(No movie reviews today. Independence Day column instead!)
In his book Invisible Bridge, Ron Perlstein has a bemused sneer about the Bicentennial celebration. He sounds astonished that even with America collapsing around us, Americans could sort of agree to celebrate. It reflects the general tone of the book that the 1970s sucked and we all knew it (at the link, author Thomas Hine expresses an alternative view).
The Bicentennial did indeed feel like a big deal in 1976. And for a couple of years before. Comic books tied in to it. Products of all sorts flaunted their Americanness. And for all the problems Perlstein talks about, there was a lot of optimism. The Vietnam War had ended, the US and the USSR had thawed the Cold War somewhat, women’s rights and black rights had advanced massively from a decade earlier. 18 year olds had the right to vote. The pill and Roe v Wade meant women could be sexually active without having to bear a child. Nixon had been driven from office after Watergate revealed his unfitness for office. That (and related revelations about the CIA and the FBI) was shocking but it was proof we could solve our problems and do better. We would do better. And the president at the time, Gerald Ford, realized the Bicentennial was not about him.
Recently JD Vance declared that by modern standards, Nixon’s crimes were trivial. He meant it as a defense — the deep state destroyed Nixon, like they’re trying to destroy the Toddler! — but it’s more like an indictment of how far we’ve fallen. The Toddler commits about one Watergate class crime a week, like using taxpayer money to build his stupid ballroom, then lying about it.. Nixon had a secret list of enemies he wanted to punish; the Toddler blatantly targets the media for not kissing his ass and someone was just indicted for supposedly sabotaging Widdle Donny’s precious reflecting pool. That’s horrifying and I’m sure the evidence is as flimsy as all the other pool-related charges. And as unjust as sentencing protesters as anti-ICE terrorists.
Small wonder nobody’s showing up for his 250th anniversary events. It seems to be a mix of lack of interest, heat and incompetent organizing. As John Scalzi puts it, “a malignant narcissist decided to make a national celebration mostly about himself, and that malignant narcissist is also an actual fascist, so that kind of sucked all the fun out of it this year.”
Like Scalzi, I believe justice will prevail. It may take long enough that we will not live to see its end; many of those who labored against slavery and segregation did not. As historian Kevin Leman says, “For most of its American existence, slavery was not contested. It was not being loudly defended because it was not being loudly challenged. It was simply the air that colonial economies breathed. The Germantown Quakers may have protested it in 1688, but their petition was quietly tabled and largely forgotten.” It was a long fight to discredit it, and too many people today are still nostalgic for it.
But as the radical priest Daniel Berrigan once put it, we do the right thing and fight the good fight because they’re right and good, not because we’re guaranteed victory. As a Christian, I believe that’s what god wants from us. As a human being, I agree with blogger Fred Clark that we should do the right thing because the alternative is becoming a ginormous jackhole. Seriously, who would you rather be, Martin Luther King or JD Vance?
As I’ve said before, I’m not sure what policies we should embrace going forward. As a number of liberals are saying, we need change. Definitely structural government reforms to undo some of the damage (packing the court, for instance, to neutralize the Sinister Six). Practical stuff, the little helpful things Mayor Mamdani is doing in NYC. Speak out against Republican fascism, and the little stupid things, like the way the Toddler’s wasting our tax dollars on monuments to himself. And a vision: equality for all, end rape over the next 20 years, universal literacy. Change the immigration laws so everyone currently entering illegal can enter legally. Do not throw anyone under the bus. Remind everyone that we are patriots and some of us are Christians — Republicans don’t get to define those terms and claim them as their own.
Any one of those will be difficult, and face lots of opposition. As I’ve said previously, even defining what “equality for all” means and how we get there is hard work. But we might as well shoot big.
And we should remember that if a former slave like Frederick Douglass could press on against the odds so can we: “Douglass did not end in despair and neither should we. His closing lines are not triumphalist, but they are resolute. Even with freedom of speech and the ballot “fallen before the shot-guns of the South,” he urged that we “bate no jot of heart or hope.” The heart of the nation, he maintained, was “still sound and strong.””
