Contemplating American History's Dysfunctional Continuities on Independence Day
“Change over time” is the simplest way to define history. As a young historian, I was very much attuned to the moments of break and rupture in history. My doctoral advisor, whose research focused on such events, further encouraged this emphasis. I also studied 19th century German history, a field where historians had fought to demonstrate its importance in its own right, rather than searching for the seeds of Hitler. For that reason, I looked to the upheavals of World War I for the answer to that issue, not the long stretch of German history.
Over time, however, I found myself becoming much more attuned to the continuities of history, forces so strong that they could weather multiple breaks. Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings on the French Revolution, for example, showed how, despite the massive changes brought by the revolution, Napoleon, and the restoration of the monarchy, in every era the power of France’s national government increased. Helmut Walser Smith’s more recent writings in my own field also swung me over to Team Continuity rather than Team Break.
Like French and German history, US history has its own continuities, many of them harmful. This Independence Day I am not feeling too patriotic, still smarting from the aftermath of a corrupt and extreme Supreme Court’s decisions. Aside from the exception of the Warren Court, the Supreme Court’s limitations of individual rights have been a consistent continuity in American history. This institution denied Dred Scott his freedom, gutted the 14th Amendment and labor rights in the Gilded Age, endorsed segregation and forced sterilization, and in recent years has struck blows against voting rights, gun control, campaign finance reform, unions, and reproductive rights. Apart from a couple of exceptional episodes, the Court has tended to narrow the reach of the Constitution and to favor the interests of capital and property. A court that says “free speech” protects unlimited monetary influence on elections by corporations and discrimination against LGBTQ people is not a democratic institution.
Historian Jefferson Cowie has written two books illustrating the dysfunctional continuities of American history that I want to draw from here: The Great Exception and Freedom’s Dominion. The Great Exception’s title comes from his understanding of the New Deal. For a long time, historians thought of the New Deal as a break from the past that provided the basis for a new, social democratic arrangement. Writing after decades of neoliberalism, Cowie instead sees the New Deal as the product of a very exceptional set of circumstances. The Great Depression created the necessary shock to break down social divisions and what I think of as the “American Ideology.” Once those conditions changed, the divisions in American society prevented the New Deal order from surviving.
Cleavages of race, ethnicity, region, religion, and national origin had traditionally been used to keep workers divided. The “wages of whiteness” discussed by WEB Du Bois and later David Roediger made it so native-born white workers accepted white privilege as compensation, and European immigrants fought to be included as “white” rather than to join in solidarity with people of color. Recent works, such as Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, illustrate how this dynamic continues. We can see it in Donald Trump’s popularity among working-class white voters, who see immigrants as their enemy rather than fellow workers in a common struggle.
Cowie also discusses important ideological assumptions that have held fast over time that prevent changes to the country’s economic system. I tend to call this the American Ideology, since the people who profess it act as if it is key to American identity itself. This ideology should be a familiar one, so familiar that it’s like the air we breathe. It says that individuals are ultimately responsible for their fate in society, that they can get ahead through hard work alone, and that government intervention in the economy saps the individualistic ethos that is the true lifespring of prosperity.
The discourse around student loan debt is a good example of this. After deindustrialization, more careers demanded education, governments defunded universities thus driving up tuition, and young people had to make up the difference by taking out massive loans with little guidance. At the same time, they graduated into an economy where housing and other basic necessities are more expensive and wages stagnant. The American Ideology encourages people to look at this tangle of social and political failures and say, “well, you took out the money, so you should pay it back!" It even encourages those not harmed by this to treat those who were with resentment and hostility. It’s the same dynamic behind the Lochner cases, which said that if workers were being exploited, they should simply negotiate better individual terms or choose another employer.
Cowie’s more recent book, Freedom’s Dominion, explores continuities around a powerful idea of freedom from the 19th century to today that links whiteness and opposition to the federal government. He focuses on Barbour County, Alabama, to show the concrete ways this has played out over time in a specific place. Cowie finds that the antipathy to the federal government among rank and file white conservatives has a lot to do with a historical continuity: the federal government has been the most consistent protector of minority rights in our Constitutional system.
He begins the book by talking about how the federal government defended Creek lands against intrusions by white settlers that broke treaties. The whites of Barbour County saw this not as protecting the freedom of an oppressed group, but as restricting their freedom to take native land. Similarly, the county’s slaveowners joined the Confederacy, claiming the freedom to control their “property.” The same people joined the Klan after the war and violently prevented Black freedmen from voting, seeing federal interventions to ensure the right to vote as tyranny. Freedom to them was not equal rights for all, but a white supremacy that allowed them to do and take whatever they wanted while keeping others below them. Historically the federal government has been the only arm of the state capable of stopping them.
This conception of freedom lies at the heart of the modern conservative movement. Freedom means being able to deny LBGTQ people service, to cite a recent court case. During COVID another aspect of this idea of freedom, of not having any social obligations beyond one’s own self-aggrandizement, expressed itself in seemingly insane paroxysms of anti-vaccine and anti-mitigation hysteria.
The American Ideology was not only present in the “let them eat cake” mentality of the student loan debt decision, it also had a lot to do with the affirmative action case. The American Ideology says that we are all the authors of our individual fates, meaning that there is no such thing as systemic racism, and thus no need to have any remedy for it.
It would be easy to think of the American Ideology as limited to the political Right, but it is in fact, the base ideology of the majority of the country. I live and work in very liberal spaces, and have heard loud complaints about student loan forgiveness and very vocal contempt for affirmative action. (
The fact that both the American Ideology and white supremacist ideas of freedom still persist in the popular imagination is not a happy thought. However, I think naming these things can help us achieve a better America. Too many liberals are blinded by the Enlightenment and think just showering facts on the ignorant will change their minds. That’s not how politics works.
Instead, progressives and leftists need to articulate their own definition of freedom. We need to discuss this in terms of positive freedoms so often ignored: the freedom to be healthy, the freedom to be secure, the freedom to be educated, the freedom to be who you are, the freedom that comes from being properly compensated for your labor. Continuities are fearsome things, but they are not unbreakable.