{"id":386,"date":"2026-07-05T13:38:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T13:38:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=386"},"modified":"2026-07-05T13:38:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T13:38:52","slug":"a-new-americanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housingnewsamerica.com\/?p=386","title":{"rendered":"A New Americanism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In 1986, the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning, bowtie-wearing Stanford historian Carl Degler delivered something other than the usual pipe-smoking, scotch-on-the-rocks, after-dinner disquisition that had plagued the evening program of the annual meeting of the American Historical Association for nearly all of its centurylong history. Instead, Degler, a gentle and quietly heroic man, accused his colleagues of nothing short of dereliction of duty: appalled by nationalism, they had abandoned the study of the nation.<\/p>\n

Read more The Strong Do What They Can\u2014and Suffer What They Must<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe can write history that implicitly denies or ignores the nation-state, but it would be a history that flew in the face of what people who live in a nation-state require and demand,\u201d Degler said that night in Chicago. He issued a warning: \u201cIf we historians fail to provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The nation-state was in decline, said the wise men of the time. The world had grown global. Why bother to study the nation? Nationalism, an infant in the nineteenth century, had become, in the first half of the twentieth, a monster. But in the second half, it was nearly dead\u2014a stumbling, ghastly wraith, at least outside postcolonial states. And historians seemed to believe that if they stopped studying it, it would die sooner: starved, neglected, and abandoned.<\/p>\n

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist, not a historian. But his 1989 essay \u201cThe End of History?\u201d illustrated Degler\u2019s point. Fascism and communism were dead, Fukuyama announced at the end of the Cold War. Nationalism, the greatest remaining threat to liberalism, had been \u201cdefanged\u201d in the West, and in other parts of the world where it was still kicking, well, that wasn\u2019t quite nationalism. \u201cThe vast majority of the world\u2019s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization,\u201d Fukuyama wrote. (Needless to say, he has since had to walk a lot of this back, writing in his most recent book about the \u201cunexpected\u201d populist nationalism of Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin, Poland\u2019s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Hungary\u2019s Viktor Orban, Turkey\u2019s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Philippines\u2019 Rodrigo Duterte, and the United States\u2019 Donald Trump.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fukuyama was hardly alone in pronouncing nationalism all but dead. A lot of other people had, too. That\u2019s what worried Degler.<\/p>\n

Nation-states, when they form, imagine a past. That, at least in part, accounts for why modern historical writing arose with the nation-state. For more than a century, the nation-state was the central object of historical inquiry. From George Bancroft in the 1830s through, say, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or Richard Hofstadter, studying American history meant studying the American nation. As the historian John Higham put it, \u201cFrom the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the nation was the grand subject of American history.\u201d Over that same stretch of time, the United States experienced a civil war, emancipation, reconstruction, segregation, two world wars, and unprecedented immigration\u2014making the task even more essential. \u201cA history in common is fundamental to sustaining the affiliation that constitutes national subjects,\u201d the historian Thomas Bender once observed. \u201cNations are, among other things, a collective agreement, partly coerced, to affirm a common history as the basis for a shared future.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the 1970s, studying the nation fell out of favor in the American historical profession. Most historians started looking at either smaller or bigger things, investigating the experiences and cultures of social groups or taking the broad vantage promised by global history. This turn produced excellent scholarship. But meanwhile, who was doing the work of providing a legible past and a plausible future\u2014a nation\u2014to the people who lived in the United States? Charlatans, stooges, and tyrants. The endurance of nationalism proves that there\u2019s never any shortage of blackguards willing to prop up people\u2019s sense of themselves and their destiny with a tissue of myths and prophecies, prejudices and hatreds, or to empty out old rubbish bags full of festering resentments and calls to violence. When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn\u2019t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s too late to restore a common history, too late for historians to make a difference. But is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history\u2014one that could foster a new Americanism?\u00a0<\/p>\n

