The End of the Myth, page 30
The fantasies of the super-rich, no less than their capital, have free range. They imagine themselves sea-steaders, setting out to create floating villages beyond government control, or they fund life-extension research hoping to escape death or to upload their consciousness into the cloud. Mars, says one, will very soon be humanity’s “new frontier.” A hedge-fund billionaire backer of Trump who believes “human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make” and that people on public assistance have “negative value,” a man so anti-social he doesn’t look people in the eye and whistles when others try to talk with him, gets to play volunteer sheriff in an old New Mexico mining town and is thereby allowed to carry a gun in all fifty states.9 Never before has a ruling class been as free—so completely emancipated from the people it rules—as ours.
For most everyone else, the area of freedom has contracted. A whole generation—those born in the 1980s—may never recover from the Great Recession that followed the 2007–08 crash.10 Since that crash, unemployment has declined and the stock market has boomed but poverty has become entrenched. According to a recent report by the United Way, nearly fifty-one million U.S. households don’t make enough “to survive in the modern economy,” their monthly budgets unable to cover basic needs such as housing, food, and health care. Ranked against other high-income countries, the United States has the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality. Ronald Reagan said nothing is impossible. For many, less and less is possible, including a decent education and a dignified retirement, or any retirement.11
Most every other industrial nation in the world has pursued “free trade” policies similar to those enacted by the United States since its farm crisis, some combination of outsourcing, privatization, and financial liberalization. But no other wealthy nation has experienced the kind of alienation, inequality, public health crises, and violence that have become routine in the United States.12 That’s because, as part of the post-Vietnam restoration, the United States didn’t just restructure but also launched an assault on the social institutions—especially public services and unions—that might have moderated the effects of the restructuring. “You’re the troops,” Reagan told the New Right’s frontline activists working to unwind as much of the New Deal as possible. “You’re out there on the frontier of freedom.”
In addition to the upheavals caused by the wars in Iraq and the financial crash, there is a realization that the world is fragile and that we are trapped in an economic system that is well past sustainable or justifiable. As vast stretches of the West burn, as millions of trees die from global warming–induced blight, as Houston and Puerto Rico flood, the oceans acidify, and bats, frogs, and flying insects disappear in uncountable numbers, any sentence from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road could be plucked and used as a newspaper headline. A VAST LANDSCAPE CHARRED, AND A SKY FULL OF SOOT ran the title of a New York Times report on California’s wildfires.
The wars might be endless, but the mission, in any of its forms, is no longer sanctified.
* * *
It’s tempting to think that Trump’s border wall represents a more accurate assessment of how the world works, especially when compared to the myth of the frontier. The frontier was, ultimately, a mirage, an ideological relic of a now-exhausted universalism that promised, either naïvely or dishonestly, that a limitless world meant that nations didn’t have to be organized around lines of domination. All could benefit; all could rise and share in the earth’s riches. The wall, in contrast, is a monument to disenchantment, to a kind of brutal geopolitical realism: racism was never transcended; there’s not enough to go around; the global economy will have winners and losers; not all can sit at the table; and government policies should be organized around accepting these truths.
Accepting that there are, in fact, limits to growth—that the old model of politics, based on the idea that social conflicts could be solved by a constant flight forward, is no longer viable—could lead to a variety of political responses. In the United States, the New Deal built a new, humane ethic of social citizenship by recognizing that the frontier had closed. That vision, though to a degree eclipsed by the New Right, still accounts for much of what remains decent in the country.
But in a nation like the United States, founded on a mythical belief in a kind of species immunity—less an American exceptionalism than exemptionism, an insistence that the nation was exempt from nature, society, history, even death—the realization that it can’t go on forever is bound to be traumatic. This ideal of freedom as infinity was only made possible through the domination of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans, as slave and cheap labor transformed stolen land into capital, cutting the tethers and launching the U.S. economy into the stratosphere. And now, as we fall back to a wasted earth, the very existence of people of color functions as an unwanted memento mori, a reminder of limits, evidence that history imposes burdens and life contracts social obligations.
And so the wall offers its own illusions, a mystification that simultaneously recognizes and refuses limits. On the one hand, Trumpism fuels resentment that the United States has been too generous, that in a world of scarcity “we can’t take care of others if we can’t take care of our own,” as that Murrieta resident protesting the arrival of Central American children put it. On the other hand, Trumpism encourages a petulant hedonism that forbids nothing and restrains nothing—the right to own guns, of course, but also to “roll coal,” for example, as the rejiggering of truck engines to burn extraordinary amounts of diesel is called. The plume of black smoke emitted by these trucks is, according to such hobbyists, a “brazen show of American freedom”—and, since 2016, a show of support for Donald Trump.13 Pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord will do little to boost corporate profits, as many have pointed out, but it has everything to do with signaling that the United States will not submit to limits. In a world as fragile as ours, such displays of freedom become increasingly cruel, until cruelty itself becomes a “brazen show of American freedom”—lifting restrictions on killing hibernating bears, say, or pardoning Joe Arpaio, or extolling torture.
