The Case for American Optimism

Freedom has been a centuries-long fight. Stay in it.

Photo by Trent Yarnell on Unsplash

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes for effective progressive activism. No surprise — progressives have seen a series of devastating setbacks, the most significant of which was the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and ending the era of legal abortion in the United States, but also includes the Supreme Court gutting affirmative action and equal protection norms, not to mention scaling back environmental regulations and common-sense gun laws. It is easy, and entirely rational, to get mired down in pessimism.

It’s also entirely rational, if moderately more difficult, to choose optimism — and opting to look toward a better future is an infinitely more effective activism strategy than cynicism, hopelessness, and defeat.

It’s one reading of American history.

Jamelle Bouie has a column today in the Times about America’s many founders: The people who worked, against long odds, to secure the promises made at Independence. His column focuses on abolitionists, who wielded the language the Declaration of Independence to highlight American hypocrisy and to make the case that an ostensibly free land cannot turn some human beings into property. Bouie writes:

The Declaration as we understand it was forged by struggle. Not the struggle with Britain but the struggle within the independent United States for freedom and equality against the weight of the Constitution and the American political system. As you might imagine, the key that shaped our understanding of the Declaration was the fight to end slavery.

Our modern understanding of the Declaration of Independence was forged by abolitionists. Bouie again:

It’s no surprise that on Independence Day, most Americans look back to the founding fathers as they celebrate and articulate the nation’s ideals. The story of the changing meaning of the Declaration should be a reminder, however, that we had more than one founding — and far more than just one set of founders.

In Stranger in the Village, James Baldwin writes on similar themes:

When one considers the history of the Negro in America it is of the greatest importance to recognize that the moral beliefs of a person, or a people, are never really as tenuous as life - which is not moral - very often causes them to appear; these create for them a frame of reference and a necessary hope, the hope being that when life has done its worst they will be enabled to rise above themselves and to triumph over life. Life would scarcely be bearable if this hope did not exist. Again, even when the worst has been said, to betray a belief is not by any means to have put oneself beyond its power; the betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. If this were not so there would be no moral standards in the world at all. Yet one must also recognize that morality is based on ideas and that all ideas are dangerous - dangerous because ideas can only lead to action and where the action leads no man can say. And dangerous in this respect: that confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses. The ideas on which American beliefs are based are not, though Americans often seem to think so, ideas which originated in America. They came out of Europe. And the establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.

…

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.