The further I drove into Oroville, the more disappointment I felt.

I had my passport with me, but no one asked me to show it. American flags still hung from stores along Montgomery Street. Homes near the Feather River were flying our state’s banner. City Hall had not been replaced by a new national capitol. And as hard as I looked, I could find no new standing army, or presidential palace, or the Oroville Food and Drug Administration.

It was as if the city council of Oroville, 70 miles north of Sacramento in Butte County, had never made national news in 2021 by declaring itself a “constitutional republic.” And no one in this town home to close to 20,000 residents much wanted to talk about this bold move, even those who once championed the idea.

That’s too bad. Because there is no more productive spirit, and no greater creative force, than the commitment to break away, to declare independence and build something new.

That’s the spirit, that’s the force, we should celebrate on Independence Day—especially in California, which is known for going its own way. But it’s been a long time since Independence Day was about independence.

These days, we try to put on displays of national unity—a fundamental mistake at the heart of our national malaise.

Americans, amidst our divisions, foolishly long for unity, even though unity, and the national compromises it requires, have produced so many awful things in our country. We the people—or more correctly, the wealthy male and European slice of we—came together to adopt a constitution that enshrined slavery and shunned democracy. In the name of unity, we ended Reconstruction and launched Jim Crow. In our moments of greatest national unity, we ceded terrible power to presidents, and pursued endless wars.

The United States only truly advances through division and disunion. We needed a civil war to end slavery. Every expansion of rights required social movements that divided us. The nation’s signature technological achievements were the products of people who went off on their own, in defiance of business convention and existing laws, from Kitty Hawk to Cupertino. Environmental progress, including climate change laws, has come when cities and states, including California, have broken ranks.

So, on this Independence Day, the problem is not our absence of unity, but the weakness of our efforts at disunion.

California, and especially its discontents, have displayed a decided lack of nerve. This country needs a revolution, but we aren’t supplying one. A state famous for producing internal secession movements—there have been more than 200 attempted break-ups since 1850—lately has seen nothing but half-hearted efforts.

In this, Oroville is hardly the only disappointment.

Who, for example, switched all the coffee in San Bernardino County to decaf this year?

Last fall, the people of that county, the largest by area in the United States, voted to direct officials to study greater autonomy “up to and including secession from the State of California.”

That verdict portended a wholesale rethinking of the meaning of county government in California and the U.S. Some of us hoped that San Bernardino, one of the few parts of California seeing population gains, would dream bigger than just statehood, and go all the way, for nationhood. (I would have applied for citizenship.)

But eight months after the vote, there have been few public signs of progress, other than a few more pointed requests for funding San Bernardino priorities in the state budget. There is no public indication of serious work on statehood, and the study that voters demanded has not been published.

In the rural precincts of the North State, the longstanding push for a state of Jefferson, which drew heavy publicity and broad local government support in the early years of this century, seems at low ebb. It’s been eclipsed by the effort by rural counties in Oregon, some of which border California and would have been part of Jefferson, to split off from the Beaver State and become part of an expanded “Greater Idaho.”

Northern California does have some disunity, but it’s not of the constructive kind. In Shasta County, right-wing political figures have taken over, and their desire to destroy institutions and threaten people eclipses any interest in building more democratic government.

Just this May, El Dorado County, which includes Lake Tahoe, saw the launch of a new secession effort, called the Republic of El Dorado, inspired in part by the fact that the county isn’t home to a single elected representative in the state or federal government. But again, the effort doesn’t have a clear agenda. It’s also built on the dubious claim, running contrary to law and the constitution, that the county can leave and make itself a state without any agreement or sign-off from Congress or the state legislature.

There are other local acts of defiance that could evolve into a bigger split and more change, but haven’t yet. Our state is full of sanctuary cities that have developed new ways to protect and serve unauthorized immigrants and their families. Some school boards, notably in Temecula, have limited access to books or taken conservative stands in the culture wars, thus challenging the state. The city of Huntington Beach and the state are suing each other over housing laws, though it seems unlikely that the outcome will boost housing production, much less change the nature of local government in California.

Meanwhile, other, more established ideas for independence in California remain dormant. Bay Area investor Tim Draper, who once circulated ballot measures to split California into multiple states, is devoted to cryptocurrency instead. The city of Los Angeles is in a political crisis and might benefit from the relaunch required by a breakup, but the movement for San Fernando Valley secession, which triggered a citywide vote a generation ago, is all but dead.