Trump’s cruelty takes many such forms, but it is most consistent in its targeting of Mexicans and Central American migrants.14 We can think of his wall as refashioning the country into a besieged medieval fortress, complete with its own revered martyrs’ cult. As a candidate, Trump campaigned with the victims (or families of victims) of crimes committed by undocumented residents, using their grief to stoke aggrievement. As president, one of his first acts was to establish a government office charged with providing support services to “victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.”
There’s no visa program aimed to help suffering people so measly that it can’t be canceled by Trump with great fanfare. A program helping a few thousand Nicaraguans was eliminated, as were similar programs for Hondurans. The director of Trump’s Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that his office was going to “start denaturalizing people”—that is, seeking out mistakes in the application process that let an immigrant become a citizen, then using them to take away citizenship—even though he admits that such errors are extremely rare. Along the border, more people than ever are being denied passports, on the suspicion that their birth documents are forged and that they were actually born in Mexico. According to the Washington Post, under Trump, “passport applicants with official U.S. birth certificates are being jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings.”15 Trump wants to go even further: he’s promised to sign an executive order ending birthright citizenship, which would entail a radical narrowing of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
And then, in the summer of 2018, with midterm elections approaching, Trump calculated that he could turn the abuse of migrant children into a winning political issue. His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announced that families arriving at the border would be split up, with the children taken away and the parents placed in jail and prosecuted as child-smugglers. Suddenly, it was as if all the many decades of long-ignored border brutalism came bursting forth, in a unbearable torrent of stories, photographs, videos, and audio clips: caged babies wailing for their parents, children injected with drugs to force them to sleep, abandoned Walmarts converted into detention centers. Outrage forced Trump to back down from the worst of his family separation policy. But he still used the public attention to insist on “zero tolerance” and used the protests against his policies to cultivate a sense of grievance among ICE and border patrol agents. It’s a “good issue,” he said, citing a nonexistent poll of public support for his policies.16 As of mid-2018, the United States was holding almost 13,000 migrant children, mostly from Mexico and Central America, in borderland detention centers, a nearly tenfold increase from the previous year.17
Trump won by running against the entire legacy of the postwar order, including those policies that have generated, in the countries south of the border as well as in the Middle East, untold numbers of refugees (and, as might be expected, criminals): endless war, austerity, “free trade,” unfettered corporate power, and extreme inequality.18 Two years into his tenure, the war has expanded, the bombing has escalated, and the Pentagon’s budget has increased. Taxes have been cut, deregulation accelerated, and the executive branch is staffed by ideologues who want to deregulate even more.
Public lands and resources are being privatized, tax cuts are continuing the class war against the poor, and judicial and executive agency appointments will increase monopoly rule. Unable to offer an alternative other than driving the existing agenda forward at breakneck speed, Trumpism cultivates an enraged refusal of limits—his appeal, to many, is his impunity, as Trump himself often points out—even as his pledge to build a border wall is founded on the idea that the world does have limits.
Whether that wall gets built or not, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint, but no longer pretends, in a world of limits, that everyone can be free—and enforces that reality through cruelty, domination, and racism.
Maybe after Trump is gone, what is understood as the political “center” can be reestablished. But it seems doubtful. Politics appears to be moving in two opposite directions. One way, nativism beckons; Donald Trump, for now, is its standard-bearer. The other way, socialism calls to younger voters who, burdened by debt and confronting a bleak labor market, are embracing social rights in numbers never before seen. Coming generations will face a stark choice—a choice long deferred by the emotive power of frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism and socialism, or at least social democracy.
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND OTHER MATTERS
RACE REALISM AND THE WALL
In a short story published in 1950, “The Wall and the Books,” Jorge Luis Borges tells of Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who ordered China’s Great Wall built and all the books in his kingdom burned. It’s Borges, so every reason he gives for these two seemingly contradictory desires—to create and to destroy—is followed by another explanation that cancels out the first. Borges finally settles on the idea that both the building and the burning were driven by the emperor’s desire to “halt death.” Shih Huang Ti, at least according to Borges, lived in terror of mortality, prohibiting the word “death” from being uttered in his presence and searching desperately for an elixir of youth. Maybe, Borges guessed, Shih Huang Ti ordered the wall built to preserve his realm for eternity and the books burned to suppress the idea that nothing lasts for eternity. For if the history contained in books teaches anything, it is that our time on earth is fleeting. The emperor apparently sentenced anyone who tried to save a book to a lifetime of forced labor on his wall. “Perhaps the wall was a metaphor,” Borges writes, since its construction “condemned those who adored the past to a task as vast, as stupid, and as useless as the past itself.”
