A damaged American flag is unfurled and carried to a fire pit to be retired June 14 at a veterans service in Tulsa, Oklahoma. July 4 will be the 246th anniversary of the United States declaring its independence.Mike Simons/ Tulsa World via AP
David Shribman is the former editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on American politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.
John F. Kennedy spoke for his own country when, six decades ago, in a summer address in the Congress Hall of the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, he said: “Time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life.”
For Mr. Kennedy’s country – first a colony, then a republic, first ruled by aristocrats and then by Democrats, first an agricultural empire, then an industrial powerhouse, first a land of resourceful tinkerers and then a center of innovative technology, first a hotbed of revolution and then a mature nation, first a weakling among world powers and then a superpower – has never stood still.
Change has indeed been a constant part of the American story, not gradually, as the Iron Age followed the Bronze Age, but rapid (e.g., the Democrats’ move from a hidden tradition to social and economic reform) and sometimes staggeringly fast (the city of Winchester , Virginia, changed hands 72 times in the Civil War, 13 times in one day alone).
And as the United States prepares to celebrate the 246th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, the changes the country has gone through are a sharp, if not stunning, relief.
A country based on idealism is plagued by cynicism. A society based on boundless opportunity is chained to a yawning wealth gap.
A country founded by an uprising against parliament in London is still recovering from accusations of an uprising in the Capitol in Washington.
A society that has broadened its view of rights over the past three-quarters of a century—for minorities, for LGBTQ people, for the disabled, and in the health care arena—now has a Supreme Court that restricts abortion rights, even as it broadens protections for gun ownership and public prayer.
A culture that has always looked to the future fights over the meaning of its past. Indeed, the next sentence of Mr. Kennedy’s speech at that famous German church – a prescient Cold War warning that could easily be applied to our time of cold disdain for the Russian invasion of Ukraine – has new meaning this weekend on Independence Day: “Those who only look to the past or the present will certainly miss the future.”
And as this week’s stunning congressional hearings on the Capitol insurgency have dramatically demonstrated, there’s one overriding transformation in the Republic of Change that’s even more ominous: a country whose first name is “United” is anything but.
There is no status quo in the United States.
Men and women who came of age in the Kennedy era are likely laden with memories of the glories of American life, such as economic security and pride in unimaginable achievements such as the moon landing and the election of a black president. In the roughly 70 years they lived, they would have witnessed tremendous political changes.
Six decades ago, the American South was segregated and politics so dominated by one-party government that all 22 senate seats of the states of the Old Confederacy were held by Democrats. Today, 18 of those seats are held by Republicans.
In the election that brought Mr. Kennedy to the White House, the three states in northern New England all voted Republican. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont voted for the Democratic nominee in the last five elections.
In that 1960 election, the three West Coast states voted Republican. In the last eight elections, Washington, Oregon and California voted Democrat. In the Kennedy years, four Georgia counties with significant black populations had fewer than 10 African Americans even registered to vote. Both candidates in this fall’s Senate race are black.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, Richard M. Nixon received 54 percent of the vote from highly educated Americans over Kennedy, a Harvard graduate with a Pulitzer Prize. In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won 61 percent of the highly educated vote against Donald Trump, who has an Ivy League degree.
John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon participate in a TV election debate in 1960. The Associated Press
The Republican platform set up for Mr. Nixon’s campaign against Mr. Kennedy specifically and forcefully mentioned the party’s support for NATO. The last Republican president, Mr. Trump, had contempt for NATO. That 1960 GOP election manifesto called for “continued vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws to ensure the right to vote for all citizens in all parts of the country.” Today’s Republicans have erected barriers to minority votes.
And think about this: At the turn of the last century, Republican Senator Jonathan Prentiss Dolliver of Iowa said his state would “get democratic when hell turned Methodist.” Democrats have won Iowa in six of the last nine presidential elections.
In the 1960 elections, men voted more often than women. In the 2020 elections, women voted more often than men. In 1960, Mr. Nixon captured the female vote by a margin of 51-49 percentage points. In the 2020 election, Mr. Biden won over Mr. Trump by a margin of 57-42.
In Kennedy’s time, Democrats used the filibuster and considered it a respectable and responsible emblem of the Capitol Hill proceeding. Today, it is the Republicans who cling to the filibuster, viewing it as a shield against democratic legislation that they believe contains traces of socialist ideology.
In the half-century and more after 1950, the custodians of tradition and the practitioners of prudence were largely Republicans, while the rebels and disruptors were almost always Democrats. Now it’s reversed. “The left is now widely regarded as the textbook example of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention,” wrote Nate Hochman, a fellow at National Review once considered the vanguard of conservative thought, last month. in the New York Times.
