriment of the social whole. This is where we get the unholy Nixon alliance that united established powers like the oil and war industries with cultural conservatives seeking state recognition of evangelical Christianity or the preservation of Southern racial hierarchies. The basic human psychology that fears change is used to support resistance to change of all kinds, even change that would benefit broader humanity as well as the poor voters who vote against their material interests for psychological, identity-reaffirming reasons.
The right of the late 20th century embraced the preservation of a warlike national fiction of America developed during World War II, in which America was ‘the good guy.’ While the ‘good guy’ narrative had its basis in certain American ideals and actions contrasted against the evils of the Axis, once you uncritically believe you’re ‘the good guy’ you are liable to use that ethos to justify anything you do, even if what you do is no longer in alignment with what made you ‘the good guy’ in the first place. This is how we bungled our way into Vietnam, led by jingoistic nationalists who believed that America was right to use force to prevent the self-determination of the Vietnamese people. The American war machine, the military-industrial complex at the very lucrative intersection of oil, technology, and massive state funding based on a culture of fear, became the center of the national narrative being ‘conserved’ by the right (what we now call ‘neoconservatism’). The right’s national fiction essentially sees America as invincible rather than kind, and great rather than good. This has been used to justify CIA atrocities in the Cold War and the 21st century invasions of the Middle East. It leads, on one end, to a hollow fiction of America as goodness, blue jeans, Bud Lite, and a childish conception of individual freedom which discounts our democratic interconnectedness. On the other end, it leads to imperialism, rampant income inequality, the preservation of oppressive status quos, and inefficient tax cuts for the rich obtained through lies to the poor about worthless identitarian cultural politics. Now, the right has been fully taken over by illiberal nationalism; its national fiction has abandoned attachment to the ideals of America, and has fallen into the hands of those who peddle cheap nativism and aggression. It has enabled the rise of a weirdly authoritarian false Christian movement antithetical to both true Christianity and the true conservative principles of the Founding. This fiction is sustained and spread by a nihilistic media ecosystem devoted to abusing humanity’s worst animal psychology to incite reactionary anger and increase viewership without regard for truth or ideals. This warped national fiction has become so powerful that it convinced many people that the most patriotic thing they could do is invade their nation’s capital.
The stable capitalist duopoly system exemplified by Coke and Pepsi has taken over the ‘market’ for American national stories. Now, we have two different, flawed, incompatible stories which subsume almost everything else in our culture. Both stories are, for lack of a better word, shitty, and they are both content to cultivate spectators rather than agents. The decadent elites are okay with this situation, but nobody else is, although they often don’t know exactly what the problem is. As Ezra Klein acknowledged in his book Why We’re Polarized, the two political identities have effectively absorbed and realigned just about all other tribal identities in the US, to the point where we have two mega ur-identities composed of multiple identities stacked on top of each other (say, white, Christian, Alabama fan Republican or female, Californian, Jon Stewart fan Democrat). These ur-identities reinforce one another, and a threat to one becomes a threat to all. This mutual reinforcement makes them almost impossible to break down.
The primary medium via which our fictions are expressed is TV news, the campfire storyteller of our day. But unlike the myths of old, our new myth is disconnected, alienated, far away from the lived experiences and genuine communities of the nation it weakly binds together. Our myth is not told by our loving grandfather who cares for the future of the tribe, but by profit-driven propaganda institutions. The biases of the medium of TV news, with its market-driven nihilistic schizophrenic fast-paced drive to preserve attention at all costs without regard for depth, truth, or prosocial outcomes, means that the modern day national fiction is inherently distracting and disunifying. A good fiction should unify and meaningfully focus; our current dominant fictions do the opposite for structural reasons. And, as everyone can see, it’s only getting worse. Meanwhile, corporate America does everything it can to use a surface-level American myth to sell products unrelated to any genuine American ideals; for many people, America means McDonald’s, Starbucks, and the Chinese-owned Home Depot. As the value of the American identity falls, corporations are squeezing every last drop out of it on the way down, further fueling the fall. Furthermore, our education system has been in decline for a long time, again for many structural reasons. Education is supposed to be the way we enculturate our young into the tribe, initiate them into the group myth. But, in my public school, US History stopped at Watergate— fully 1/5 of America ago. Everything after that, apparently, is nothing, up for grabs, not history, just something your parents saw on the news. The implication is that it’s not important. Of course, it is important if you care about the future of the nation.
