On November 4, 2008, President Barack Obama proclaimed the following in his election night victory speech:
"This is our time, to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can."
The problem, though, is that President Obama was misreading recent history. America is not the country of "yes, we can."
No, we can't build a Metro line to connect rich and poor neighborhoods in our nation's capital.
No, we can't rebuild ancient tunnels connecting the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country on Earth to the other side of a river.
No, we can't ensure that every man, woman and child can see a doctor when they get sick.
No, we can't provide women with the chance to spend some time with the miracle -- miracles, if twins -- they just brought into the world. (And, no, we can't do it for dads, either.)
No, we can't keep our kids safe when they show up at school, because it's too fucking hard.
No, we can't let our middle- and working-class kids study for free.
No, we can't protect our (huge number of) prisoners from rape.
No, we can't do our part as a nation to combat global climate change.
No, we can't even win our wars of choice
For a nation that prides itself on reinvention, renewal and optimism, it's particularly sobering to consider not what we can do in America, but what we can't do.
America is not just a country with gross political dysfunction and corruption -- remember, even Italy (i.e. a collection of medieval city-states that wasn't a country until 1861) has been able to "do" high-speed rail, maternity leave and outstanding socialized health care -- it is a country where there is no longer even a consensus amongst Very Serious Elites that the "state" -- classically-defined -- should serve any purpose at all, perhaps beyond protection of property and global capital. Both of those roles, however, are to be understood in the negative: no, you can't rob me. No, you, foreign leader in the "Axis of Evil," can't defy our wishes.
This is a huge problem -- a cultural, social, historical problem that won't be solvable with our weak institutions and insane politics.
As Jeffrey Sachs recently argued, the entire logic of the "state" and "society" is accepted as antithetical to what it means to be an "American":
How strange to the American eye and ear is Aristotle’s declaration in the opening pages of The Politics that “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part.” Aristotle does not mean that the state can willfully crush the individual, but rather that the individual finds meaning in life, and the path to happiness, as a citizen of the polis, the state. In a phrase that reverberates powerfully still today, Aristotle noted that “man is a social animal.”
For Aristotle and for Jesus, as in the Beatitudes, the path to happiness is through the exercise of virtue, which means the right kind of living by each individual as a member of society. Aristotle’s message is that happiness (eudaimonia) is achieved through the practice and cultivation of virtues, including moderation in the pursuit of material wealth and the exercise of good citizenship. Jesus’ message is that happiness, and indeed salvation, cannot be found through material goods, or through the pursuit of happiness as consumers and moneychangers, but through the virtues of humility and justice, including most importantly “feeding the least among you.”
I encountered this deeply-engrained and deeply-problematic American psychosis when I called Health Services Group earlier this week in response to
Shaun King's outstanding diary about the shooting of Monroe Bird by a private security officer. (Monroe's health insurer, Healthcare Solutions Group, is refusing to cover his hospitalization and treatment for paralysis because -- in a nutshell -- they claim he is a criminal based on the words of a corrupt District Attorney.)
When I called, I explained that in Europe Monroe's parents wouldn't be facing the trauma of their son becoming paralyzed and facing millions of dollars in medical bills, because everyone has good health care coverage. With contempt dripping from her mouth, the person with which I spoke responded, "Well, this is the United States of America," before promptly hanging up on me. Exactly. Exactly. Perhaps it's not that the "state" is abandoning Monroe in his time of need, but that the "state" -- as most societies conceive of it -- does not even exist in this exceptional space between Mexico and Canada.
Consider, too, the recent Amtrak disaster. John Boehner -- again, with contempt dripping from his lips for the journalists in the room -- whined that it was "stupid" to consider whether absence of funding for safety infrastructure may have contributed to the death of eight people. Adam Gopnik, in an outstanding New Yorker article, problematizes such a worldview where spending tax dollars on a public good for the public good is immediately derided as hogwash (errr..."stupid"):
What we have, uniquely in America, is a political class, and an entire political party, devoted to the idea that any money spent on public goods is money misplaced, not because the state goods might not be good but because they would distract us from the larger principle that no ultimate good can be found in the state. Ride a fast train to Washington today and you’ll start thinking about national health insurance tomorrow.
The ideology of individual autonomy is, for good or ill, so powerful that it demands cars where trains would save lives, just as it places assault weapons in private hands, despite the toll they take in human lives. Trains have to be resisted, even if it means more pollution and massive inefficiency and falling ever further behind in the amenities of life—what Olmsted called our “commonplace civilization.”
Yes, we can? Exceptional nation?
If more of us were willing to accept the deeply problematic -- arguably tragic -- reality of America as a country in which "no, we can't" is actualized much more than "yes, we can," perhaps we could finally begin to engage in the collective work necessary to solve some of this nation's most appalling injustices.
America is -- and has been for more decades than many of us have been alive -- a nation that says "yes" to "no," but I do believe, in my heart, that we, as a people, are better than that.