THE NATION AND THE STATE<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The United States is different from other nations\u2014every nation is different from every other\u2014and its nationalism is different, too. To review: a nation is a people with common origins, and a state is a political community governed by laws. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins\u2014stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, \u201cthe French nation\u201d had common ancestors, when they of course did not. As I wrote in my book These Truths<\/em>, \u201cVery often, histories of nation-states are little more than myths that hide the seams that stitch the nation to the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in the American case, the origins of the nation can be found in those seams. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness. Long after independence, most Americans saw the United States not as a nation but, true to the name, as a confederation of states. That\u2019s what made arguing for ratification of the Constitution an uphill battle; it\u2019s also why the Constitution\u2019s advocates called themselves \u201cFederalists,\u201d when they were in fact nationalists, in the sense that they were proposing to replace a federal system, under the Articles of Confederation, with a national system. When John Jay insisted, in The Federalist Papers,<\/em> no. 2, \u201cthat Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people\u2014a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs,\u201d he was whistling in the dark.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was the lack of these similarities that led Federalists such as Noah Webster to attempt to manufacture a national character by urging Americans to adopt distinctive spelling. \u201cLanguage, as well as government should be national,\u201d Webster wrote in 1789. \u201cAmerica should have her own distinct from all the world.\u201d That got the United States \u201cfavor\u201d instead of \u201cfavour.\u201d It did not, however, make the United States a nation. And by 1828, when Webster published his monumental American Dictionary of the English Language<\/em>, he did not include the word \u201cnationalism,\u201d which had no meaning or currency in the United States in the 1820s. Not until the 1840s, when European nations were swept up in what has been called \u201cthe age of nationalities,\u201d did Americans come to think of themselves as belonging to a nation, with a destiny.<\/p>\n

This course of events is so unusual, in the matter of nation building, that the historian David Armitage has suggested that the United States is something other than a nation-state. \u201cWhat we mean by nationalism is the desire of nations (however defined) to possess states to create the peculiar hybrid we call the nation-state,\u201d Armitage writes, but \u201cthere\u2019s also a beast we might call the state-nation, which arises when the state is formed before the development of any sense of national consciousness. The United States might be seen as a, perhaps the only, spectacular example of the latter\u201d\u2014not a nation-state but a state-nation.<\/p>\n

One way to turn a state into a nation is to write its history. The first substantial history of the American nation, Bancroft\u2019s ten-volume History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent<\/em>, was published between 1834 and 1874. Bancroft wasn\u2019t only a historian; he was also a politician who served in the administrations of three U.S. presidents, including as secretary of war in the age of American continental expansion. An architect of manifest destiny, Bancroft wrote his history in an attempt to make the United States\u2019 founding appear inevitable, its growth inexorable, and its history ancient. De-emphasizing its British inheritance, he celebrated the United States as a pluralistic and cosmopolitan nation, with ancestors all over the world:<\/p>\n

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The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nineteenth-century nationalism was liberal, a product of the Enlightenment. It rested on an analogy between the individual and the collective. As the American theorist of nationalism Hans Kohn once wrote, \u201cThe concept of national self-determination\u2014transferring the ideal of liberty from the individual to the organic collectivity\u2014was raised as the banner of liberalism.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Liberal nationalism, as an idea, is fundamentally historical. Nineteenth-century Americans understood the nation-state within the context of an emerging set of ideas about human rights: namely, that the power of the state guaranteed everyone eligible for citizenship the same set of irrevocable political rights. The future Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner offered this interpretation in 1849:\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Here is the Great Charter of every human being drawing vital breath upon this soil, whatever may be his condition, and whoever may be his parents. He may be poor, weak, humble, or black,\u2014he may be of Caucasian, Jewish, Indian, or Ethiopian race,\u2014he may be of French, German, English, or Irish extraction; but before the Constitution of Massachusetts all these distinctions disappear. . . . He is a MAN, the equal of all his fellow-men. He is one of the children of the State, which, like an impartial parent, regards all of its offspring with an equal care.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Or as the Prussian-born American political philosopher Francis Lieber, a great influence on Sumner, wrote, \u201cWithout a national character, states cannot obtain that longevity and continuity of political society which is necessary for our progress.\u201d Lieber\u2019s most influential essay,\u00a0\u201cNationalism: A Fragment of Political Science,\u201d appeared in 1860, on the very eve of the Civil War.<\/p>\n

THE UNION AND THE CONFEDERACY<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The American Civil War was a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; it has just moved around.<\/p>\n