The current state of the American national fiction is disconnected, nihilistic, spectatorial, contextless, divided, and weak. The space once filled by identification with an inspiring, idealistic national myth is now filled by an incoherent hodgepodge of gaslighting corporate myths and two irreconcilable mega-identities incentivized to increasingly hate one another, driven by the interaction between political parties and conflict-driven TV news. This is mixed in with whatever is most distracting and entertaining on a base psychological level, and supported weakly by a couple books everyone read in high school. This sorry state of the national myth leaves us impotent and unable to positively reform our society in ways we increasingly desperately need. National pride is a precondition for national improvement. But if there’s no unifying national myth, is there even a nation? The whole experiment of American liberal nationalism is based on the idea that the only requirement for membership is shared belief in the national ideals. But to look at America today, it is impossible to identify any unifying national ideals. Lip service is paid to freedom and democracy in service of wildly different aims, and it is clear that nobody has a solid or shared grasp on what these ideas mean. At the end of the day, it is impossible to ignore this glaring problem: democracy is impossible under such conditions. Political democracy depends on everyone believing that they are interconnected, interdependent, and part of one great tribe, one boat that floats or sinks together. But people don’t believe that anymore, and we can see democracy crumbling as a result. When people and parties don’t even believe that their opponents are part of ‘the people’, all restraints, higher values, and bets are off; then only might makes right. People become willing to break down the structures of government, reject its legitimacy, and potentially shoot their opponents. We need to fix our national myth before it’s too late.
A New National Fiction
The myriad problems America faces in the 21st century cannot be overcome unless we have a massive cultural reformation in service of a new national fiction. We need economic reform to make our society more dynamic and liberating, but to achieve that we need political reform to fix our gunked up system; to achieve political reform, we first need cultural reform that can unlock the power of the people, change the way they interact with politics, and unite them under ideals and myths that inspire concrete action. Without a unifying, inspiring national myth based on genuine ideals, we will continue to spiral into division, impotence, frustration, and nihilism. We cannot ignore the deeply felt human need for tribal identification based on shared myths. We cannot ignore the way modern America fails to provide this, even though this mythmaking is the very origin of nation states. Intellectuals thought America was past the need for nationalism, and they were dead wrong; now the worst kinds of nationalism are resurgent around the world. Like it or not, even if you believe in a future beyond nations, the current situation demands that we pragmatically deal with the massive power of nationalism, and use it for positive purposes. If your goal is to transcend nationalism, then the only way out is through. If America, the blueprint for modern nations with the oldest constitution in the world, cannot figure out a healthy nationalism for itself, there is little hope that the majority of the rest of the world will either. Without a myth America is just eight corporations in a trenchcoat about to trip over itself, and when it falls it will crush billions. America has many problems in the 21st century, and none of them can be thoroughly addressed if we can’t even agree that we are a single tribe bound together on a course of common destiny. We are, inextricably, in this together; we need our fictions to emphasize this fact and align individual actions with this fact. We need a new national fiction which sinks genuine ideals into the hearts of Americans in order to guide national action. If we do this, the world will follow.
And that’s just the negative view. Not only will a new national fiction be able to avert catastrophe and solve some of our problems— it will also empower us, make us happier, make us a more creative and dynamic society. If we can saturate our society with a national fiction that believes in the genuine ideals of liberal democracy espoused earlier, the ideal of optimizing individual flourishing and societal flourishing, the ideal of maximizing Muchness in the romance of endlessly proliferating diversity, then we could build a utopic society the likes of which we haven’t permitted ourselves to dream of in a long time. Our new national fiction should be inspiring, pragmatically optimistic, and oriented towards the creation of utopia for our grandchildren. This is a noble way to use human reason. If we don’t believe in the possibility of utopia and therefore don’t act towards it, we will definitely be right. But if we do believe, and do act… then there’s a chance we’re right. The beautiful thing about humans is that they can take such chances on faith. This existential faith makes their lives feel meaningful, whether or not they succeed. As Emily Dickinson wrote in a precursor to American Pragmatism, “’Tis so much joy! ‘Tis so much joy! / If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I / Have ventured all upon a throw; / Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so / This side the victory! // Life is but life, and death but death! / Bliss is but bliss, and breath but breath! / And if, indeed, I fail / At least to know the worst is sweet. / Defeat means nothing but defeat, / No drearier can prevail! // And if I gain— oh, gun at sea, / Oh bells that in the steeples be, / At first repeat it slow! / For heaven is a different thing / Conjectured, and waked sudden in, / And might o’erwhelm me so!” Life is to be chanced! Faith and failure are beautiful. One day we could wake up to heaven on earth.