As to the United States, the biologist Garrett Hardin, a tenured professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was among the first to call for a wall to be built on the border with Mexico. “We might build a wall, literally,” Hardin wrote in a 1977 essay titled “Population and Immigration: Compassion or Responsibility?” published in The Ecologist. Hardin was an early exponent of what today is called “race realism,” the idea that a world of limited resources and declining white birth rates calls for hardened borders. Hardin’s 1971 editorial in Science, titled “The Survival of Nations and Civilizations,” makes the case:
Can a government of men persuade women that it is their patriotic duty to emulate the rabbits? Or force them? If we renounce conquest and overbreeding, our survival in a competitive world depends on what kind of world it is: One World, or a world of national territories. If the world is one great commons, in which all food is shared equally, then we are lost. Those who breed faster will replace the rest.… In a less than perfect world, the allocation of rights based on territory must be defended if a ruinous breeding race is to be avoided. It is unlikely that civilization and dignity can survive everywhere; but better in a few places than in none.
Two centuries earlier, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were rhapsodic when they contemplated New World bountifulness: the idea that growth, including rapid population growth, would soon double “the numbers of mankind, and of course the quantum of existence and happiness.” Self-styled “realists” such as Hardin made explicit what in Jefferson and Franklin was implicit: such joy was reserved exclusively for Anglo growth. Hardin would go on to describe his position as “lifeboat ethics,” the idea that oars should be used not just as paddles but weapons, to swat away others trying to climb up on the boat. He would later advocate the “race science” of The Bell Curve.
Over the last few decades, as anti-migrant nativism has revitalized the conservative movement, the right has built a library of follow-up manifestos. Some of the early publications emerged out of the post-Vietnam “end of plenty” literature, and reveal overlap between the concerns of environmentalists, population controllers, English-language defenders, and anti-immigrant nativists. Hardin is an example of this overlap, as is John Tanton, who in the 1970s wrote an essay arguing for eugenics and helped found the nativist Federation for American Immigration Reform. Elena R. Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s Reproduction (2009), discusses the increasing obsession of immigration restrictionists like Tanton with Mexican fertility rates. See also Laura Briggs, How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics (2017).
The novelist and environmentalist Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, had already expressed concerns about population growth, the rising birth rates of people of color, and the “Latinization” of the U.S. when in 1981 he called for the creation of a “physical barrier” and an expansion of the border patrol to include up to twenty thousand agents (a number that was considered a radical proposal at the time but today is only about half of the agents working for the border patrol and ICE combined). “These are harsh, even cruel propositions,” said Abbey. But echoing Hardin, he wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books (December 17, 1981) that the “American boat is full, if not already overloaded; we cannot afford further mass immigration. The American public is aware of this truth even if our ‘leaders’ prefer to attempt to ignore it. We know what they will not acknowledge.” As xenophobia became a more central element of the conservative right, environmentalists, both mainstream and radical, moved away from linking their social critique to immigration concerns. Murray Bookchin, in 1988, called Abbey racist. See also Luis Alberto Urrea’s criticism, “Down the Highway with Edward Abbey,” in Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998).
Patrick Buchanan did the most to popularize the idea of a barrier on the southern border in his 1992 nomination challenge to George H. W. Bush. Today, most conservative personalities, such as Ann Coulter and the like, publish at least one anti-migrant call to arms. Earlier contributions to the genre include Palmer Stacy and Wayne Lutton, The Immigration Time Bomb (1985); Wayne Lutton, The Myth of Open Borders (1988); Lawrence Auster, The Path to National Suicide (1990); Roy Howard Beck, The Case Against Immigration (1996); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation (1996); John Tanton and Joseph Smith, Immigration and the Social Contract (1996); Samuel Francis, America Extinguished (2001); Buchanan, The Death of the West (2002); and Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia (2003). Also worth mentioning is Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s respectfully received Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004). Daniel Denvir’s forthcoming All-American Nativism is an important overview of the rise of anti-migrant extremism.
The decision of the Republican Party to focus on suppressing the vote of Latinos and other people of color was based on mundane calculations: that if voter registration, turnout, and preference trends continued as they had been, then the Republican Party was in danger of losing Texas, Arizona, and Florida, along with its status as a national-level political organization. For voter suppression, as well as its targeting of Latinos, see Gregory Downs, “Today’s Voter Suppression Tactics Have a 150 Year History,” Talking Points Memo (July 26, 2018), and Ari Berman, “The Man Behind Trump’s Voter-Fraud Obsession,” New York Times (June 13, 2017). Rick Perlstein and Livia Gershon document Republican Party efforts at voter suppression of minority votes going back to 1961, including in Arizona’s now infamous Maricopa County, where the future chief justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye, which forced “every black or Mexican voter” to take a literacy test and read a passage from the Constitution—an initiative that was expanded statewide, with the help of nearly all of the state’s sheriffs, during Barry Goldwater’s 1966 presidential run. Perlstein and Gershon, “Stolen Elections, Voting Dogs and Other Fantastic Fables from the GOP Voter Fraud Mythology,” Talking Points Memo (August 16, 2018).