That’s too bad. As the historian and journalist Richard Kreitner observed in his 2020 book Break It Up, “secession is the only kind of revolution we Americans have ever known and the only kind we’re ever likely to see,”

So, on this Independence Day, the best way for Californians to celebrate their country is by plotting to break away and build something new.

We’re disunited, and that’s what makes us great.

The post In Praise of a Disunited States of America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If the newly drafted Constitution wasn’t ratified, he warned in Federalist No. 8, a “War between the States,” fought by irregular armies across unfortified borders, was imminent. Large states would overrun small ones. “Plunder and devastation” would march across the landscape, reducing the citizenry to “a state of continual danger” that would nourish authoritarian, militarized institutions.

“If we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or … thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe,” he continued. “Our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.”

Hamilton’s 1787 plea was successful, of course, in that we adopted a new, stronger Constitution two years later. But Americans still didn’t agree on why it was we had come together and what defined us as a people.

Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a special challenge for the United States, arguably the world’s first civic nation, defined not by organic ties, but by a shared commitment to a set of ideals. The U.S. came into being not as a nation, but as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for 13 disparate rebel colonies facing a common enemy. Its people lacked a shared history, religion, or ethnicity. They didn’t speak a language uniquely their own. Most hadn’t occupied the continent long enough to imagine it as their mythic homeland. They had no shared story of who they were and what their purpose was. In short, they had none of the foundations of a nation-state.

The one unifying story Americans had told themselves—that they had all participated in the shared struggle of the American Revolution—lost its strength as the Founders’ generation passed from the scene, and had been shaken by secession movements in the Appalachian backcountry of Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1790s and in New England during the war of 1812. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly clear that this identity crisis could no longer be papered over: Americans knew they needed a story of United States nationhood, if their experiment were to survive.

The first person to package and present such a national story for the United States was the historian-statesman George Bancroft. Bancroft, the son of a famous Unitarian preacher in Massachusetts, who graduated from Harvard in 1817 and was promptly sent by that college’s president on an epic study-abroad trip to the German Confederation, another federation of states contemplating its identity. In Europe, Bancroft studied under Arnold Heeren, Georg Hegel, and other intellectuals who were developing ideas of Germanic nationhood; chummed around with Lafayette, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, and Goethe; backpacked on foot from Paris to Rome; and returned home, doctorate in hand, with his head churning with ideas about his country’s place in the world. After failing in bids to be a poet, professor, prep school master, and preacher (who memorably evoked the image of “our pelican Jesus” in a sermon), Bancroft embarked upon what would prove to be his life’s work: giving his young nation a history that would answer those great questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “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.”

Bancroft’s expansive notion of American identity had questionable aspects, too. He claimed that the Founders were guided by God, that Americans were a chosen people destined to spread across the continent, that success was all but preordained—notions whose hubris and imperialist implications would become clear during his lifetime. But the core of it has remained with us to this day: a civic national vision that defined an American as one devoted to the ideals set down in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: equality, liberty, self-government, and the natural rights of all people to these things.

Bancroft’s draft of our national myth was taken up and refined by Abraham Lincoln. In the Gettysburg Address, the president presented the myth—“a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—not as our destiny, but as an ideal that had not yet been achieved and, if not fought for, could perish from the Earth. It’s no accident that the definitive copy of the Address is one Lincoln handwrote and sent to Bancroft, who months later was chosen by Congress to deliver the official eulogy for the assassinated president. One had influenced the other.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass—who like Bancroft had traveled to the White House during the war to lobby Lincoln to take a stand for the Declaration’s ideals—carried this civic nationalist torch through the dark days of the 1870s and 1880s. It was a time when Northern and Southern whites agreed to put aside America’s commitments to human equality in favor of sectional unity, even when it meant tolerating death squads in the South and the effective nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. “I 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,” Douglass said in an 1869 speech that summarized U.S. civic nationalism as well as anyone ever has. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter … [and] all 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.” Douglass, who had escaped from slavery, was, unlike Bancroft, well aware that America had not implemented its ideals and that it was not at all inevitable that it ever would. That made his framing of the task and its stakes far more compelling, accurate, and ultimately inspirational than the bookish and often oblivious historian’s.