In the antebellum United States, Northerners, and especially northern abolitionists, drew a contrast between (northern) nationalism and (southern) sectionalism. \u201cWe must cultivate a national, instead of a sectional patriotism\u201d urged one Michigan congressman in 1850. But Southerners were nationalists, too. It\u2019s just that their nationalism was what would now be termed \u201cilliberal\u201d or \u201cethnic,\u201d as opposed to the Northerners\u2019 liberal or civic nationalism. This distinction has been subjected to much criticism, on the grounds that it\u2019s nothing more than a way of calling one kind of nationalism good and another bad. But the nationalism of the North and that of the South were in fact different, and much of U.S. history has been a battle between them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOurs is the government of the white man,\u201d the American statesman John C. Calhoun declared in 1848, arguing against admitting Mexicans as citizens of the United States. \u201cThis Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,\u201d the American politician Stephen Douglas said in 1858. \u201cIt was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Abraham Lincoln, building on arguments made by black abolitionists, exposed Douglas\u2019 history as fiction. \u201cI believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence,\u201d Lincoln said during a debate with Douglas in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1858. He continued:<\/p>\n

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I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

No matter, the founders of the Confederacy answered: we will craft a new constitution, based on white supremacy. In 1861, the Confederacy\u2019s newly elected vice president, Alexander Stephens, delivered a speech in Savannah in which he explained that the ideas that lay behind the U.S. Constitution \u201crested upon the assumption of the equality of races\u201d\u2014here ceding Lincoln\u2019s argument\u2014but that \u201cour new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery is his natural and moral condition.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The Military and the Republic<\/a><\/p>\n

The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism raged on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states\u2014namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens. These Reconstruction-era amendments also led to debates over immigration, racial and gender equality, and the limits of citizenship. Under the terms of the 14th Amendment, children of Chinese immigrants born in the United States would be U.S. citizens. Few major political figures talked about Chinese immigrants in favorable terms. Typical was the virulent prejudice expressed by William Higby, a one-time miner and Republican congressman from California. \u201cThe Chinese are nothing but a pagan race,\u201d Higby said in 1866. \u201cYou cannot make good citizens of them.\u201d And opponents of the 15th Amendment found both African American voting and Chinese citizenship scandalous. Fumed Garrett Davis, a Democratic senator from Kentucky: \u201cI want no negro government; I want no Mongolian government; I want the government of the white man which our fathers incorporated.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The most significant statement in this debate was made by a man born into slavery who had sought his own freedom and fought for decades for emancipation, citizenship, and equal rights. In 1869, in front of audiences across the country, Frederick Douglass delivered one of the most important and least read speeches in American political history, urging the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments in the spirit of establishing a \u201ccomposite nation.\u201d He spoke, he said, \u201cto the question of whether we are the better or the worse for being composed of different races of men.\u201d If nations, which are essential for progress, form from similarity, what of nations like the United States, which are formed out of difference, Native American, African, European, Asian, and every possible mixture, \u201cthe most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n

To Republicans like Higby, who objected to Chinese immigration and to birthright citizenship, and to Democrats like Davis, who objected to citizenship and voting rights for anyone other than white men, Douglass offered an impassioned reply. As for the Chinese: \u201cDo you ask, if I would favor such immigration? I answer, I would. Would you have them naturalized, and have them invested with all the rights of American citizenship? I would. Would you allow them to vote? I would.\u201d As for future generations, and future immigrants to the United States, Douglass said, \u201cI want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.\u201d For Douglass, progress could only come in this new form of a nation, the composite nation. \u201cWe shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the Isles of the sea,\u201d he said, and \u201call shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.\u201d That was Douglass\u2019 new Americanism. It did not prevail.<\/p>\n

Emancipation and Reconstruction, the historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois would write in 1935, was \u201cthe finest effort to achieve democracy . . . this world had ever seen.\u201d But that effort had been betrayed by white Northerners and white Southerners who patched the United States back together by inventing a myth that the war was not a fight over slavery at all but merely a struggle between the nation and the states. \u201cWe fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present,\u201d Du Bois wrote bitterly. Douglass\u2019 new Americanism was thus forgotten. So was Du Bois\u2019 reckoning with American history.<\/p>\n

