Of the hundreds of thousands of words I have written in my life, these are the most important because they will speak of a nation, my community, that has maintained itself in an ambiguous relationship between theory and practice, and to a population, this people, that is still searching to realize the proposition they believe to be their own Founding. And sometimes, in the study of History, the veil of the past must be pulled aside to reveal raw truths so evidently held, but often ignored. I write of my own expression, which cannot speak for anyone else, but the AmericaHypothesis established herein is one that has encompassed the ideas, words and actions of all Americans.
Is this where it all began? No
The stories we tell about who or what we think we are has been, and will be, what most people call history. From camping underneath the stars in front of some primordial village fire, to trying to pay attention in an anti-septic plastic wasteland of a classroom, humans tell the story. And when there is a Story, a beginning, an end, fixed characters and gallant heroes, there is an exactness to the knowledge gained, a surety of time and place, and a precision of who and what you are. But that is not history, it is heritage. History is messy, conflicted and ever changing. It changes for many reasons, because of new source material, because of better technique and methodology, but most of all because of changing perspective. New ways to look at old questions makes for new answers. It is not so much that the old answer is wrong, more that it has been replaced by something that appears more relevant to the experience of the present. New questions create new answers. In science that flexibility is heralded as the strength that allows for growth, innovation, and greater understanding. In History, such flexibility is mocked as the path to distortion and deception, but that is only true if history is heritage, if it is the “story of us” instead of what it actually is, an interpretation of the ideas, words and actions of human beings.
So what is the Founding?
It’s an old question that was being framed even when the Founders were going through the process and it was the Founders themselves who wrote the first Story and defined just what they had found. One of the first to write the Story was Dr. David Ramsay of South Carolina (he was a physician, so not a real doctor) and it is the story we all learned of a magical tale where magical men defeated an evil foe to establish a magical land of liberty and justice for all. It is what you would want to read about “your” Founding, a total advocacy of one side over another to cause the reader, and subsequent generations, to take pride in the actions of their Founders …. And there is nothing wrong with that. Every society needs to love itself, and most societies have divine (or at least semi-divine) origin stories to instill and promote pride. Pride of place, “our place,” and pride of people, “our people,” with a precision and exactitude that will stand into time immemorial the immutable being of nations. In this conception the question doesn’t need to be asked and there are no other questions needed. There is only the “Story” and learning it is enough to support who and what you are.
But one of the significant aspects of America is that a “Story” does not suffice for understanding who and what we are because America is not defined by “a people” or even by “a place.” Our Archaic* patterns of humanity beg us to hold on to the heritage of “Heritage” but the construction of this culture does not conform – it is not “an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken,” no, instead it is “time’s fool” that has fooled with the very meaning of human community, which makes the proposition of its Founding all the more difficult and all the more important. (*For more on Archaic check out the post “Understanding Different Worlds” from April, 2018)
In the course of this series many hypotheses have been posed as to the Founding from Bacon to Zombies to the complexity of power relationships, and still, “we know nothing, Jon Snow,” and the answer as to the Founding is being skirted now into the 10thinstallment. But this should be an easy question, since our history already provides us with an answer that we all know to be true: The 4thof July, 1776.
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| Is this where it all began? No |
In the course of this series many hypotheses have been posed as to the Founding from Bacon to Zombies to the complexity of power relationships, and still, “we know nothing, Jon Snow,” and the answer as to the Founding is being skirted now into the 10thinstallment. But this should be an easy question, since our history already provides us with an answer that we all know to be true: The 4thof July, 1776.
Here is the moral proposition articulated for the first time in the famous words of courses of human events, truths that were self-evident, and vows of sacred honor. Here originated what would become a nation based on the rights of its people. But if this is the Founding it is a poorly executed moment. And not for the fact that it was at the prompting of the King being revolted against, or the failure of a military campaign, or even the product of some other country’s paraphrased ideas. Locke was after all English, and Jefferson undeniably used the phrases and intent of Locke, however altered, in the second paragraph of the Declaration. And I can’t buy the argument of many scholars of the Classical Republican (non-Lockean) Hypothesis that Jeff only used the words but his meaning was altogether different ideologically. That’s like saying “love thy neighbor” can be interpreted as a call to kill them …. Oh, it has been used for that. But still even classical republican ideology is not really American and so while it is an inspiration, it can’t really be the thing (the Founding) itself.
This makes me more a farmer than Jefferson. He was a Capitalist Slave Owner.
Worse yet, the 4thof July Declaration was a statement only partially applied – it was not for women. They had no rights. It was not for Americans of African descent, slave or free. They had no rights. It is not to say that all things in their origin must be complete. Humans grow from babies and they are hardly complete, but in the denial of so many to so much of the proposition of what was to be intended in the first place, the Founding is not really found in the 4thof July, at least not the one in 1776.