But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

This ethno-nationalist vision of our country was dethroned in the 1960s, but it remains with us, resurgent, today. Its strength can’t be underestimated: Simms’s vision is as old and as “American” as Bancroft’s, and it was the dominant paradigm in this country for nearly as many decades. It will not just slink off into the night. It must be smothered by a more compelling alternative.

The civic nationalist story of America that Bancroft envisioned still has the potential to unify the country. Its essential covenant is to ensure freedom and equality of opportunity for everyone: for African Americans and Native Americans—inheritors of the legacies of slavery and genocide—to be sure, but also for Americans with ancestors from Asia and Latin America, India and China, Poland, France, or Ireland. For rural and urban people; evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and atheists; men, women, nonbinary people, and, most certainly, children.

It’s a coalition for Americans, a people defined by this quest, tasked by the preamble of the Constitution to promote the common good and individual liberty across generations. It’s a framework that could unite the Democratic Party with the non-Trumpist branch of the Republican Party, and most independents to boot. And over the past century, cultural, judicial, and demographic changes have strengthened its hand, ending white Christian control over the electorate in all the large states, not a few of the small ones, and in the federation as a whole. It’s not an off-the-shelf product, however. Its biggest failings—arrogance, messianic hubris, a self-regard so bright as to blind one to shortcomings—stem from the Puritan legacy Bancroft was so steeped in. The Puritans thought they had been chosen by God to build a New Zion. Bancroft believed the product of their mission was the United States, and that it was destined to spread its ideals across a continent and the world. This notion of American Exceptionalism—that the U.S. can walk on water when other nations cannot—needs to be jettisoned and replaced by the humility that comes with being mere mortals, able to recognize the failures of our past and the fragility of our present and future.

It’s a task that will take a generation, but could bring us together again, from one shining sea to the other.

The post Determining America’s National Myth Will Determine the Country’s Fate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My acting friend, Ryan, has a British agent and a German agent because he pursues his career in both countries. That’s a typical conversation with his British agent. If he’s not “in the country,” he laments, they don’t put him up for jobs. Here’s one with his German agent:

“Ryan we have an audition for you in Cologne tomorrow afternoon.”
“That’s fine. I’m in London so I’ll get the 7:45.”
“Fine.”

The British play a leading role in the European Union, but despite joining it nearly 40 years ago, we never imagine ourselves as really part of it. We’re more like the kid with the sick-note on the sidelines, making snide comments when someone misses a sitter or falls over.

Last month, I travelled with my opera-singer partner from an audition that she had in Paris on one day, to an audition in Stuttgart the next. I experienced a deep thrill as, minutes after our train departed Strasbourg, we crossed from France into Germany. We crossed the border. One moment we were in France, and the next, a completely different country.

That fluid border has become part of the essence of what it means to be European.

We Brits are not used to crossing borders on land. We’re used to the process requiring a much greater effort and ceremony. Going to Europe—whether transported by some mechanical means under, on, or over the sea (which is otherwise impassable to all but the most audacious human swimmers)—that’s going abroad. You can walk to Wales. You can’t walk to Belgium. That’s what “abroad” means.

Mainland Europeans, meanwhile, have imagined away their borders.

This border between France and Germany was for me a mysterious, intangible but intensely powerful zone: nonexistent in real life, yet relatively massive as a black squiggle on a Google map. It bewitched me as I tried to pinpoint it, to experience “the going over,” to feel that infinitesimal moment of liminality. Although the ticket inspector naturally switched from French into German, and (as per European Union regulations) exchanged her neck-ring of garlic for a giant pretzel headpiece, in all other respects she carried on as if nothing had happened.

The crossing received not a flicker of interest from the morning commuters. To me it was monumental. “But the Maginot Line …” I kept murmuring to myself and my half-asleep companion, groggily studying Mozart. I didn’t even know whether the Maginot Line had even ever been there …

Britain is not in Europe because it is not in mainland Europe. The mentality of the British is frequently described as an “island mentality.” I am ashamedly prone to it myself.

As a stage director, I read a lot of actors’ and singers’ CVs. On my latest project, as I attempted to whittle down the audition schedule, I caught myself looking suspiciously at details of experience in European theaters I hadn’t heard of. I caught myself asking, “What have you done in the U.K.? What are all these foreign companies?”