NATIONAL HISTORIES<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The American Historical Association was founded in 1884\u2014two years after the French philosopher Ernest Renan wrote his signal essay, \u201cWhat Is a Nation?\u201d Nationalism was taking a turn, away from liberalism and toward illiberalism, including in Germany, beginning with the \u201cblood and iron\u201d of Bismarck. A driver of this change was the emergence of mass politics, under whose terms nation-states \u201cdepended on the participation of the ordinary citizen to an extent not previously envisaged,\u201d as the historian Eric Hobsbawm once wrote. That \u201cplaced the question of the \u2018nation,\u2019 and the citizen\u2019s feelings towards whatever he regarded as his \u2018nation,\u2019 \u2018nationality\u2019 or other centre of loyalty, at the top of the political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

This transformation began in the United States in the 1880s, with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and with a regime of immigration restriction, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal law restricting immigration, which was passed in 1882. Both betrayed the promises and constitutional guarantees made by the 14th and 15th Amendments. Fighting to realize that promise would be the work of standard-bearers who included Ida B. Wells, who led a campaign against lynching, and Wong Chin Foo, who founded the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1892, insisting, \u201cWe claim a common manhood with all other nationalities.\u201d<\/p>\n

The uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the white men who delivered speeches at the annual meetings of the American Historical Association during those years had little interest in discussing racial segregation, the disenfranchisement of black men, or immigration restriction. Frederick Jackson Turner drew historians\u2019 attention to the frontier. Others contemplated the challenges of populism and socialism. Progressive-era historians explained the American nation as a product of conflict \u201cbetween democracy and privilege, the poor versus the rich, the farmers against the monopolists, the workers against the corporations, and, at times, the Free-Soilers against the slaveholders,\u201d as Degler observed. And a great many association presidents, notably Woodrow Wilson, mourned what had come to be called \u201cthe Lost Cause of the Confederacy.\u201d All offered national histories that left out the origins and endurance of racial inequality.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, nationalism changed, beginning in the 1910s and especially in the 1930s. And the uglier and more illiberal nationalism got, the more liberals became convinced of the impossibility of liberal nationalism. In the United States, nationalism largely took the form of economic protectionism and isolationism. In 1917, the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, opposing U.S. involvement in World War I, began calling for \u201cAmerica first,\u201d and he took the same position in 1938, insisting that \u201cAmericans should maintain the traditional policy of our great and independent nation\u2014great largely because it is independent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the years before the United States entered World War II, a fringe even supported Hitler; Charles Coughlin\u2014a priest, near presidential candidate, and wildly popular broadcaster\u2014took to the radio to preach anti-Semitism and admiration for Hitler and the Nazi Party and called on his audience to form a new political party, the Christian Front. In 1939, about 20,000 Americans, some dressed in Nazi uniforms, gathered in Madison Square Garden, decorated with swastikas and American flags, with posters declaring a \u201cMass Demonstration for True Americanism,\u201d where they denounced the New Deal as the \u201cJew Deal.\u201d Hitler, for his part, expressed admiration for the Confederacy and regret that \u201cthe beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by the war.\u201d As one arm of a campaign to widen divisions in the United States and weaken American resolve, Nazi propaganda distributed in the Jim Crow South called for the repeal of the 14th and 15th Amendments.<\/p>\n

The \u201cAmerica first\u201d supporter Charles Lindbergh, who, not irrelevantly, had become famous by flying across the Atlantic alone, based his nationalism on geography. \u201cOne need only glance at a map to see where our true frontiers lie,\u201d he said in 1939. \u201cWhat more could we ask than the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific on the west?\u201d (This President Franklin Roosevelt answered in 1940, declaring the dream that the United States was \u201ca lone island,\u201d to be, in fact, a nightmare, \u201cthe nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In the wake of World War II, American historians wrote the history of the United States as a story of consensus, an unvarying \u201cliberal tradition in America,\u201d according to the political scientist Louis Hartz, that appeared to stretch forward in time into an unvarying liberal future. Schlesinger, writing in 1949, argued that liberals occupied \u201cthe vital center\u201d of American politics. These historians had plenty of blind spots\u2014they were especially blind to the forces of conservatism and fundamentalism\u2014but they nevertheless offered an expansive, liberal account of the history of the American nation and the American people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The last, best single-volume popular history of the United States written in the twentieth century was Degler\u2019s 1959 book, Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America<\/em>: a stunning, sweeping account that, greatly influenced by Du Bois, placed race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of the story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality. Astonishingly, it was Degler\u2019s first book. It was also the last of its kind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

