Anti-Climacus

I quite liked this:

Out there, on the Mall, among the monuments, in this state, it all came at me, the recent readings of American history, my own movements through  life and congealed into the oddest thing--an intense pride in country.

I spend much of this blog discussing race, and teasing at the problems of American history. I think that it would be easy to see in that a scornful, pessimistic and cynical view of the country. On the contrary, I was much more scornful and pessimistic in my nationalist days. It's easier to attack the alleged fallacies of American democracy in the abstract. I've found it increasingly harder to do when measuring the country against the breadth of human history. My roots are radical and nationalist.  I regularly depend on the skepticism gifted to me by the radical/nationalist tradition, still my cynicism has been dulled by my excursions into history. 

I don't know if "American Exceptionalism" means much in this age, but it did, once. In The Feminist Promise, Christine Stansell notes that in 1850, America was the last standing democracy in the Atlantic world. That claim must be qualified by the broad swath of Americans--blacks, immigrants women--who were disenfranchised.  At the end of the 19th century, Stancell notes that Utah and Colorado were two of the only places in the entire world where women could vote. The hackneyed notion that "America is a beacon for democracy" is usually deployed in arrogance. But in the time of Abraham Lincoln, it was a demonstrable fact.

I think of my parents born into a socially engineered poverty, and I think of their children enjoying the fruits (social mobility) garnered by the nonviolent, democratic assault on that social engineering. And then I consider that for centuries, over the entire world, if your parents were  peasants, you were a peasant, as were your children.