Status Updates From American Intellectual Histo...

'Postmodernist thought raised difficult, urgent questions then, and it remains to be seen what the answers are or if they will ever come. Should the United States be American citizens’ primary allegiance or, in the era of globalization, should they aspire instead to be citizens of the world? If we cannot even get intergroup reciprocal loyalty in the United States, how can we possibly achieve it internationally?'

'Judith Butler... was one of the most powerful theorists... to question the assumptions and categorical thinking of fellow feminists. In her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler interrogated the “foundationalist fictions” of the sex/gender divide, which viewed sex as something rooted in biology and gender as constructed by culture.'

'Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. sounded the alarm with his 1991 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. He argued that academics had degenerated into ethnic activists and that advocates were proselytizing to students a way of thinking about America that “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”

'But because a vocal minority of academics began working with postmodern ideas and interpretive strategies, even turning their spokespeople into adjectives for this way of thinking (“Foucauldian,” “Derridean”), worried observers sounded the alarm that a “foreign invasion” was infecting the academy and, by extension, the tender minds of impressionable students'

'Less than a year later, two transformative texts would add to this lineup, breaking apart conventional ideas of the proper social “place” for women and people of color while helping to strengthen their respective liberation movements: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

'For Friedman... of the “Chicago school” of economics and its most vigorous critic of Keynesian (or state-interventionist) economics, the best thing a democratic government could do was to get out of its citizens’ way. Friedman’s wildly popular Capitalism and Freedom... maintained that governmental regulations were strangling freedom not just out of the market, but also out of American political life.'

'It was a decade [1960s] in which a number of visionary and inspiring political leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, rallied millions to their cause. But it was also the decade in which their lives—and much of the hope they inspired—were cut short by assassins’ bullets'

'Few decades in American history are as fabled as the 1960s. They were years of great hope as activists, lawyers, and governmental officials translated American liberal ideas into civil rights laws and Great Society social reforms. They were also years of dashed dreams as the full benefit of those liberal achievements was undercut by the Vietnam War, which drained resources from American cities to ramp up the war'

'The French existentialists were greeted with fascination, though also with some revulsion, by Americans who felt that the horrors of World War II had made a mockery of the Western intellectual tradition and thus sought to reset a notion of the self and the world more in line with their feelings of radical indeterminacy and experiences of aloneness in an anonymous, indifferent world.'

'The concern about conformity extended into other registers... David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) showed how the postwar American pressure for uniformity and togetherness was actually producing its opposite... American culture was producing atomized and alienated “other-directed” personalities who run on a “diffuse anxiety” and toggle between conformity and anomie.'

'First was their shared interest in—and ambivalence about—the European Enlightenment. The modifier “European” here is significant, because during this Cold War period it becomes necessary to distinguish it from a newly discovered “American” one. American historian Adrienne Koch was the first to popularize the notion of a distinctly American (and more wholesome) Enlightenment'

'Feeling exasperated with what they considered a smugness and complacency in mid-century liberals’ worldview, a growing number of political and cultural critics identified themselves as “conservatives” offering an alternative. Though the United States, unlike the United Kingdom or Canada, never had a “conservative” party, conservatism, they contended, did have an American history.'

'Throughout the war, many Americans spoke in terms of the “public interest” and “democratic community” while too often overlooking or simply being blind to the ways in which their national institutions, like Jim Crow and Japanese internment camps, belied their inclusive rhetoric.'

'Roosevelt had an equally threatening enemy in the Michigan-based Catholic priest and radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, who ratcheted up the worry of his forty-five million largely white, working-class listeners into a full-scale panic with his anticommunist, anticapitalist, rabidly antisemitic diatribes, as he called for a “Christian front” to fight off these forces of evil.'

'the growing popularity of Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the dark inner workings of moderns’ minds and libidos, the Austrian psychiatrist joined Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to form an unholy trinity of Continental thinkers corrupting American thought.'

Over the course of the 1920s, normalcy came to mean isolationism, with the United States backing away from the League of Nations. Normalcy also meant antiradicalism, with the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 and labor unrest at home bringing on fears of communism and anarchism. For many old-stock, white Protestants, normalcy also came to mean a belligerent nativism with tightened immigration laws.

'It was at this time that many white, Protestant, propertied elites disparaged the influx of “unwashed” masses from southern and eastern Europe, and satirical magazines such as Puck and The Wasp circulated images of Irish laborers as apes and Chinese laborers as hordes of locusts. Somehow they had forgotten that once upon a time, their people were immigrants to America, too.'

'Sumner’s science of society mixed Protestant ethics, classical economics, and democratic individualism in its advocacy of an unflinching “Darwinian” framework. In his 1883 treatise What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, which endorsed laissez-faire ideas, his answer was unapologetic: absolutely nothing'

'As one African American folk song went, “Got one mind for white folks to see,/ ’Nother for what I know is me;/ He don’t know, he don’t know my mind.” There was nothing more threatening to a master than to admit to owning slaves who thought for themselves.'

'In the South, thinking about the slave economy was a very complicated affair because theirs was not simply a society with slavery but also a slave society whose whole political, social, and moral economies were built to justify the presence of a permanent labor force based on race.'

'Troubled that Americans’ language was wholly derivative of the English spoken and written in Britain, Webster set out to give Americans an English of their own. “Language,” he declared, “as well as government should be national. … America should have her own distinct from all the world.”

'The desire for the enlightened republican vision of a government of independent landowners ensured that white freedom would continue to be predicated on Black exploitation and Native Americans’ dispossession of their ancestral lands and their ways of life.'

'Much like Jefferson, who penned paeans to freedom while he had a workforce of slaves, early American universities were not only sites of Enlightenment race science but also the beneficiaries of racial oppression. Without exception, every American college was built on Native Americans’ dispossessed lands. Their connections to slavery varied in scope and kind, but none of them was exempt.'

'This optimism helped embolden many observers to imagine that American independence was not an accident of empire, but rather a fulfillment of Providence.'