A provocative premise. George Packer has a less binary formulation in LAST BEST HOPE, where he identifies four Americas. Free America is the Reagan-esque version, generally socially permissive with a focus on the international and domestic marketplace (your 1776 myth figures prominently here). Real America is the Palin-esque version -- now the MAGA view, leaning heavily toward the theocratic myth. Smart America is the Clinton/Obama model, the moderate elites. And Just America is everything you've said about the age of atonement.
Sometimes student writing is an interesting mirror for your own pedagogy. Back in 2016, while I was still teaching full-time, I added an essay question to my American Literature exam: What makes America great? The most memorable response was a two-part essay. The first half began, "America is not great. America has never been great." And then it went from the atrocities committed by Columbus and other conquistadores through the Native American Holocaust and slavery -- very much the 1619 version. The second half began, "America is great. America has always been great." And that version ran through the legacy of dissenters, beginning with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and then featuring voices of resistance (Douglass, Jacobs) and white abolitionists (John Woolman, Thoreau).
The roots of Just America run deep -- all the way back to the beginning. I'm not sure I have the space here to do it justice, but there is a kind of irreconcilable contradiction in the oppression/opportunity dialectic when one thinks about immigration. Nearly everyone who emigrated to America was oppressed (some wealthy exceptions originally, I guess) before they found opportunity. The American Dream really took hold in the nineteenth-century, the first Age of Migration, and it seemed to hold reasonably steady through the mid-twentieth century. Vietnam, it seems, marked the end of that illusion. I suppose the Obama/MLK line on this is the long arc of history bending toward justice -- for women and people of color. But it's kind of unbelievable to think that women's suffrage did not succeed until 1920. And the histories of redlining are also impossible to ignore.
What you're talking about are myths of identity. But the myth of opportunity is a competing narrative -- and the core of it is that anyone, regardless of how oppressed they once were, can find a way to make it in America. I think the death of that myth is perhaps the most crushing of all. In fact, Substack is kind of a microcosm of it: the illusion that anyone can turn a side hustle into a full-time job, when the deck is clearly stacked, and anyone who beats those odds is the outlier, not the rule.
A provocative premise. George Packer has a less binary formulation in LAST BEST HOPE, where he identifies four Americas. Free America is the Reagan-esque version, generally socially permissive with a focus on the international and domestic marketplace (your 1776 myth figures prominently here). Real America is the Palin-esque version -- now the MAGA view, leaning heavily toward the theocratic myth. Smart America is the Clinton/Obama model, the moderate elites. And Just America is everything you've said about the age of atonement.
Sometimes student writing is an interesting mirror for your own pedagogy. Back in 2016, while I was still teaching full-time, I added an essay question to my American Literature exam: What makes America great? The most memorable response was a two-part essay. The first half began, "America is not great. America has never been great." And then it went from the atrocities committed by Columbus and other conquistadores through the Native American Holocaust and slavery -- very much the 1619 version. The second half began, "America is great. America has always been great." And that version ran through the legacy of dissenters, beginning with Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and then featuring voices of resistance (Douglass, Jacobs) and white abolitionists (John Woolman, Thoreau).
The roots of Just America run deep -- all the way back to the beginning. I'm not sure I have the space here to do it justice, but there is a kind of irreconcilable contradiction in the oppression/opportunity dialectic when one thinks about immigration. Nearly everyone who emigrated to America was oppressed (some wealthy exceptions originally, I guess) before they found opportunity. The American Dream really took hold in the nineteenth-century, the first Age of Migration, and it seemed to hold reasonably steady through the mid-twentieth century. Vietnam, it seems, marked the end of that illusion. I suppose the Obama/MLK line on this is the long arc of history bending toward justice -- for women and people of color. But it's kind of unbelievable to think that women's suffrage did not succeed until 1920. And the histories of redlining are also impossible to ignore.
What you're talking about are myths of identity. But the myth of opportunity is a competing narrative -- and the core of it is that anyone, regardless of how oppressed they once were, can find a way to make it in America. I think the death of that myth is perhaps the most crushing of all. In fact, Substack is kind of a microcosm of it: the illusion that anyone can turn a side hustle into a full-time job, when the deck is clearly stacked, and anyone who beats those odds is the outlier, not the rule.