Even better than the moral proposition, perhaps, is the structural foundation. We don’t acknowledge very much the date of the Constitution, in part because we know, we really do, that it totally changed the nature of the Revolution of 13 separate countries into one country. Historians chafe at that proposition, even if they know it to be true, because it smacks the immutable Heritage of the Divine Founding right in the face, and that is a no-no. You can re-interpret Lincoln to show that he didn’t want to free the slaves, you can explain away the genocide of the PAI, or even show its horrors, but don’t mess with these united States (as it was referenced in 1776) always being the United States (as it became under the Constitution). So therefore, if we wish to find the formal institutionalization of the United States, then, it is not 1776 but 1787 that the United States – America – is founded. Or was it? Because when we say the word America, it’s not formal state structures that are being referred to. It’s so much more, and in a sense, so much less.
It’s because of the more and less that we, as Americans, like to go back to colonization. I have had countless students who have written, “Columbus founded America.” Not “Columbus found America,” and it isn’t as common as, of course, “Columbus discovered America,” but about 30% of college students think that Columbus founded America – and he did find something, but “Founding” America? No. What did he found? Columbus, as has been noted, was not an explorer in the sense of the expansion of human knowledge. And we all know that when you hear “Columbus was an explorer” those words are totally meant that he is some Jean-Luc Picard charting unknown spaces to further some curiosity jones that humans (especially those magical Europeans) have. But in earlier installments it became pretty clear that not only had Columbus founded capitalist production and the dehumanization of labor, he initiated the destruction (however unwittingly) of the PAI (Paleolithic Asian Immigrant populations), but he also brought to these shores (or at least ones in the Caribbean, as he never came to North America) the strain of Power that is anathema to what “America” means to most of the world.
And Power in the Palpatine sense was at war with the type of individual liberation that “America” really means – and that conflict, between the Power of dudes like Bacon, was at war with the type of power sought by other European immigrants like the Puritans, Quakers and Pennsylvania Dutch (Deutsch). These people sought little p power (though they sometimes slid into big P Power) of individual opportunity and self-sufficiency, which is really the hallmark of the Modern definition of freedom, self-definition and self-determination, preserved by the community for the betterment of the community. And even though the rank and file of the Revolution fought for that definition, those ideas were not always the clear regard of the “Founders” -- those who made the decisions, policies and institutions. And the conflict raged for another four score and some odd years. Then came a war – some would call the Founding!
Seven score and thirteen years ago, Lincoln
From Lincoln’s perspective the war was over Power, but not really power v. Power. Lincoln wanted Power for the Federal Government – which was the rationale, the only rationale, behind the Constitution – to establish one government over one nation. The Power structure of the South fought against this -- against the Power structure of the North – that’s what the Civil War was about from Lincoln’s perspective, and the South agreed. Southerners who wielded Power knew that a dominant Federal Government would someday come for their slaves, especially given the industrial proclivities of men like Hamilton, who foresaw what Adam Smith wrote about in Wealth of Nations. Smith wrote that for economic productivity and private wealth to really grow you had to replace slave labor with wage labor. It’s more efficient for Capital to only pay workers for what they do instead of, as with slaves, maintain them for their lives. But Southerners liked being inefficient. They relished being in total control of life or death over people, because …. When you control someone it makes “you think you’re a big man!” (you have to read that with a snarky little kid voice).
Yes, they did. They liked their Power and they like keeping power from others. But the Northern Elite, like Lincoln, liked it too. “But he wasn’t elite. He read by candle light in a log cabin when he was growing up.” That’s what people think – that Lincoln was from outside of Power, but really, think about it. What kind of peasant wastes candle light to read? Peasants don’t, the powerful do, and Lincoln was – the Western Power group to be sure, but Power nonetheless. In the North, Power extended from industrialization and the rise of Capitalism, where the few controlled wealth, and used that wealth to create more wealth for themselves through the exploitation of wage laborers. And Lincoln fought the Civil War to insure that Power. The Federal Constitution would help insure the growth of his own Power group. He didn’t really want the union of the states. He wanted Union, northern commercial interests dominant over southern commercial interests through Federal control of labor compensation … so it really was all about slavery!
