There are now, as there have always been, two visions of America which compete for the soul of the country. That competition, more than either one on its own, defines American identity. Both are equally real in the literal sense—they exist imperfectly but in reality, and have since the inception of the country—and metaphysically. Liberal America, the America founded on the radical affirmation that all men are created equal and with certain inalienable rights, is at odds with the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, tribal tradition of America, with its apple pie and shotguns, spurs, saddles, stars and stripes. That tradition is our permutation of tribalism, and tribalism is the vice which liberalism was articulated to constrain.
The right to establish America and govern the American people was based on the principle that the government was bound in service to liberalism. The American government rules by and for the people. Its primary responsibility is to safeguard its citizens’ rights. It promises that all are equal before the law. Tribal America balks. Tribalism loves family and teaches, as Carl Schmitt, the German philosopher (and Nazi party member) so conveniently and explicitly states, to hate enemies. Loyalty is its lifeblood. Specialness is its currency. It promises: No one is equal to us.
There is no country that is more bound to liberalism than America, because there is no country whose founders were forced by inconvenient circumstances to stake their right to establish the state on liberal principles. A king across an ocean was stripping us of our rights. We were forced to affirm that we—and all like us, by which we meant the underprivileged and disenfranchised in particular—had rights. The great American tug of war is the vicious, bloody, and unending struggle between these two factions. Tribalism is an appetite. Liberalism is a virtue. And both of them live in the heart and mind of every person on American soil. The disenfranchised and the privileged alike are stamped by these competing visions. We understand both because we are creatures of both.
You cannot graze the ear of an idea and draw blood. Virtues and appetites cannot be killed, not with a gun or a bomb, and not with the sling of a thousand tweets. Truths—and our tribalism and our liberalism are both equally and incommensurately true—remain true whether or not they can be articulated. They work on us; we bear their marks. Truths thrust themselves upon us. The truth is that as freedom for all grows, the jealous hatred which tribalism festers, and off of which it thrives, metastasizes. All men are created equal. All men are endowed at birth with certain inalienable rights. Liberalism hectors that “men” refers to all people, and that rights include the right for Black people to vote and for women to choose abortion and for same sex couples to marry. The tribal mass watches in horror as the liberal vision of America eats away at its self-conception and its sense of dignity and control.
America, America, watch how she destroys herself. The backlash is fierce and intelligent and stupid and brutal. And it never ends. The tribal mass manoeuvres to stock courts with like-minded judges and police departments with like-minded cops. The fury is contagious, and tribal America does not have a monopoly on ugliness. Leftists can shoot too, and many leftists don’t like liberals any more than traditionalists do. Why affirm the rights of those who want us weak and helpless? All men are created equal? What about the men with the guns and the tiki torches? Why make bones about their humanity?
Rights remain inalienable whether honoured or ignored. And people remain aware of their rights whether or not the world affirms them. The injustice of dehumanisation, which is the precondition of fascism, is a silent, irrepressible shriek. It warps the oppressor and the oppressed but does not essentially alter either. We look into one another’s eyes as equals before some eternal law, and we are judged. A human being is a human being in a cell or a pit or on a raft in the ocean. No one outlives their own humanity.
Trump, who survived an attempt on his life, has a libidinal appetite for hatred. He is a brilliant champion of the tribalist cause because he has no shame, and makes no apologies for the obvious tragedy that at least part of America must die for at least part of America to thrive. It should not need to be said but it does need to be said: His supporters are just as human as his opponents. Few are as immune as their nasty hero to the gnawing concern that they relish the disenfranchisement of their fellow Americans. I do not believe that this is a source of no concern for them. It makes them ashamed and their shame makes them angry. They insist that the liberals want to destroy them no less than they want to destroy the liberals. Insane conspiracies are manufactured to obscure or explain away the ugliness without which their cause would shrivel. Trump moves with uncanny ease to assure his followers that they are entitled to their fears and furies. He models perfect security. He dishes out the lie that they are under threat, that the immigrants are hoarding across the border to rape their women and steal their jobs. His shrill stream of intoxicating vitriol numbs the conscious and muffles scruples. It is calming to fall into the appetites he indulges. Does Trump “believe” the things he says? It’s an absurd question—you cannot believe in a hunger.
Trump is the most brazen pontiff of the tribal mass but he is not the only one. As his recent selection of vice president makes clear once more: Trump is very good at making sure that his vision of America survives him. JD Vance matches Trump in every way but brains: he has more of them. And the executive is not the only branch allied in this vision. The current Supreme Court is as much a threat to American liberalism as he is. The six-three majority which its illiberal faction enjoys will continue to erode minority rights in service to the vision of tribal America for decades to come. And unlike Trump, it robes its illiberalism in the language of the constitution. The court’s cunning evil is a perfect partner for Trump’s blatant bigotries. In Trump v. United States, the last and perhaps most undemocratic decision of an historically undemocratic term, the court emboldened Trump to deliver emphatically on his promises for dictatorship. In the majority opinion for that case, six conservative Supreme Court justices placed the office of the president above the law, and they did so while knowing that a convicted criminal with dictatorial aspirations is the forerunner for winning the next presidential election.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor warned: “Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be immune from criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such immunity. If the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our democracy,” she concluded, “I dissent.”
Fear is the intelligent and condign response of every liberal American. The ugliest permutation of our nation is empowered by the structures of government which are meant to constrain it. We are already losing, and our opponents are better armed than we are. But this battle does not end. Fear is proper, despair is unjustifiable: we have rights to defend.
