America is Both

There is no sentence in America more famous than “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” Declared before the world 250 years ago. In second place is simply the phrase “We, the People,” In both cases, much of the text around these famous words is forgotten, along with its significance. But the ideas that we are all born equal, that we have inalienable rights, that the People are sovereign: these are at the core of the American democratic religion.

Ours is a religion of saints and martyrs. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington always vie for the highest seats, with Lincoln always close behind. Madison is the saint of institutions and political architecture, FDR perhaps the last elected official to truly gain that status.

After centuries of white men and presidents, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. were added to this canon of American saints—at some point and in some regions of the country. But a canon of saints is precisely what continued to get handed down. Perhaps some schools in some districts took some time to dwell on the unsaintly qualities of some of these figures, or the systematic character of certain persistent evils in our history.

Yet by and large they have not and still do not. Americans have always taken our history with a heavy dose of hagiography. And so American children who grow up with enough intellectual curiosity to read history with clear eyes frequently end up feeling betrayed by the lies their teacher told them. An all too common story for left-liberals is pure disenchantment. Adults on the right, meanwhile, double down on the mythology at the expense of reality.

Disappointed cynicism and defensive idolatry both have a similar thought-terminating quality to them. An unwillingness to face the weight of reality in its totality. America is not merely the arc of history bending towards justice, nor merely justice delayed or outright denied. It is not merely the promise implicit in the Declaration of Independence nor the genocide of indigenous peoples. It certainly is not “somewhere in the middle.”

America is both.

“The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” and the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Slavery and abolitionism.

John C. Calhoun and Harriet Tubman.

Reconstruction and Redemption.

Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Division.

MAGA and the Resistance.

Jonathan Ross and Renée Good.

We’re the country that built continent-crossing railroads and sky-scraping towers and the country that has forgotten how to do exactly that. We’re the country that built the greatest system of publicly funded science in the world and the country that is burning that system down for no particular reason. The arsenal of democracy and unable to keep up with Russian munitions production. The country of PEPFAR and the country that pulled the rug out from millions of sick children worldwide. The country that defeated the slave power and fascism in war and the country who pursued wars of arrogance in Vietnam and Iraq. The country of the Golden Door and the country of mass deportation. The country of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and of Trump’s UFC match.

America is both. Accepting this does not mean surrendering to the way things are. It means accepting responsibility for your part in that history. Your responsibility to do what you can to nudge us towards being more of one than the other, away from fascist consolidation and towards 21st century Reconstruction.

America is both, and has been for 250 years.

Today we will no doubt see many quotes from Thomas Jefferson, a troubled figure who very much embodies both sides of our history. I will instead quote a different and more recent troubled figure: “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Featured image is John C. Calhoun by George Peter Alexander Healy, and a mural of Harriet Tubman, picture taken by Wikimaribarre