Liberty for me, too bad about you

On May 25 of this year, a man named George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since that day, there have been protests and riots across major American cities. At this point there are conflicting stories spreading: voices from the political right say that the protestors are also rioting and looting, while voices from the political left say that the protests have been peaceful until agents provocateurs working for the authorities initiate violence and thereby give those authorities an excuse for a violent response. As a mere philosopher I am far too lazy to sift truth from falsehood while the mix is still so inchoate. But whatever else might be true it certainly appears -- even on the most generous reading of the data -- that the forces of "law and order" have been guilty of wild overreach if not manifest malpractice in many of our cities over the last few days.

And so people are starting to grasp at historical analogies, to try to understand where we are, how we got here, and what is coming next. Are we once again in 1968? Or is this 1860? Could it be 1933, with the murder of Mr. Floyd our Reichstag Fire? All of the examples seem outlandish and dangerous; but it also seems like we are living in an outlandish and dangerous time.

Or is it? More precisely, there does appear to be danger aplenty, but is it outlandish? Are we really seeing the unraveling of the social fabric, or is this how it has always been? Certainly in the last few days there have been voices explaining with some exasperation that the only people who find these times outlandish are White Americans, because those who are Black or who otherwise fall outside the White mainstream have lived with the threat of random terror all their lives, whether from state actors or from their fellow citizens.

[As a terminological note: one current way to refer to those outside the White mainstream is BIPOC, which stands for Blacks, Indigenous, and People Of Color. I will use that word in what follows.]

Unsurprisingly, this is not a story that White Americans want to hear, particularly not liberal White Americans who believe themselves always to have had the kindest of motives and who (again, unsurprisingly) don't like being told that they live blind and insulated lives. So the alternative story that one hears fairly often from White liberals is that it is all the fault of Donald Trump. If only Hillary Clinton had won the Electoral College in the same way that she won the popular vote in the election of 2016, life would be roses. But this story is false in at least two important ways.

First, much of today's agitation is around race, and it is simply not credible to assert that Mr. Trump personally turned tens of millions of people into racists. If anything, this story has the causality exactly backwards. It is impossible to argue that Mr. Trump has used his Presidency to cause ordinary Americans to adopt this or that set of opinions. Rather, it should be obvious that the whole reason he is President in the first place is that large swathes of the electorate already had whatever opinions they had, and as a result of their opinions they decided they liked him better than his opponent.

Second, there remains the pernicious half-truth that Mr. Trump is a minority President. I call this a "half-truth" because the numbers are there to support it if you look no closer; but the impression they give is misleading. More exactly, it is true that the total number of votes cast for Mr. Trump was about three million fewer than were cast for Mrs. Clinton. But consider for a moment an alternative map of the United States which contains every inch that it contains today with only two places dropped out: the City of New York and the County of Los Angeles. In that alternative country, Mr. Trump won a popular majority. Add up all the other great Democratic strongholds you like: San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Chicago. They are not enough. Mr. Trump's support across the country was wide enough and deep enough to outvote them all. So when you stop to ask yourself what the election of 2016 tells us about ourselves as a people, there are really only two alternatives. Either the "average American" is a New Yorker or an Angeleno and none of the rest of the wide, full country counts for anything; or Mr. Trump is ours. We elected him, we earned him, and we deserve him. My money is on the second alternative.

So who are we as a people? I'm inclined to think the radical BIPOC voices have it right, or almost. They make the discussion about race and I'm going to make it about ideals (in the next few paragraphs, at any rate) but we end up in much the same place. The history of America is a history of violent self-assertion. Taken together as a nation, we are one of the most violent -- and hands-down the most self-assertive -- on the planet.

I have hinted at this argument before, but let me approach the question a couple of different ways. Here's a personal story. A couple of years ago I was working on a project with a colleague from Germany. She travelled all over the world for work, and had been to the United States many times before. Anyway, in the course of the conversation one evening over dinner I used the term "American exceptionalism," and she asked me "What does that mean?" And I was kind of stumped. How do you explain American exceptionalism? I mean ... I know what it is. I assume every American more or less knows what it is. It is the assumption ... no, not an assumption, the knowledge deep in your bones that America is different from the rest of the world. Different and better. And the rules that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us. We all know what this attitude means. And I will wager that at some level most Americans believe it too, even if they would never admit it in public. (Most? Let's say more than half.) Only ... how was I supposed to explain this to my colleague, an intelligent professional woman who has visited and worked in more countries than I can even name? How was I supposed to explain it and not sound like a five-year-old? I don't remember what I said. But you all know what I am talking about.

Or let's look at first principles. What is the most important American ideal, the one we consider our gift to the world? I pull a quarter out of my pocket, and right there underneath George Washington's chin it says "LIBERTY." But what is liberty? Liberty means I get to do what I want. Oh sure, there are scholars who will tell you it means more than that. John Stuart Mill wrote what may be his most famous work (On Liberty) to argue that it means granting equal liberty to all, subject only to the restriction that none of us impinge on the liberty of anyone else. It sounds great. But only scholars would actually believe such a thing.