THE DECLINE OF NATIONAL HISTORY<\/strong><\/h3>\n

If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

It had long been clear that nationalism was a contrivance, an artifice, a fiction. After World War II, while U.S. President Harry Truman was helping establish what came to be called \u201cthe liberal international order,\u201d internationalists began predicting the end of the nation-state, with the Harvard political scientist Rupert Emerson declaring that \u201cthe nation and the nation-state are anachronisms in the atomic age.\u201d By the 1960s, nationalism looked rather worse than an anachronism. Meanwhile, with the coming of the Vietnam War, American historians stopped studying the nation-state in part out of a fear of complicity with atrocities of U.S. foreign policy and regimes of political oppression at home. \u201cThe professional practice of history writing and teaching flourished as the handmaiden of nation-making; the nation provided both support and an appreciative audience,\u201d Bender observed in Rethinking American History in a Global Age <\/em>in 2002. \u201cOnly recently,\u201d he continued, \u201cand because of the uncertain status of the nation-state has it been recognized that history as a professional discipline is part of its own substantive narrative and not at all sufficiently self-conscious about the implications of that circularity.\u201d Since then, historians have only become more self-conscious, to the point of paralysis. If nationalism was a pathology, the thinking went, the writing of national histories was one of its symptoms, just another form of mythmaking.<\/p>\n

If love of the nation is what drove American historians to the study of the past in the nineteenth century, hatred for nationalism drove American historians away from it in the second half of the twentieth century.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Something else was going on, too. Beginning in the 1960s, women and people of color entered the historical profession and wrote new, rich, revolutionary histories, asking different questions and drawing different conclusions. Historical scholarship exploded, and got immeasurably richer and more sophisticated. In a there-goes-the-neighborhood moment, many older historians questioned the value of this scholarship. Degler did not; instead, he contributed to it. Most historians who wrote about race were not white and most historians who wrote about women were not men, but Degler, a white man, was one of two male co-founders of the National Organization for Women and won a Pulitzer in 1972 for a book called Neither Black nor White<\/em>. Still, he shared the concern expressed by Higham that most new American historical scholarship was \u201cnot about the United States but merely in the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

By 1986, when Degler rose from his chair to deliver his address before the American Historical Association, a lot of historians in the United States had begun advocating a kind of historical cosmopolitanism, writing global rather than national history. Degler didn\u2019t have much patience for this. A few years later, after the onset of civil war in Bosnia, the political philosopher Michael Walzer grimly announced that \u201cthe tribes have returned.\u201d They had never left. They\u2019d only become harder for historians to see, because they weren\u2019t really looking anymore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A NEW AMERICAN HISTORY<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.<\/p>\n

What would a new Americanism and a new American history look like? They might look rather a lot like the composite nationalism imagined by Douglass and the clear-eyed histories written by Du Bois. They might take as their starting point the description of the American experiment and its challenges offered by Douglass in 1869:<\/p>\n

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A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the close of the Cold War, some commentators concluded that the American experiment had ended in triumph, that the United States had become all the world. But the American experiment had not in fact ended. A nation founded on revolution and universal rights will forever struggle against chaos and the forces of particularism. A nation born in contradiction will forever fight over the meaning of its history. But that doesn\u2019t mean history is meaningless, or that anyone can afford to sit out the fight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe history of the United States at the present time does not seek to answer any significant questions,\u201d Degler told his audience some three decades ago. If American historians don\u2019t start asking and answering those sorts of questions, other people will, he warned. They\u2019ll echo Calhoun and Douglas and Father Coughlin. They\u2019ll lament \u201cAmerican carnage.\u201d They\u2019ll call immigrants \u201canimals\u201d and other states \u201cshithole countries.\u201d They\u2019ll adopt the slogan \u201cAmerica first.\u201d They\u2019ll say they can \u201cmake America great again.\u201d They\u2019ll call themselves \u201cnationalists.\u201d Their history will be a fiction. They will say that they alone love this country. They will be wrong.<\/p>\n

CORRECTION APPENDED\u00a0(February 26, 2019)<\/strong><\/p>\n

An earlier version of this article misidentified the U.S. president who began building the liberal international order after World War II. It was Harry Truman, not Franklin Roosevelt.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more The End of Hamas<\/a><\/p>\n

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