“When I was young, the Republican Party had a lot of moderates, and it was a party that had its roots in the Civil War north,” Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward Markey, who was 14 in 1960, said in an interview. “Franklin Roosevelt turned many people who could have been Republicans into Democrats. There was a balance in politics. The people in both parties knew they could only go so far. But that balance is gone, and those boundaries are gone. That also applies to many of the balance sheets and limits in our society.”
A hand-coloured print published in the mid-1800s shows the moment in 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was presented to John Hancock, seated on the right. As president of the Second Continental Congress, he would be the first to sign the document.Library of Congress
The leading American historian of his generation, Henry Adams (1838-1918), a man with deep roots in the enterprise of making America (he was the great-grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the second president; he was grandson of another chief executive and son of Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War ambassador to Britain) possessed an unusually sharp perspective about the country that shaped his family so much. In his most famous work, The Education of Henry Adams, published posthumously and awarded the Pulitzer Prize 1919, he spoke of how “the old universe was thrown on the ashes and a new one was created.”
The American ash heap of history is overflowing.
In that ash heap are ‘bundle shelves’ that kept men and women apart in bed; textbook horn books that educated young children; Conestoga wagons traveling the Great Plains to the open west; blacksmiths, men’s suffrage, prohibition, collegiate goldfish swallow, payphones, and Howard Johnson’s restaurants—all remnants of a rapidly receding past.
“In nature and in human society, everything is in flux,” David Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Stanford University, told me. “It’s especially true in the United States, because there’s no such thing as a constant in American history. It is an illusion to think differently.”
While it was the Enlightenment that fired the American revolutionaries being celebrated this week, things got loose with the application of mechanical power to what had been human and animal effort. “It’s not just change, it’s the speed of change,” explained Prof. Kennedy. “We can be proud of the dynamics of our society, but we are surprised when change occurs. Often it is more change than we expected.”
And the engine of change? Here’s a fitting answer to a question put to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: “Events, dear boy, events.”
In American history, those events included a civil war that ended slavery; a gilded age that created huge fortunes and robber barons; a brief conflict in 1898 with Spain that created American imperialism; two world wars that ended America’s “beautiful isolation”; enormous consumer prosperity that economist John Kenneth Galbraith called the “prosperous society”; the war in Vietnam and Watergate, which spawned a deep distrust of government and authority; a hostage situation in Iran that illuminated the limits of US power; cultural transformation that turned “privilege” from a sought-after attribute to one for which an apology was made; a searing racial reckoning that woke up Americans to long patterns of discrimination; and the rise of social disruption that has brought with it the internet, smartphones, social media, and Mr. Trump, among others.
A woman snaps a photo on her phone as Donald Trump arrives for a 2018 rally in Cincinnati.Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
More generally, the ‘powers that be’ have become the ‘powers that were’.
Network television, once dominant in news and entertainment, is in decline; cable outlets, Netflix and other streaming services have surpassed it in profit and influence. Once a symbol of US manufacturing supremacy, US Steel is a shadow of its once all-powerful (and profitable) self; the towering headquarters in Pittsburgh now bears the name UPMC, the local health giant.
The United States Chamber of Commerce, once a huge influence in the Republican Party, is sometimes mocked as a symbol of yesterday’s economy; the new fighters of Trump’s insurgency consider it a symbol of arrogant corporatism and are critical of the group’s recent sympathy — unimaginable just a generation ago — toward Democratic political candidates.
The most visible political element is the change in American civilian life—never peaceful but rarely as hostile as today, when Americans are divided over mask mandates, vaccinations, the legitimacy of elected officials, and even elections themselves.
“Many of these changes are reactions to the previous changes,” said former Massachusetts Democratic Representative Barney Frank, whose own life — homosexuality in the closet followed by gay activism — itself represents a massive change. “The southbound Republican was in response to the Democrats becoming a left-wing party. The change my generation sees is no more profound than the change my parents saw. Things are changing fast in this country.”
Kennedy meets Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in Ottawa in 1961.The Canadian Press
It all forms a stark contrast to the country’s northern neighbors.
Canada is by no means a static country. Consider, as a handful of examples, how its view of the treatment of Indigenous peoples has changed even in the past two years, or how Quebec has been stripped of the Church since the Silent Revolution of the 1960s, or how Saskatchewan has moved from Cooperative Commonwealth Federation-New Democratic Party socialism to its modern centre-right stance. And while Western Canada flirted with liberals in the 1968 Trudeaumania elections, the region has generally favored conservative parties ever since.
But there is no real Canadian analog to an entire region shifting its political profile as the American South became Republican, a political transformation that has happened in large part because of the determination of Democrats, from Lyndon B. Johnson forward, to embrace the once-banned civil rights ethics. For example, