My teaching this semester has centered on the meanings of American citizenship, with an eye toward the election that is now over, though its dangerous consequences have yet to be felt — and they will be felt.
Months ago, I shared with my students the report of the 1776 Commission hastily appointed by then-President Donald Trump in September 2020, a slick piece of propaganda designed to counter The New York Times’ 1619 Project — which highlights the legacies of slavery in American history — by sermonizing on the greatness of the Founding Fathers and the evils of all forms of progressivism. We spent some time discussing the report, with an emphasis on one of its key texts: “The foundation of our republic planted the seeds of the death of slavery in America. The Declaration’s unqualified proclamation of human equality flatly contradicted the existence of human bondage and, along with the Constitution’s compromises understood in light of that proposition, set the stage for abolition.”
The course I’m teaching traces the history of arguments about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. A core theme is that Thomas Jefferson’s preamble, which states that “all men are created equal,” far exceeded his own complex intentions as a slave owner who refused to advocate abolition, and indeed inspired political radicalism in the 19th century and beyond. We have discussed how Elizabeth Cady Stanton, David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass and many other American abolitionists drew explicitly on the language of the preamble to denounce inequality and support demands for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery and egalitarian citizenship. We’ve lately been discussing Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois and Eugene Debs, whose famous 1895 “Liberty” speech, given after his release from imprisonment for his leadership of the 1894 Pullman strike, begins with the proud declaration that “Manifestly the spirit of ’76 survives” — invoking the idea of liberty’s triumph over despotism to support a campaign for unionization and greater workers’ rights.
As these important texts indicate, it is correct, in a way, to say that Jefferson’s words planted “the seed” of further liberation. But, as I explained to my students, if we are serious about this metaphor, we need to fully explore its logic. When we do, we can see how much false comfort it provides and how flawed it is, for two questions immediately arise.
First, how much work — extraordinary, life-threatening, self-sacrificing work, work that involved no guarantee of success (Martin Luther King Jr.’s image of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice notwithstanding) — was necessary to get that seed to “blossom” in liberatory ways? Something that takes almost a century, and requires enormous blood, sweat and tears — including a civil war — hardly seems “automatic.”
Second, if some part of the declaration planted the “seed” of abolition and emancipation, is it not also true that other parts of the declaration itself — though not the preamble’s opening lines — implanted the seed of resistance to abolition and emancipation, and further strengthened and embedded the institution of slavery, and of reaction more generally?
I reminded my students that if Douglass and Garrison drew on the declaration, so too did Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, and the authors of the declarations of secession by every Confederate state, who cited the Declaration of Independence as a blueprint for secession and claimed that if the rights of the (white) people of the Southern states were attacked — as they believed abolition threatened to do — it was their right and duty “to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” (See especially the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina From the Federal Union” issued by the Confederate States of America on Dec. 24, 1860.)
My point is that if the Declaration of Independence is a “seed,” it is a strange seed indeed, for it is capable of germinating both freedom and its antithesis, slavery. And while I have been teaching versions of this course for over two decades, many fine historians have made similar arguments, including Aziz Rana in “The Two Faces of American Freedom” (2010) and Jefferson Cowie in “Freedom’s Dominion” (2022).
Nov. 6 was the MAGA movement’s version of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America,” and a glorious morning it was, for Trump and those who voted for him. Make no mistake about it, his decisive win, in both the Electoral College and the popular vote, has been powered by a genuine movement, one that is deeply embedded in U.S. political culture and is powered by a profound and widespread resentment that the resurrected Trump himself, an almost Christ-like figure, incarnates.
Back in 2016, I wrote that it was a huge mistake to view Trump as an aberration or a Russian recruit, because he is 100% made in America. It has never been a surprise to me that the things he stands for are things that many millions of Americans are happy to get behind, just as it has never been a surprise that the broadly progressive and liberal values that many of us hold are despised by large swaths of the country. If I had any doubts about this, they were erased the minute I made Bloomington — a liberal enclave in conservative, red-state Indiana — my home back in 1987.
I never thought that Trump’s defeat this time was inevitable, even in the face of his two impeachments, his awful handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, his civil and criminal convictions, or even the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that he engineered and incited. I knew it would be close — or at least I thought I knew this. And yet, I confess, I did not think he would win so decisively, especially in the popular vote. Deep down I thought, or at least hoped, with some thread of reason, that his recent crescendo of fascism, his manifest racism and misogyny, and the number of supposedly respected establishment figures who denounced these things would allow Kamala Harris to scratch out a victory. I expected Trump to do everything in his power to litigate and obstruct. I did not expect that he would so quickly be positioned to give an acceptance speech that would be universally acclaimed as a true victory. In a matter of hours, it was all over. Who knew?
Trump is 100% American. That’s for sure. And that ought to be very sobering.
Joe Biden’s entire presidency has centered on the appeal to a rhetoric of “democracy” grounded in the Declaration of Independence’s preamble and, especially, its opening line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [Biden always misleadingly inserted ‘and women’] are created equal.” Biden gave speeches, brilliant speeches, that rehearsed a lineage of liberation that included the abolitionists and the suffragettes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, and that repeatedly distinguished between the light of “democracy” and the darkness of “autocracy” or “authoritarianism,” which lately even he — given license by Trump’s own former generals — has called “fascism.”