Creating a new national myth will not be easy. The forces against it are strong. We must overcome the dead-end stranglehold of the two-party system, and overcome the incoherent media environment created by television and remediated by social media. But we must try, because it has become clear to me that, despite the long odds, this is still the best and only way America can be saved, the best and only way to prevent myriad catastrophes, dissolutions, and sufferings, the best and only chance we have at redirecting our trajectory from dystopia to utopia.
There is only one identity potentially large enough and strong enough to overcome the two partisan mega-identities currently tearing America apart with completely irreconcilable epistemologies and mythologies, and that is the American identity. As Ezra Klein’s research showed, it is nearly impossible to convince someone to change their mind when it threatens some aspect of their identity, even with all the facts in the world. Our psychology is too hard-wired to defend the tribe over the truth. If you come straight at them and try to change their mind, they will resist, and it will only make their rigid identity-based beliefs stronger, continuing the spiraling siloing effect. What you have to do is be more subtle, and offer them a psychological ‘out.’ You need to appeal to another one of their identities; by framing the piece of truth you offer as in alignment with one of their identities, they may accept it, even if it goes against another one of their identities. Within them, the tension between the two identities can be resolved by the presence of facts or a good argument, and they can feel safe defending the side that’s more true, because it still reaffirms one of their identities. Psychologically, they have a tribe on their side either way, which makes it safe to change one’s mind and consider seriously what is most true. One will not change their mind no matter what if it means betraying the group-think of their only tribe; this is one reason why being part of a wide diversity of tribes is good for discourse and good for people. However, the two partisan ur-identities have absorbed or aligned with many of the other possible identities in America. Besides, offering people different arguments based on hundreds of tiny tribal alignments is not a workable solution to the problem of partisanship and the need for unity. No, there is only one identity capacious enough to transcend partisanship, and that is the American identity.
The American identity is a sleeping giant. You might say it is currently undervalued; like a stock, we who wish to rewrite the American myth want to buy America low and sell high. A majority of Americans claim to identify with America in some way. Even most partisanship is framed in this way: in a partisan’s view, the other side is bad because it’s destroying America, while their particular party has a monopoly on Americanness. Of course, this flies in the face of America’s explicitly pluralistic ideals, but the parties are very powerful entities and have done a great job of convincing their followers that they represent true Americanness. What we need to do is break this connection, and demonstrate that neither party represents true Americanness. We need to associate true Americanness with a rejection of the two party system entirely. We need to articulate a quality, compelling, inspiring, well-grounded, well-argued, universally appealing vision of what it means to be American. It must appeal to elements from both partisan myths, while moving beyond them. For example, we ought to appeal to certain historical Americans and explicitly reference their statements on America, freedom, democracy, partisanship, etc; this will appeal to conservatives by framing the new American myth as deeply grounded in the best of what America already is. We also ought to appeal to the idea of America as fundamentally unachieved, something to be improved and progressed, to appeal to progressives. We need to rekindle the sense that America is a grand experiment in common humanity, and that to continue the grand experiment we must focus on what we share in common and defeat the insidiously divisive two-party system in the name of a truer America worthy of pride.
How can we overcome the incoherence and distraction of the warped corporate media environment? The only way I see to do this is for the new national fiction project to be a broad and diverse movement across all mediums, working separately in service of recreating the American myth through every possible avenue. We need writers, poets, novelists, journalists to write the new national fiction; we need singers, musicians, bands, rappers to make American music; we need TV shows and movies to articulate genuine American ideals; we need visual artists and TikTok influencers to contribute to a new kind of positive nationalism. We need to make it cool, make it a movement, especially among young people, but involving everyone. If the cultural movement is successful on some of these avenues, then the central corporate media structures will eventually have no choice but to address it, even if they address it problematically. They will be forced to at least give it more attention. The more the meme spreads, the stronger it gets, and more people will come to believe in a new America.
