Opinion: America is always a work in progress

The U.S. celebrated its 250th birthday with the level of patriotism at a new low and the partisan divide over who feels it at a new high. This growing sense of “national shame,” according to President Trump, stems from a campaign to cast U.S. history as “irredeemably flawed.” For Trump, reviving national pride to help “Make America Great Again” requires learning about how great America once was through “patriotic education” in schools, museums and historical sites across the country.

Ironically, Trump would be hard-pressed to find anyone more qualified to be patriotic educator-in-chief than President Obama. No politician since Ronald Reagan, who inspired Obama, has done more to tap the nation’s past to instill national pride in the present. Reagan, Obama wrote in 2006, offered Americans “a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster.”

Obama’s effort to harness history in the service of “fostering unity,” as Trump called for last year, first captured national attention in his 2004 address to the Democratic National Convention. Obama hailed the U.S. as a land of “greatness” that served as a “beacon of freedom and opportunity” for the world.

Obama had no patience for Americans who denounced their country for being irredeemably flawed. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama blasted 1960s radicals who went so far as to burn American flags and blame the U.S. for “all that was wrong with the world.” He even rebuked his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, for denigrating “the greatness and the goodness of our nation” with his fiery, censorious sermons about America’s sinful history.

Such a static conception of the American past flew in the face of the romantic patriotism that Obama appealed to Americans with, one rooted in a history of inevitable progress rooted in incessant struggle. By contrast, Trump would later offer a nostalgic patriotism of a golden past with an immaculate conception, the “miracle of history,” as he described the Declaration of Independence in his thunderstorm-delayed July 4th address.

Both kinds of patriotism have historical precedents to commend them. There is plenty to be proud of in U.S. history, including inspiring struggles and sacrifices that yielded progress. But nostalgia has blind spots, and romance can go unrequited. Patriotism rooted in one or the other can curdle into cynicism or nihilism when confronted with evidence that confounds them.

A more resilient and historically-informed patriotism would begin with the premise that America, like Americans, is always a work in progress, which is not the same as a march of progress. We can no more turn back the hands of time to Make America Great Again than we can predict what the future holds, including how it will judge the past. Struggle does not always bear fruit, and what passes for progress today might not be deemed as such tomorrow.

Unforeseen outcomes

Consider the Progressive Era, named for the Progressives who pursued a proliferation of policy reforms on behalf of progress as they understood it, such as California’s John Randolph Haynes. A Los Angeles physician, Dr. Haynes was a prominent socialist and leading proponent of expanding the reach of democracy through direct democracy measures (the initiative, referendum and recall).

In 1911, Haynes’ efforts came to fruition when California legislators, with the support of newly elected Progressive governor Hiram Johnson, enacted all three direct democracy reforms. California would eventually become the state most known for legislation by direct democracy. However, the ballot proposition process would increasingly serve the very forces that direct democracy was conceived as a bulwark against — those with the means to push their pet causes.

Progressives also promoted the nation’s first laws to protect the environment. This included the creation of national forests, which banned prescribed burns and promoted fire suppression. Over time, though, this well-intentioned Progressive reform backfired. It contributed to growth of dense underbrush that provided the fuel to make California’s most recent fires its most devastating ones.

The logic driving environmental conservation also drove another Progressive Era reform: eugenics, which sought to steer human evolution in particular directions. As Progressive President Theodore Roosevelt’s National Conservation Commission explained, “conservation of our natural resources … must include … above all … conservation of the racial stock itself.”

California became the nation’s second adopter and most voluminous practitioner of the eugenics reform of compulsory sterilization. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously dissented from his brethren to support Progressive legislation that protected workers, wrote the 1927 majority opinion that, in the name of progress, upheld the practice of rendering women deemed “unfit” to procreate unable to do so.

Modern parallels

The Progressive Era was a response to the Gilded Age driven by the late 19th century industrial revolution. Today, we live in a New or Second Gilded Age, which is, in part, the ironic and unanticipated product of the post-industrial (or information) revolution. In 1976, America’s bicentennial year, The New York Times celebrated the “Revolution in Silicon Valley” and the promise of “almost unlimited consumer markets.”

As Silicon Valley soared, however, so, too, did economic inequality, the defining feature of yesterday’s and today’s Gilded Age. Here, too, California led the way, even as it became an ever increasing Democratic Party stronghold. In 1969, California sat just below the national average when it came to the degree of family income inequality. Since then, the state’s income inequality gap has widened considerably — making it one of the most unequal in the country today: the Golden State as Gilded State.

As these historical examples underscore, there is no idealized past to reclaim nor idealized future to arrive at through an inevitable march of progress. Instead, the best we can do is endeavor to make America greater. This is a never-ending quest implied by the Constitution’s aspiration “to form a more perfect union.” Our past provides reasons for both hope (if not guarantees) and humility borne of the knowledge that the future brings unforeseen twists and ironic turns that can mock the convictions of those who profess today that they know what’s best for tomorrow. But that should not deter us from trying.

Fortunately, in this journey without destination we have north stars to guide us. Foremost among them is the Declaration of Independence. Embedded within it are what Obama aptly described as “ideals that … stir our collective conscience” and “bind us together despite our differences” — and which Trump rightly hailed for igniting a “revolution that has never ended.”

This “great charter,” as President Calvin Coolidge called the Declaration on its 150th birthday, anchored in what Walter Isaacson recently called “the greatest sentence ever written,” provides the foundation for making America greater over and over again. That ought to be more than enough for Americans across polarized political divides to fly the Stars and Stripes in our front yards, while celebrating the nation’s birthday in our backyards under a fireworks-lit sky — and to return to the work-in-progress that is our nation for another 250 years.

Mark Brilliant is an associate professor of history and American Studies at UC Berkeley.