I am ashamed of my prejudice, because I see myself as an example of a rare thing: a European Brit. In fact, I am currently living in Italy. I am house-sitting for my sister’s (Italian-Australian) in-laws. I am here because I love Italy and want to improve my Italian. I want to make contacts and to work in theaters across Europe.

My interest in Europe comes, I believe, from my late mother, an art critic and book editor who spoke Italian, French, and German. It’s rare for a Brit to speak anything other than English.

Always impressed by my mum, I have spurred myself to study those languages too. I drew stares of astonished horror on London’s “tube” (subway) when I directed a lost French woman in French at Christmas. That my French was wildly ungrammatical didn’t matter—no one apart from my interlocutor knew. To the Londoners (who as a rule conceal their emotions at all costs), I was gifted with terrible powers. An enthusiastic attempt at Italian in a similar situation caused people to move down the car.

Our suspicion of languages other than English is another symptom of our islander mentality. There’s little attempt to shake it. Although the sea’s relevance as a physical barrier between “us” and “them” has dwindled, it retains a powerful grip on our psyche. The leader of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) complained that hearing foreign languages around him on the train was “deeply disturbing.” His interviewer questioned him about that, because the leader of UKIP is in fact married to a German, and his own children speak German. (Only in Britain could this be seen as a massive victory for the Left.)

As they say, “exposure is everything,” and I credit my mum with seeding my interest in cultures beyond the coast of Blighty. We spent the occasional summer in Italy. Dad’s shoeboxes of photographs contain classics such as myself, my sister, and brother grimacing in Rome’s August heat, in front of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Here’s Lewis on the verge of sunstroke outside the Medici Palace. Here’s Eleanor sulking sweatily on the Uffizi floor. I grew up with pasta (normally with pesto) as my staple food, while my British friends were on oven chips and burgers. Among the more traditional roast beefs and treacle puddings, my grandmother still makes me sweet and sour pork with spaghetti (pineapples and all) whenever I visit Liverpool. I see this as a continued nod to my mother’s Europeanism. Sweet and sour is, of course, emphatically not Italian: I can only assume it’s the thing Grandma thinks goes best with spaghetti. The gesture is in the spaghetti. It is a dish that I have grown to love, although I have only ever encountered it in Grandma’s house.

My mother’s European son, I find myself now living in Italy—until I return to London for that summer opera. I love Italy, Italians, the food, the culture … I love fumbling through the pronouns and drawing beaming smiles of approval at my catastrophic and often offensive errors. I love the absence of McDonald’s and the rest of them. A recent return to London—for those auditions—had me grumpy, cramped, and resentful at the nonstop circuit of chain stores and soulless restaurants. I heard myself declaiming sentences such as, “It’s not how it’s done in Italy …”

Here in Pisa, I have been sent to see Guido on Via San Francesco for my vegetables. He picks them for you: You do not touch Guido’s vegetables. This can be difficult when it comes to nonnative products such as avocados. Guido doles them out too hard. “Italians do not understand the avocado,” laments my friend Giorgio. “It is grown here, but it is not native.” What a wonderful foible.

I may lapse into some of the anti-European prejudices intrinsic to my island. But I’m not proud of that. Should my country vote to leave the European Union, I still hope to remain an active part of it. An Italian friend based in London has offered to help me find a flat in Berlin. Perhaps I will take her up on that.

The post The British Are Anchored by an Islander Mentality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A Court decision that relies on our federal constitution to legalize gay marriage across the country would be a triumph for individual liberty, common sense, and human decency. It would also amount to a well-deserved blow against that most persistent of villains throughout American history: the destructive creed of state rights and state sovereignty.

That same creed is at issue in the Obamacare case that is also expected to be decided this month, as the Court concludes its current term. At first glance, the Affordable Care Act and the institution of gay marriage don’t seem to have much in common as litigation subjects, but this case, too, is as much about the proper relationship between the states and the federal government as it is about anything else—which is true of so many of our political and legal fights these days.