And that means, even with the victorious Northern victory, you can’t find the Founding in the Civil War. Maybe, if Reconstruction had succeeded, but it didn’t, because the Civil War was never really about rights, and we all know it. Otherwise Americans would have woken up in May of 1865 and gone, “Damn, I just read the Declaration of Independence. Do you know that thing suggests that ….” Well, we all should know what it suggests, but we don’t – because most of us, just like in 1865, don’t like the idea that everyone has rights and that the community establishes government, not for protection, not for empire, not for wealth, but for rights, and only for rights of individuals, all individuals. When Northern Power nearly ran America into the ground through the utter domination of, well, EVERYTHING, by corporate America in the Gilded Age, the Middle and Upper Middle Classes were scared that they either might become peasants who worked the factories, or, even worse, might be killed in a violent Revolution by those peasants, and so they started a reform movement. The Progressives sought to save America, and in so doing might just be the Founding of America.
Institutionally, it was the Progressives who put us on the road to the relationship we have between government and the individual – kinda. They took funding the Federal government away from Corporate America and moved it to individual taxpayers through the income tax. Huzzah for April 15, the Founding of America!
Just kidding, I wouldn’t do that even if I thought it to be true, because America is more than paying for the institutions of the community, of government, of Power – even if individuals and not the elite were in control.
The question, therefore, is whether the Founding of America is solely defined through the protection (or at least recognition) of rights or the institution of democratic systems of government. It kinda has to be both, and even at that it is still more!
The children of the Progressives embraced a lot of the cultural innovations that developed in the Progressive Era, like jazz and baseball. Both of these cultural phenomena pre-date the Progressive Era in some form or another, but they came into being by the early 1900s as cultural forces. Yet, it wasn’t until the 1920s that both, jazz and baseball, in different ways, began to define America. I won’t go into the origin or substance of either of these, as that isn’t the topic, but instead how these represent the Founding, if, indeed, they do.
One of the favorite things Americans love to think about as being American is, “we’re a melting pot.” Most cultures throughout time have been homogeneous – they don’t accept stuff from outside groups, and if they control those outside groups, they certainly don’t accept things from them, at least not on purpose. Americans of African descent have always added more than labor. Spatial patterns, work and language rhythms, among other things, from Africa helped define colonial culture, but most of that was imperceptible at the time.
By the 1920s, though, Jazz was an American cultural phenomena that was known to be a contribution of the African American experience (and Jazz begat Rock-n-Roll, which begat Hip Hop, kinda, and these took over the world!).
A view of "Panic! At the Disco"
Part Jazz, Part Rock-n-Roll, Part Hip Hop, kinda
And, of course, by this time it was not just the African experience that helped re-define American culture from the Anglo-Saxon predominance of the 18thcentury. Italians, Irish, Eastern European Jews, Chinese, Japanese and others were all hated and pigeon holed initially, but in the 1920s …. Oh, yeah, Anglo-Saxon Power banned them. Closed and monitored immigration became the law of the land and for the first time someone could be “illegal” in America. Oh, and the KKK became just about the largest civic organization America had ever seen, with monopolies on power, not just in the south, but in places like Indiana and Colorado (though Indiana, home of Mike Pence, is not a schocker). So a majority of “White” America was still just as racist and xenophobic as they had been in the 19thcentury, and 18thcentury, and 17thcentury, and …. You get the picture (though, of course Americans of western European descent do not have a monopoly on xenophobia – scratch a human and you will find a being who, by Nature, likes their own kind and doesn’t like a differ).
And baseball, which is, or was, a synonym for America, was not much better. Babe Ruth does form the basis of contemporary celebrity worship, the true religion of America, but baseball as definitive of the American experience maintained a strict color line. And sure there were the Negro Leagues with amazing players, but segregation is another term for “we are better than you,” and that isn’t power, the type of power that allows for self-definition and self-determination, that’s Power, the type of which Americans tell themselves they want no part of, that their forefathers and mothers left whereverthehell and sought refuge from. So the Roaring 20s? not the Founding …. even if it really is the touchstone for 21stcentury America.
Certainly, the essence of America, as it exists today, must be founded through the efforts of the “Greatest Generation.” Those who fought to end tyranny around the world and supported a democratic Democrat who made the government even more responsive to individual empowerment than did the Progressives. (Is FDR the true Founder of America? But who the Founder is must be a different AmericaHypothesis than Finding the Founding) Yet for all that is ballyhooed about the GG they maintained Jim Crow. After the war the increase in opportunity seen in the Great Depression (notice it starts with Great) for women in the professions, in graduate education and in the work force declined. The GG also embarked America into an era of imperialism that does not really seem compatible with the ideal we always claim “America” to be. American military presence is a strange catch-22, because it has kept the world out of any major conflicts, in part, through two of the arms of the American Empire, NATO and the United Nations. Yet the emergence of Empire, and invigorated Power, has also cost the United States too many lives in places like Panama, Nicaragua, not to mention Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan – and dozens of more places that we conveniently forget. And we forget because we love the benefit of Empire, it wasn’t enough to be the wealthiest nation with part of the population living freer than anywhere in the world (European descended males), but the lure of being Power Adjacent was enticing, thrilling, intoxicating. Power Adjacent because many people still didn’t have empowerment over their lives, but that’s ok when, by association, you feel as though you are part of the most powerful empire on earth, and that the earth has ever seen. But the American Empire is another hypothesis in the making.