Because stop and think: as long as I get to do what I want, what incentive do I have to think about you? Why should I really care? And let's say that in the course of things it becomes necessary for someone to stop me from doing something I want for the very good reason that my actions interfere with you. Am I going to stop, evaluate the whole thing dispassionately, and realize that of course you are right? Am I going to apologize for my thoughtlessness? Or will I see only that I was trying to do something and somebody stopped me, and therefore that horrible person is interfering with my liberty? Won't I just insist that the American ideal of liberty means I should be allowed to go ahead with whatever god-awful plans I have in mind, regardless of the cost to you? Once in a while, of course, you may be able to get through to me. Once in a while I might not be completely self-centered about the whole encounter. But over the long haul, which way do you want to wager your money?

This forgetting-about-other-people is fundamental and all too easy. How else could the American Founders so easily accept slavery? Not all of them did, of course. But four of the first five Presidents, and nine of the first twelve, were slaveholders. Samuel Johnson commented on this obvious incongruence (not to say hypocrisy) between the ideals of the Revolution and the daily lives of the primary revolutionaries when he wrote, in 1775, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" And of course Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the rest were smart men. Intellectually they knew it was a problem. But pragmatically, on a day-to-day level, it was much easier not to think about it. To forget about others so they could get on with what they were doing.

Or look at the Revolution itself. We all know that it was sparked by a rebellion against taxes, and there was something about tea. But that was in Boston. Out on the frontier (which at that point ran through the Appalachian Mountains) the big problem was land. The British Crown had signed treaties with various Indian nations, promising to stay out of all the lands across the frontier. The Indian nations were there first, it was their land, and the British recognized as much. But this put the Crown in direct conflict with her own subjects, the colonists who lived on the frontier and saw all that beautiful land just waiting for them. They wanted to take the land for themselves and cultivate it. So when the British Crown tried to stop them, that just meant that the King's government was ... wait for it ... interfering with their liberty. And in that case the King had to go. So they raised the banner of revolution in order to stop the government from interfering as they stole somebody else's land in defiance of a written treaty. Liberty for me -- too bad about you. (You can find a summary of this history in this book review here or in the book itself, Alan Taylor's American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804.)

Do I have to go on? In 1812 and 1813, Joel Roberts Poinsett was meddling in the relations between Chile and Peru; having been sent by President James Madison to look after American commercial interests, he accepted a commission in the Chilean army and captured the Bay of Conception from Peru. What difference did it make if he was fighting and commanding troops under the flag of a foreign power, so long as the end result was more favorable to American commercial interests? So long as we got what we wanted?

A decade later, in 1823, President James Monroe first articulated what was later known as the Monroe Doctrine, a principle which stated -- at a time when we had a tiny army and almost no navy -- that the entire Western Hemisphere (half the globe, in principle) was now our sphere of influence and other Great Powers (meaning Europe) should stay out of it. Breathtaking arrogance, comical in fact. And that's how the European powers took it for several years. In 1861, the French installed an emperor in Mexico, which shows how seriously they took the whole thing. (Also in 1861 we were rather preoccupied with our own troubles.) But the point is that we took it seriously. And when our army and navy began to grow in strength and reach, towards the end of the nineteenth century, we took it as our natural right to settle border disputes between other powers in this hemisphere, or even to make and unmake governments as we chose. After all, we had already explained this to everyone beforehand.

And after all, this is why the rest of the world thinks we are so insufferably arrogant: because it never occurs to us not to tell other countries what to do. Because we "bestride the narrow world like a Colossus" and send our troops where we will to make or break other nations. Because it is totally natural for us to do this, and to lecture other countries about their internal affairs even when we seem to have a pretty poor grip on our own. When George Floyd was murdered and our most recent riots started, don't think the rest of the world failed to notice. (See, for example, here or here.)

Well, but that's all about foreign policy. Every country does things abroad because they have to, in the interests of political realism. But how about at home? Aren't we Americans basically Nice Guys?

Sure. Everybody abroad understands that we can be tremendously nice (Florence King once called us the Labrador puppies of the world) ... as long as you don't cross us. But get us mad -- I'm still talking about private life here -- and suddenly you find out how many guns we own. Other people have written about this topic, more extensively and more eloquently than I can. So I won't try to improve on what anyone else has said. But let me reference two articles by James Fallows, written five years apart, each time after a mass-shooting captured all the country's headlines. He wrote the first one in 2012 and the second one in 2017. In both articles he makes a simple point: we choose to be a country where mass shootings are possible. We know this about ourselves, and we know that we will never do anything to change it. What's more, everybody in the world knows it about us too. This, more than anything else, is what the rest of the world cannot understand about us.

It's who we are.

Violent self-assertion.

This essay of mine that you have just been reading -- is it un-American? That's impossible. I'm an American, so this essay represents by definition an American opinion. The accusation of un-Americanism comes from a fear that after I write all these things about us, I'm going to wind up by saying that by contrast life is all roses somewhere else: in Cloud-Cuckoo Land, or on the Moon. But I'm not going to say that. I assume there are troubles everywhere. I assume that everyone has faults, and that every nationality has elements of their national character that make them shake their heads in dismay when they think about it.

It just so happens that this one is ours. Violent self-assertion is our special badge among the nations of the world. And of course if we can succeed in asserting ourselves without violence, that's just swell. We don't insist on the violence, as long as we get our way. That's where the praise of American individualism comes from, the praise of Emersonian self-reliance and Yankee ingenuity. They are all great things, and they allow us to make names for ourselves in all kinds of ways. Cue the lights, cue the flags, cue the stirring music and balloons.

Just don't cross us.

So yes, the radical BIPOC voices more or less have it right. This is who we are.