And it’s not only artists we need to believe in the project of creating a new national myth. The project of refounding America requires the belief of scientists, engineers, coders— the people who will be building the physical new world, building more democratic social networks, building more equitable energy grids, building more prosocial cities, building the technology that will shape the future of the country. The ideals that shape the shapers of these technologies matter. The things they build will become concrete examples of the new myth, helping to write it and spread it. The goal is nothing less than a culture of prosocial national pride spreading memetically.
What are some core things the new national fiction must do? Well, first of all, it must deeply explore the core ideals of America in order to articulate and express them in powerful ways. It must engage with some of the ideas explored earlier in this essay, ideas of liberty, democracy, independence and interdependence, political economy, selfhood, the problem of imperfect eusociality, the dream of utopia, the relationship between idealism and pragmatism, the relationship between civilization and nature, the nature of humanity, and the emergence of novelty, just to name a few of the core issues. Since America appeals to common humanity, a quest to understand America is an excellent way to launch a broader quest to understand humanity. Big terms like ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ have a lot of power; many people pay them lip-service, but few have a deep feeling for what they mean. We need to articulate exactly what we mean by these big words, and then use them to marshal people together. Oh, you believe in liberty? Then help increase the freedom of all Americans. Oh, you believe in democracy? Then abandon your political party. We need to produce robust understandings of these core ideals and then use them for positive progress through concrete action.
The new national fiction must fearlessly deal with the best and the worst of the American past. We must not shy away from the biggest failures and crimes; they are an essential part of the story; we must honor them by growing from them. “Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of,” said Rorty. If we ignore any part of our past, we lose a valuable source of meaning and education; furthermore, that part is bound to bubble up again later, like a suppressed memory. We have the power to write the history of our nation as a story, but that does not mean we should gloss over anything or only take an optimistic view. A truer, more robust optimism can be cultivated by framing past failures within a story of growth. Humans are not meant to be perfect; they are meant to grow. Having compassion for our ancestors in their contexts will be essential in humanizing them, and humanizing them places them in the same story as us.
Luckily for us, we have what Cornel West calls “the deep democratic tradition” to support our project. Throughout American history, despite everything that happened, good people, brilliant people, empowered by the American context and seeing themselves within it, have been thinking about what democracy, liberty, and America mean. They’ve thought about what America is, and what it could be. They have articulated higher visions of America. These people— primarily philosophers, poets, artists, and activists— have kept a torch burning for the American ideal, no matter how far the American reality has fallen below that ideal. We have Ralph Waldo Emerson teaching us how to be genuine individuals and independent thinkers, all the while knowing that we are connected to all things. We have Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. teaching us how to stand up for our individual conscience even against the threat of the state, one of them in service of the sovereign individual and the other in service of the dream of the Beloved Community of democracy. We have Toni Morrison teaching us how to find community in the face of oppression, and James Baldwin teaching us how to believe in the dream of a loving America despite bearing the brunt of its historical failures. We have Walt Whitman and John Dewey reminding us that we are social before we are individual, that we are made up of everyone around us. We have Muriel Rukeyser showing us the connection between poetry, democracy, and peace. We have Jean Toomer illustrating the transcendence of race and we have Elizabeth Cady Stanton fighting for the rights of women. We have a history of resisting imperialism running from Herman Melville through William James down to activists of the present day. The works of these great thinkers who have borne the torch of the deep democratic tradition form our greatest weapon in the fight to recreate the fiction of America. It turns out a lot of the raw materials we’ll need are already here— we just need to put them together, rearticulate them, make them alive again. Achieving our country means conservatively returning to the great ancestors, extending their spirit through the present day, and progressing from them. This will form the continuity of the story of America.
A final core characteristic of the new national fiction will be its diversity of expression. We know that more interactions between more diverse things produces more Muchness, more novelty, more Good. This generation ends up benefitting the whole universe as it grows richer. Our new national fiction will grow richer and richer the more viewpoints and expressions that are added to it. Every American experience is a part of the fiction of the nation. Every American experience is part of the unfolding work of art that is America. Every person is welcome to contribute their verse. The more experiences collected and shared, the more truly ‘representative’ the fiction will become. Of course, we must make sure that all these diverse viewpoints in some way point towards what is common to all, to our shared Americanness, to our shared humanity. We must articulate unity in diversity and diversity in unity.
