During a concert in Europe, Bruce Springsteen issued a criticism of Trump and his administration that generated a typically childish response from our thin-skinned autocrat. Springsteen’s comments–unlike Trump’s– displayed a fundamental understanding of what it means to be an American–“the union of people around a common set of values.” That union, he said, is “now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other.”
Springsteen recognized an essential element of American identity, an element that MAGA appears incapable of comprehending: America is, and has always been, about a set of ideals.
Back in 1997, I wrote that it is the mission of public education to identify and transmit the values Americans hold in common, the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and reflected through our national history.
What is the “American Idea”?
Americans value liberty. We believe in our inalienable right to hold our own opinions, to think for ourselves, to assemble with our friends, to cast our votes, to pray or not, all free of government coercion.
We value equality before the law– not to be confused with the fuzzy notion that we are all somehow interchangeable, and not to be confused with the belief of some religions that all people are equally worthwhile. This is a more limited proposition – – that government should apply the same rules to all similarly-situated citizens. It was a radical notion in 1776. It is fundamental to the way we understand ourselves and our society today.
We value the marketplace of ideas, the supreme importance of our ability to communicate with each other, unfettered by government censorship.
We value government legitimacy and respect for the rule of law. So long as our representatives continue to derive their authority from the consent of those they govern, we recognize our individual obligations to respect and obey the law. If we protest a law we believe to be unjust, we recognize our obligation to accept the consequences of that disobedience. (Tell that to the Jan. 6th insurrectionists pardoned by Trump…)
Finally, real Americans value the “woke” civic virtues which are necessary to the realization of the foregoing values: honesty, courage, kindness, mutual respect and tolerance.
In a country where people read different books and magazines, patronize different websites and news sources, attend different churches, and even speak different languages – where the information and beliefs we all share are diminishing and our variety and diversity are growing –these are the core values that make us Americans. They are nowhere to be seen in MAGA or the Trump administration.
Recently, David Brooks underlined the difference between Americans who define patriotism as allegiance to those overarching values, and the “blood and soil” Trumpers.
Trump and Vance have to rebut the idea that America is the embodiment of universal ideals. If America is an idea, then Black and brown people from all over the world can become Americans by coming here and believing that idea. If America is an idea, then Americans have a responsibility to promote democracy. We can’t betray democratic Ukraine in order to kowtow to a dictator like Vladimir Putin. If America is an idea, we have to care about human dignity and human rights. You can’t have a president go to Saudi Arabia, as Trump did this month, and effectively tell them we don’t care how you treat your people. If you want to dismember journalists you don’t like, we’re not going to worry about it….
If America is built around a universalist ideal, then there is no room for the kind of white identity politics that Trump and Stephen Miller practice every day. There is no room for the othering, zero-sum, us/them thinking, which is the only kind of thinking Trump is capable of. There’s no room for Trump’s immigration policy, which is hostile to Latin Americans but hospitable to the Afrikaners whose ancestors invented apartheid. There’s no room for Tucker Carlson’s replacement theory. There’s no room for the kind of racialized obsessions harbored, for example, by the paleoconservative writer Paul Gottfried in an essay called “America Is Not an ‘Idea,’” in Chronicles magazine: “Segregation was also an unjust arrangement, and I don’t regret seeing that go either. But what has taken its place is infinitely more frightening: the systematic degradation of white Americans.”
Brooks is right to accuse this Trumpian cabal of moral degradation, of substituting an ugly tribalism for genuine patriotism.
Springsteen is also right: people unified around American ideals can defeat Trump’s efforts to debase America. We all need to turn out for No Kings Day.
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