If the American regime that I have known were to end on or around November 2020, could I adapt? Is my notion of my self flexible enough to find new ways of existing in an order for which it has not been prepared? Is my character, my identity, plastic enough? Should I worry more if it isn’t, or if it is?
I wonder whether my sense of being American can be separated from being part of a democracy. It’s a question that most of us have not had to ask, but obviously the answer must, at some level, be yes. The histories of almost every other nation-state involve multiple regimes. This is true even in France, which, more than the United States perhaps, unleashed the modern ideal of citizenship into the world. But the French Revolution failed, as did several subsequent republics. Yet one can still be French and still write French history.
The United States, for better or for worse, sees itself as having a continuous republic dating back to a founding moment, and governed by a document originally written in 1787. Thus questions of identity, history, and regime change have been at the margins of our national consciousness. After the American Revolution, we struggled to determine how to tell the story of our colonial past in relation to our postcolonial present. Was it a story of disconnect, or were the seeds of the American experiment first planted among early settlers? But, for the most part, we are comfortable imagining ourselves as the world’s oldest democracy, governed by an eighteenth-century charter that remains worthy of our admiration.
There are two major exceptions that offer contradictory glimpses of how Americans might tell their story following a regime change. First, we continue to struggle with the story of the Confederacy, when southern whites rebelled to create a slave-holding republic. After four bloody years, their revolution was crushed by Union forces. Since then, southerners have debated how to tell the story of their conquered region, a story that sits uncomfortably within the dominant narrative of a single, continuous American republic. The tense and emotional debates over Confederate monuments today exposes how Americans continue to disagree deeply over how to situate the Confederacy, as a regime, into our national story.
The second major exception concerns the experience of African Americans. From the perspective of African American history, there have been multiple American regimes, beginning with the regime of slavery. The Civil War produced a rebirth of freedom during Reconstruction. This second founding, alas, did not produce a lasting republic, but instead gave way to Jim Crow. With the civil rights movement there was hope that the arc of the moral universe was bending in the right direction, but that seems less certain today. Throughout, African Americans struggled for justice against the cruelty of a racist state, but also lived lives full of meaning and even laughed.
African American history, in this sense, is more like that of other nation-states, where there is continuity under changing regimes. But even this is not quite accurate, because African American history cannot be imagined outside the history of the United States, in which citizenship is fundamental. To achieve full membership in the polity has been central to African American struggles. DuBois documented the painful realities of ”two-ness”, of being American and being denied full membership in the polity because of one’s skin color. It granted African Americans, DuBois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), second sight, but that sight came with real existential struggle. That is why we still turn to African American thought and the history of African American social movements to understand the possibilities of democracy.
But what if the democracy part of the story is gone? What if there is no democracy left? What if the existential angst of being denied is resolved by removing the thing to be desired? Could I, could we, flourish without political liberty? Could I stop thinking of myself as a citizen? Would I take joy in the private, but still shared, experience of family and friends, of rituals such as birthday cakes and Christmas gifts and family game nights? Might faith fill the void—was the political always a false idol anyway? Why do I need to know the news if I am not an agent in producing it? Why do I need to care what my leaders do, so long as I follow the rules and they leave me and my loved ones alone? Could I still be American without being political? Yes, perhaps.