For a brief period, it seemed like Biden’s presidency might actually herald a serious defense of America’s weak, fragile and corrupt version of democracy. Then Biden faced Republican political obstruction, aided by Senate rules that require 60% supermajorities to pass ordinary legislation. And he faltered, as a president and as a campaigner. Harris picked up the torch with enthusiasm and had a seemingly broad base of support — a “popular front” bringing together people across the political spectrum, from the conservative Liz Cheney to the progressive Bernie Sanders, though in the end it proved to be less popular than many imagined. She quickly shifted from the rhetoric of “democracy” to that of “freedom,” sensibly linking this theme to the awful and unpopular Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court ruling of 2022 that overturned Roe v. Wade, imagining that she could win as the defender of the rights of women. At the same time, Harris sounded much the same theme as Biden, offering a generically progressive narrative in which we are the heirs of previous generations who struggled nobly to force the nation to realize an egalitarian promise.
In 1953, the distinguished historian Clinton Rossiter published a book called “Seedtime of the Republic.” Fortifying an ascendant national myth echoed in the rhetoric of Biden and Harris — and also the whitewashed sections of Trump’s own 1776 Commission report — Rossiter identified postwar American liberalism as the product of a tradition of liberation traceable to the Declaration of Independence. Rossiter’s was not an especially progressive version of liberation. But, like many before and after him, he believed what Biden has so often said about the cruelties of Trumpism: “That’s not us, that’s not who we are, we are Americans.”
And Biden and Harris are Americans. While they are hardly the best or most authentic heirs to the tradition of Stanton and Douglass and MLK, that tradition is real, and it has been heartening that they have so consistently invoked it — even if their deeds often did not match their words. They have spoken for a pluralistic America. And they have been repudiated.
Trump is also an American. Stephen Miller and JD Vance and Marjorie Taylor Green and Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell are Americans too. And they are also heirs of an august American tradition of sorts, whose luminaries include Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Ku Klux Klan leader Hiram Wesley Evans, Charles Lindbergh and the isolationist WWII-era America First Committee, the fascist-sympathizing Rev. Charles Coughlin, segregationist Gov. George Wallace, “paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan — and Trump himself. Americans all, and not simply Americans, but “patriots” determined to root out and defeat and even eradicate those “enemies from within” deemed insufficiently “American.”
It would appear that a healthy majority of over 74 million American voters identify with this “America,” and they seem able to accept an agenda of “eradication” likely to silence, deport and marginalize millions of their fellow citizens.
Now they celebrate their project of making America great again. It has won a decisive electoral and political victory, giving the MAGA agenda control of the White House, the Senate, the Supreme Court and, quite likely, the House of Representatives as well, not to speak of statehouses across the country.
As for those of us who stand for a different, more inclusive America — we have been repudiated by the electorate, who responded to Trump’s 2020-21 effort to stay in power through false claims of victory by believing his lies and giving him an actual victory. In so doing, these Trump voters have retrospectively erased not simply Trump’s real criminal liability but the precarious legitimacy of the Biden presidency itself. At best, Biden will be remembered as a feckless leader who briefly stewarded political normality. At worst, he will be remembered as the man whose mistakes — including immoral support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes — gave Trump life, and whose moment briefly interrupted the ascendancy of Trumpism. He is surely a politically broken man. And the Democratic Party he led — it too is broken. That is where we are today.
As former U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill put it on MSNBC the morning after the election, it turns out that Trump understood the American electorate, and American political culture, better than “we” did. Trump’s version of America is apparently the version of most American voters, who have now given it further legitimation and power.
On Nov. 5, Jamelle Bouie, one of the sharpest commentators around, published a heartfelt appeal in The New York Times with the headline, “Don’t Let Trump Make America Into an Image of Himself.” Bouie is no naif. A contributor to the 1619 Project, he has for years consistently written about the very complex discursive and political history of the U.S., underscoring how much struggle has been necessary to achieve even fragile gains and emphasizing how much more is necessary for democratic equality to be achieved. Bouie knows that Trump is an authentic, if especially perverse and toxic, representative of a very real version of “who we are,” one with a real and violent history.
But last week, Bouie held out the hope that the American electoral process would reject that version of “America” in favor of one that is more inclusive, less angry and, quite frankly, less fascistic. No celebrant of “Biden-Harris-Walz,” no enthusiast for Liz Cheney or Gens. James Mattis and John Kelly, he understood that a Democratic victory would represent the possibility of some progress, while a Trump victory would represent not simply its defeat, but the triumph of a deeply reactionary, xenophobic and possibly fascistic alternative.
Like Bouie, I too held out such a hope. And all of us who did were treated to a rude awakening. This year’s election represents a new seedtime of the republic, under the leadership of a fully Trumpist Republican Party that has power, confidence and an alarming vision of the future.
All is not lost. New beginnings are always possible, and often in the most unexpected of times and places. But these are dark days for everyone who cares about human rights, the Constitution, democratic values or even just simple human decency.
And anyone who says, now, that they can see a political way out is deluding themselves. A new day is dawning for Trump and his America. Whether there is a “we” who might yet chart a path through the next four years to a better America beyond them is an open question.
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