One of my great regrets is never having studied Australian history. It got such a bad rap in primary school — “explorers, explorers, explorers” — that by high school and then university, anything sounded better. Eventually, however, I realised there was a gaping hole in my background understanding of many of the issues I was called upon to write about authoritatively. So, I approached one of our universities to see if I could resume my studies by embarking on a higher degree program in Australian history.
That was when I learned something about the scholarly ‘darg’, which, at that time, controlled academia: Despite eight years’ history studies at high school and university, the university powers-that-be decreed that I was qualified to apply my scholastic training in ‘history method’ and experience only to the particular aspect of history I had taken in my final undergraduate year. So, Vale Australian history! And benvenuto, American history!
Nevertheless, as irrelevant as American history proved to be in my daily life, there have been times when that intense study over two years under the tutelage of some very fine American scholars has given me insight and awareness I would not have acquired had I not been forced to run the academic gauntlet into a course in which I had no real interest.
I had such a moment of déjà vu during the recent upheaval that followed the death of African-American George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Although, in a way, the rioting and bloodshed could be said to be only the latest flare-up in the chronic racial conflicts dogging the United States since the Little Rock, Arkansas, school crisis of 1957, I was still glued to the ABC News channel’s enthralling live transmission. Whereupon the anchor crossed to a US insider to add substance to that coverage.
The insider, whose name I missed but let’s call him ‘Irving’ for luck, had been an adviser to Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden when he was vice-president under Barack Obama. More revealing than the significance of how close to real power ‘Irving’ had been, was the message he quite deliberately wished to convey to his Australian audience and what I gleaned to be the assumptions underpinning that message.
‘Irving’ was seriously bothered by the hard-core Trump supporters — something like 35 per cent of American voters, he guessed — who were utterly unshaken by the inflammatory response of the President to the social fracturing of the US after the death of Floyd.
But then ‘Irving’ went on to assure Australian viewers, almost pleading with us, that this intractable 35 per cent did not represent the mainstream of American society who were decent, law-abiding citizens and not the kind of rednecks who chant vilifications at Trump rallies and who now drive vehicles at high speed through the ranks of demonstrators.
At the same time, like so many American liberals, it seemed to have escaped ‘Irving’ that many of the Trump agros were former Democrats, left high and dry by the high-handed policies and attitudes and priorities of the Clinton and Obama administrations. Further, he failed to comprehend why such a desertion might have resulted in a huge swathe of the American population becoming so ungovernably angry that the future of democracy itself in the US may now be under serious threat.
This is where some historical knowledge of what is called ‘American exceptionalism’ kicked in for me. Because I reckon that 35 per cent is alarmingly more significant than the fringe group of rednecks that ‘Irving’ would like Trump’s hard-core base to be seen as. In my book, to have that many baying hounds following a reckless demagogue like Trump is a serious existential problem for the United States.
American exceptionalism, by which the US has historically taken a path of extreme individualism, unlike the more socially cohesive countries of Europe and Australasia, finds its roots in the kinds of people who emigrated to North America in the formative years of the US and the reasons why they felt driven to put Europe behind them.
Many of the 13 British colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries were established by religious dissenters who could not abide any form of state-sanctioned religion yet, when transplanted to the forests of North America, their narrow religious fundamentalism often proved to be far more intolerant of dissent than the state-sanctioned religions they had escaped from. The Salem witch trials were the mere tip of an iceberg.
While this elevation of the freedom of the individual conscience to the equivalent of Holy Writ may be manageable when you are dealing with small congregations in the wilderness, but when it directly impacts on people’s lives and livelihoods, as it has in the US Rust Belt, where so many of the rusted-on Trump supporters live, then you have a problem.
Add to this resentful narrative the legend of the American frontier, ever pushing into Indian territory, which the British colonial authorities had tried vainly to retain as a peaceful buffer zone between the 13 colonies and the French, and you can see why the 2nd Amendment to the US Bill of Rights, the right to bear arms, is, historically, such a mystifying obsession to those of us non-Americans. But to many Americans, the gun is a trusted friend.
Thus was America fully formed psychologically within the first 75 years of its independence, as intolerant, gun-dependent and individualistic to the marrow of its bones — before greeting and absorbing the first large-scale wave of immigrants to the US (but never the slaves and their descendants), that of the Germans and Irish, when they arrived in the middle of the 19th century.
As African-American H. Rapp Brown, once said in the 1960s, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” I would qualify that to say American violence is a constant undercurrent that cannot be wished away as a departure from the norm — for no other Western country has had the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings (only six US states have never had a lynching, while some have had more than 600) and the McCarthyite witch hunts on its CV to explain.
The US showed during World War II that, when necessary, it can pull together in spite of the violent, centrifugal forces lying dormant below the surface. That was at a time when the US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’ and everyone had a job to do. But with 41 million now out of work and the numbers swelling, and real self-respect for the ordinary Yank in the street a thing of the past, US can-do optimism might be a stretch too far this time. Even for ‘Irving’.
Proudly Australian owned and operated