King v. Burwell, the Obamacare decision, is a fluke of a case, an opportunity for opponents of the law to take another swing at the piñata (which they damaged, but did not break it in an earlier challenge) by capitalizing on some careless legislative drafting. The law allows the federal government to provide subsidies to lower-income insurance customers who sign up for coverage on the new exchanges “established by the state.” Trouble is, pursuant to other sections of the law, it was the federal government that ended up establishing an exchange for those states that refused to establish their own—and no one involved in drafting the law intended for its patients to be denied the same subsidies available to people signing up for coverage on a state-created exchange. Now, in their feverish desire to interfere with the relationship between American citizens and their national government, opponents of the law are hoping the Supreme Court will cut off millions of people from the support and coverage they are receiving.

As we await these landmark decisions that are so of the moment, it’s worth reading Joseph J. Ellis’s new book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution 1783-1789. It’s a masterful reminder of how timeless this tension is between the concept of the United States as a singular nation and the United States as merely a confederation of sovereign states.

Ellis chronicles how four of our more visionary Founding Fathers—George Washington, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—recognized from the earliest days after independence that the individual states, and the excessive power retained by them under the loose Articles of Confederation, were a serious threat to the promise of the American Revolution.

Hence this influential “quartet” pushed for the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Washington’s greatness lay in the fact that, from his earliest days leading the Continental Army, he transcended his narrow identification with Virginia, to think more broadly in terms of an American nation. He came out of self-imposed retirement to lend his enormous credibility to the Philadelphia proceedings. Washington wrote at the time (in what can be read as a challenge to pro-confederation Virginians then, but also to Virginia Confederates who’d secede from the Union in the following century): “We are either a United people or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation … If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”

Ellis captures the rare brilliance and admirable foresight of Washington’s three intellectual partners in this quest—Jay, Hamilton, and the first president’s fellow Virginian, Madison. All three men had a clear vision of an America destined to be a unique power in the world, defined by its collective sense of purpose and its citizens’ liberty. They understood that to survive, and thrive, as a continental power, the United States needed a stronger national government representing, and protecting, all of its people.

Madison, often cited as the father of the Constitution, lost plenty of battles at Philadelphia, starting with his bedrock insistence that sovereign power be shifted entirely from the states to the central government. Madison gave up on what he initially considered his non-negotiable demand for a federal veto power over state laws, as he would later have to surrender on his proposal that some of the Bill of Rights also limit the power of states. Though the closest of political partners at other times, Madison and Jefferson disagreed vehemently over whether it was state governments or the new federal government that would be the biggest threat to individual liberty and rights, and history has proven Jefferson spectacularly wrong in that debate. It’s hard to blame him: Madison’s (and Hamilton’s) belief that the larger, more distant national government could be a more representative embodiment of “We the People” was a very modern concept.

But being so ahead of their time limited The Quartet’s contemporary success. They were able to remedy the immediate flaws of the Articles of Confederation, bind the new nation closer together and set it on the right course, but their new Constitution, by political necessity, was riddled with fraught compromises – such as the electoral college and the equal vote of each state in the Senate—whose underlying tensions would define much of American history.

Abraham Lincoln ratified and reinvigorated the Quartet’s accomplishment to the point where he deserves to join Ellis’ crew, and make it a Quintet. The Civil War and its aftermath—especially the 14th Amendment on which the gay marriage case should hinge—delivered on the Madisonian concept of a federal government empowered to protect citizens—especially minorities—from the bullying of local and state authorities (i.e., majorities). But that doesn’t mean the fight is over.

Nowadays we don’t often think about these federalist debates that have haunted our history, because we are too busy—and this goes for both conservatives and liberals—gaming the tension between Washington and state capitals. Even within the gay marriage legal fights over the last decade, both sides have taken turns, depending on the prevailing winds, arguing in favor of a state’s right to define marriage for itself, damned what the rest of the country thinks.

Too rarely do we ask ourselves the more fundamental question of whether we are citizens of California or Texas—or the United States? If the Quartet had invented a time machine and paid us a visit, they’d be astonished at the resilience of the state sovereignty creed, despite all we’ve been through as a nation. Too many Americans stubbornly cling to the belief that the United States is a confederation in which citizens’ fundamental rights—on issues like marriage, access to baseline health care, and what is taught in their public schools—can and should vary across state lines, to accommodate local biases.

Let’s hope in the coming days and weeks that five such Americans aren’t sitting on the Supreme Court.

The post What Do Gay Marriage and Obamacare Have in Common? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.