But whence comes this vision of America as a "united country"?
I was discussing with a former flatmate of mine (he's from India) recently the rather peculiar nature of America's body politic and the newsmedia that claims it can analyze our opinions. I came up with the following idea: take Thorstein Veblen's comments about German industrialization and substitute "the USA" for "Germany" and "democratization" for "industrialization" and you have an interesting hypothesis about America.
When you think of the history of Europe's "democratization", it's chock full of revolutions(*) and/or many struggles for democratic rights by increasingly unwashed increasingly numerical segments of society.
Where is that struggle in the USA? Certainly, we have a huge history of exlusion, but our exclusion from the franchise (at least among us menfolk) was of specific minorities, not your everyday Joe Sixpack. "Universal" male sufferage came out of a bourgeois revolution and otherwise just kinda happened, didn't it? Even many of the "revolutionaries" didn't intend for it to happen -- it just sorta did because it was borrowed from the ideas of outsiders (dare I bring up the partial Islamic heritage of the Polish nobility who helped craft our country?).
Even the degree to which there were struggles has been suppressed in our popular imagination. Certainly, we had more than one revolution (ignoring whether or not the civil war was a war of revolution), but of the two "popular" revolts I can think of (happening after the bourgeois revolution that established our country -- the hoi polloi wanted a piece of the action, nu?), one was nipped in the bud, and the failure to nip the earlier one in the bud is what lead to our constitution. And both are denigrated in the popular imagination to this day.
So popular democracy, outside of the struggle for "civil rights" of "those people", in the US is, or at least is according to our memes, something that just kinda happened. C.f. Veblen, unlike other advanced nations, we've not paid for the development of democracy by changing our habits and wont. Instead, in our memetic code, we have this vision of a "unified country" that has sprung into existance like Minerva or something.
And that, IMHO, is very important to understand what goes wrong with our national discourse, e.g. in our time.
* I know people who are expert enough in history that they should know better who constantly trash the revolutionary struggles of Europeans because all they see is the rabid anti-clericalism of these revolutions and, being religious, view the revolutions as thus evil due to how they treated religiosity in Europe. Many Americans denigrate Europe, France in particular, for its laicite (sp?) but have no clue as to why it got that way, as we were spared, by a wise wall that the people who have most benefited from it are trying to tear down -- but again, at least in our memetic
The history of the labor movement is an example, DAS.
As Studs Terkel likes to point out, people died for the 40 hour work week. Mother Jones led children's marches to finally (it took a long time) force child labor laws (and that was in the early 20th century, not sometime in the 19th). There were riots and violence which accompanied many of the changes in labor conditions in this country.
Who teaches that? Who knows that? Terkel tells the story of confronting a comfortably middle-class couple who sneer at labor unions. Terkel gives them a brief history of the struggles of labor for fair treatment in the work place, points out the 40 hour work week and vacation time and overtime and all the other things we take for granted, were wrested from employers by near revolutionary effort. To this day we overlook the revolutionary fervor brought on by the Great Depression.
I think you're right: we've never paid the price for our democracy. It is clear that if, in France, the government fears the people (think of the revolutions there), in America the people fear the government. Much of that is the narrative we tell ourselves about our history.
Who teaches that? Who knows that? Terkel tells the story of confronting a comfortably middle-class couple who sneer at labor unions. - Rev. RMJ
My mom does. Being middle class ourselves, we always run into these sorts of smug folks. And my mom takes every opportunity to teach them about how they got to be where they are.
But, of course, such struggles have failed to enter into our memetic code as a nation, as evidenced by the middle class couple Terkel cites and that we all know. As I mentioned, various other struggles have been effective erased from our history.
Democracy may have been hard won here, but as far as most people know, it was bequethed to us from on high: "civil rights" struggles were only, as far as our memes go, about the rights of "those people". Maybe the issue isn't so much a lack of struggles as a lack of historical understanding -- but the result is still, IMHO, the same as Germany's experience with industrialization.
OTOH, because we do have a "liberal, democratic tradition", it does give (c.f. The Rhetoric of Reaction) a perch from which conservatives can make the argument that further reforms will jeopardize liberty. So, in a sense, we have the worst of both worlds -- enough of an actual liberal, democratic tradition that scoundrals can hide behind the idea of preserving hard won gains, but not any memory of how those gains came about such that the wont and habits of democracy have penetrated the populace (e.g. our making the President a de facto King).
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