For my part in the creation of our new national fiction, I have been working for the last 5 years on a Great American Novel project. It started when I was 17, during the 2016 election, when I realized that American culture was pretty deeply broken. I looked around me and saw that nobody was confronting the core problem. So, that next summer, I worked at a burrito shop, saved up $900, and then spent two months hitchhiking 8000 miles around America. I had never really left New England until then. I did a full loop around the country, saw the beauty of the continent, and fell in love with riding the roads of America. I met hundreds of kind strangers, had interesting discussions, learned about different places, and had adventures you wouldn’t believe. I proved that the culture of fear that seemed to dominate most suburban thinking on the issue of trusting strangers was wrong. People are mostly good, deeply good. Americans can be trusted. Our fellow countrymen are our neighbors in the deepest sense of the word, and we have more in common than we have differences. How can you have a democracy if you can’t trust strangers? Those strangers’ votes are entangled with your own future. We are in this together. When you actually talk to people from outside your bubble, you realize that the only things really separating us are different stories we’ve been told. If we could only agree on a story, then everything would go much more smoothly for democracy from there. After hitchhiking, I believed in Americans, even those who disagreed with me, and I believed in America, even the parts of it I wanted to change.
That was how I had the idea for the Great American Novel. Of course, it’s a meme that’s existed for 200 years, but then again, where is it? The ideal, the prophecy, has never been achieved; even if it had, it would need updating for the 21st century. So, I started reading everything I could that had to do with the essence of America. I made it my life mission to read all the greatest American philosophy, poetry, literature, and thought. I wanted to see what would happen to someone’s brain if they did that; 5 years in, I can say it does some pretty interesting things, although I’m nowhere near done yet. There is a web of dialogue stretching across American history, and I am beginning to see the broader contours, connections, and directions of this web. This will enable me not only to share this rich tradition with modern Americans who have forgotten it; it will also enable me to more effectively contribute my verse.
Of course, nobody wants to read a book about books. If you want to write the Great American Novel, the easiest way to do it is to live it, to live a life worth writing about. In my mind, it became obvious that the Great American Novel would need to take place in all 50 states; it would need to genuinely attempt to represent the diversity of American nature and the diversity of American people. Plus it had to be genuinely exciting, a real adventure, a real Hero’s Journey. Therefore, the Great American Novel must be a road novel. Eventually I realized that I had to drop out of Harvard to pursue my dreams. I hitchhiked some more, until I realized I could continue my adventures in a school bus home. I could live on the road, and carry all my books with me. I could live the adventure full time. So, I worked hard and built the home I’m living in now, my big blue school bus. I’m finishing this essay in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho on my redwood writing desk. In the last 5 years, I have hitchhiked over 20,000 miles, driven my bus over 30,000 miles, read hundreds of books, talked to thousands of diverse American strangers, and had more crazy adventures than some people have in a lifetime. I can’t wait to tell you all about it.
I believe the Great American Novel Project will eventually begin to pick up steam and get recognized. I plan on influencing the culture with essays and movements long before the novel is ever finished. The project is really more about a journey than about a book. Hopefully, this project will inspire others to work on their own projects to contribute to the new fiction of the nation, to help refound America. In fact, I’m counting on that. I know I can’t do this alone. While the single Great American Novel is a worthy ideal, the true Great American Novel has always been and always will be the sum of all the great American novels, the pantheon of great American novels, the congress of great American novels. In truth, the ultimate Great American Novel is the nation itself. Not only do I want to see artworks of all mediums and activists of all stripes pursuing the dream of recreating America’s mythology; I want direct competitors for the Great American Novel. Competition within cooperation, competition in which you both ultimately want the same thing that benefits everyone in the tribe, is the healthiest form of competition, and it can give rise to beautiful things. So consider this a call to write your own Great American Novel. The competition will make both of our stories stronger, and ultimately everyone benefits. Of course, the American story is always ongoing, always oriented toward the future. Whitman knew that one day someone like me would surpass him, and he welcomed that as the best teachers do; one day, I hope someone will surpass me. I’m sure the America of the future will need its own new fictions when ours have grown old. But for now, we of the 21st century have this task before us. It is our moment on the stage of history.
The fiction of the nation is in a terrible state, and it is up to us to recreate it. We did not choose to be characters written into this great story. But the magical thing about being human is that, even though we did not choose the script so far, we can write the future. We are the characters that, growing conscious, become the authors. Life is our lucid dream; let’s imagine a better life and make it real. Let’s imagine a better America and make it real. After all, the fiction of the nation is unfinished.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 