The USA at 250 – Make it New

Ben Wildsmith

It’s discomfiting to realise I’ve been alive for over a fifth of the USA’s existence. As a kid, the cultural horsepower of the place was so immense that it seemed to be a fact of nature, rather than a relatively recent political phenomenon.

Elvis, Evel Knievel, Coca Cola, MASH, Star Trek, Jack Kerouac, Maya Angelou, Charlies’ Angels – whatever you were into, ‘murica had it, only bigger, brighter, and louder than anything on offer here.

To see a rare Pontiac Trans Am or Corvette Stingray on UK roads was to be humbled before the sheer grunt of American commerce at a time when Morris Minors were still bumbling round the suburbs like an automotive expression of repressed sexuality.

I yearned for it, even more so once my musical tastes had led me to Johnny Cash, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, The Carter Family, Aretha Franklin, Link Wray, Townes Van Zandt, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Hank Williams and a thousand other stops on an imaginary highway that led from boredom to possibility. I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia, California on my mind…

So, I ended up there for a while to study in Arizona. It was 1997, so bang in the middle of Bill Clinton’s economic boom.

The Ratpack nostalgia movie Swingers had come out the year before, inspiring a craze for jive dancing, vintage suits, and cigars. Up and down Mill Avenue in Tempe, stores with fancy walk-in humidors were opening up to suck up all that disposable cash.

By the time I left, six months later, they were closing down as new fads took hold. ‘Make it new’, as Ezra Pound instructed.

Beneath the surface, though, darker forces were, as always, at play. The Oklahoma bombing in 1995 grew from a strand of dissatisfaction that has endured throughout American history.

A state that holds individual freedom as its founding principle is inherently contradictory. States stop you from doing things you want to do. However lightly they attempt to tread across the lives of their citizens, the muddy footprints of restraint are there across our taxes, the seat belts they make us wear, the identification we must show to their representatives, and the wars they send us to fight.

In Europe, we’re still grateful that monarchs aren’t decapitating us on a whim, so individual freedom is received as a welcome bonus. Americans, though, sit down to file their federal income tax returns in the knowledge that no such thing was supposed to exist in their country.

Those whose inner frontiersman spoke most angrily found each other with the advent of the internet. The notion that federal government was overmighty had always had support, but connected across the continent, constitutional absolutists began to organise.

By the mid-1990s there were up to 60 000 active militia members across America, with 10 000 in Michigan alone. Perceived government overreach at incidents like the Ruby Ridge killings and the Waco siege fed into what seemed like an insurrectionary moment.

Horror at the Oklahoma bombing dampened this down, and 9/11 refocused the nation on threats from abroad, leaving only a minority who believed that the attack on the Twin Towers was an inside job.

For them, Islamist terrorism had stepped into the role once fulfilled by UFOs – keeping American eyes looking outward as bad actors corrupted the nation from within.

Like a weed in native soil, however, constitutional fundamentalism poked through into American politics in new ways. The Tea Party faction of Republicanism that emerged in 2009 to oppose taxes being used to bail out failed banks had a populist appeal that eventually found expression in Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.

The Donald, however, has failed to live up to his promise. The war on Iran and consequent hikes in petrol prices have enraged a significant portion of his voter base.

Instinctually isolationist and convinced that corporations are screwing the ordinary Joe, these Americans are, once again, evoking revolutionary spirit in their politics. This time, however, the insularity which limited previous ‘America first’ movements has found an external enemy in Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.

The ongoing refusal to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein has prompted critics to question whether Trump is acting of his own accord.

The notion that Israel is ‘controlling’ America has migrated from the ethnonationalist fringe to new media acceptance via figures like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. Both commentators were previously Trump loyalists whose viewership is overwhelmingly on the right.

Their repudiation of Trump, therefore, is hitting with an entirely different audience from that which laps up traditional liberal critiques of the administration.

Significantly, both are Christians. Carlson has framed American involvement in Israeli foreign affairs as being against scripture, going so far as to exclude Judaic principles from the foundation of western civilisation, which he credits to Rome.

Existential threat

For the Republican Party this represents an existential threat. Ronald Reagan’s ‘Southern Strategy’ involved politicising evangelical churches around conservative social issues, thus breaking the Democrats’ traditional hold on the Bible Belt.

Many congregants of these churches believe support for Israel to be biblically mandated as preparing circumstances for the second coming. Carlson speaks directly to these people as one of their own, challenging that premise as spiritually bankrupt.

A new force that offers social conservatism alongside international isolationism could have powerful appeal as the cost of living rises and images from Gaza give people of all persuasions pause for thought. The shifting of tectonic plates, however, does not end there.

The Democrats have been steamrollered by Trump’s presidency. From the doddering public relations disaster of Joe Biden’s final months in office, to the failure of Congress to halt presidential misconduct, the party has looked too comfortable, too established, and too insulated from real life to be of use to anyone.

It has looked too old to represent meaningful change to younger voters who demand action on housing, health costs, and Gaza.

Zohran Mamdani

In New York City, however, against the horrified objections of the party machine, Zohran Mamdani’s capture of the mayoralty represented a startling shift in political sensibilities.

Running as a self-declared Democratic Socialist, Mamdani not only revived a strand of American politics that had been taboo since the McCarthy trials of the 1950s, but after winning, seems to have built a broad consensus of New Yorkers around his performance in office.

Mamdani is disqualified from running for President, having been born in Uganda, but his influence will be crucial when it comes to selecting a candidate.

The suspicion is that the American party system no longer expresses the views of the people it represents. As in the UK, where stasis in the centre has rotted out first the Tories and now Labour, the system itself has become the issue.

Common ground

Insurgents from the left and right are showing signs of finding common ground. Former MAGA ultra, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from the House over the Epstein files and her objection to funding for Israel, has suggested that a party comprised of figures from the left and right of American politics, perhaps headed by Carlson, will emerge to challenge the status quo.

Such a shift would represent a new era in America. The centrality of Israel to the nation’s international strategy has been unchallenged in our lifetimes and the seeming rejection of this by a broad coalition of Americans would mean a remapping of geopolitics that would outlive us all.

The tension inherent to the USA’s constitutional makeup has been the energy behind some of humanity’s greatest achievements as well as some of its most egregious atrocities.

That energy persists, however, and when the USA remakes itself, you can be sure it will do it quickly, loudly, and without equivocation.