Perhaps the most important thing that the GG did was to vote for institutional Power that actually did something the Gracchi and Machiavelli*, not to mention the so-called Founders, would have been proud of. They put heavier taxes on wealth. The 50s and 60s saw economic expansion, a growth of “Middle Class,” and a better distribution of wealth than the United States has ever seen. Perhaps, its not coincidence that the children of the GG urged forward the Civil Rights Movement and the Counter-culture Revolution of the 1950s and 60s. Of course, America only half-heartedly supported the search for rights and recognition by Americans of African descent, women, people of non-traditional lifestyles (including but not exclusive to sexual orientation) and a variety of other groups. Whether we admit it or not the CRM did not establish that “Black Lives Matter,” and the hippy counter culture didn’t really tear down barriers to self-definition and self-determination because much of it was disingenuous – Jerry Rubin became a stock trader by the 1980s – enough said. (*See Finding the Founding: Part VII)
So the GG and their baby booming children didn’t Found anything, but merely allowed Power to keep denying power to many Americans. And then came Reagan.
Hi, Cato! Power is Ugly.
The possibilities of an economy that spread wealth around better, and was close enough to getting rid of poverty that Power declared “War on Poverty,” was utterly crushed by the man from Whiteside County, Illinois. Listen, it’s just a coincidence that he was from Whiteside – it wasn’t “white side” – that’s not Reagan’s fault. It’s just the nature of Power in America. White has always had it, and the natural human psyche (as meaning coming out of Nature and incorporated into human civilization, as defined in “Understanding Different Worlds”) is to do whatever is necessary to promote your own side – White Side. Further, Reagan’s movement taught generations that government was evil, democratic government was evil, American government was evil. Ironically, in the Reagan Revolution, Power was evil, but by training people in this ideological trap, it only enabled Power to become more powerful and snap the head of movements toward socio-political equality and economic justice. In fact, it did what the Romans did to the Gracchi. Oh and even more irony, this all received the blessing of the democracy hating “Cato Institute.”
Even more, more irony – The economic disparity caused by trickle down economics has had a crushing effect on the very “white-side” working class population that elected Reagan. And after 4 administrations who have pounded impoverished white America, the Republican administrations (RR, GHWB, GWB and T-rump), with economic policies designed to help Power create a wage earning peasant population, the absolute nutso-fear caused by losing their shit has resulted in White America becoming just as racist as ever. Was that Power’s Plan? Holy Shit, that is worthy of the Man himself!
One Last Time!
Listen, Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Democracy, Oligarchy, Anarchy, they have been, and ultimately are, functions of the same thing – systems of Power. They all mean in theory to be systems of power, meaning empowerment of people, of individuals, of communities, but in practice they have not been, and will not be. In these ideologies and systems cannot be found the Founding of America. The Founding is based on an idea of individual empowerment, a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of a variable that is up to the individual to decide – happiness. The premise was the Enlightenment Maxim, Cogito Ergo Sum – thinking, the choices you make makes you who you are. The True nature of the Founding flows from this and can only be found in what it means to Be an American by accepting people for who they are, and not what they are, as individuals entitled to self-definition and self-determination. Even if we don’t like their choices, as long as those choices don’t affect someone else’s self-definition and determinations, “Who” they are should be supported, acknowledged and accepted, unconditionally …. But what about “what” someone is, meaning how they are born, their skin, their language, their sexuality, their gender, and you can throw a larger net, of their culture? “What” they are is not relevant to the community’s goal, to the government’s goal, of protecting the rights of individuals because the United States is not a nation of physical attributes or genetics. It is a nation of ideas, and those who share those ideas deserve the protections for “who” they are in spite of “what” they may be. And on that proposition, America has always fallen short.
Unfortunately, therefore,
America has not yet been founded because it is an aspiration of a set of principles, not a dream but an idea, not a wish but a thought, not a prayer but a vision, not a utopia but a nation – America will not be Found until Power is ended and empowerment is realized by all Americans, and our brothers and sisters around the world, wherever they may be.
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| A view of "Panic! At the Disco" Part Jazz, Part Rock-n-Roll, Part Hip Hop, kinda |
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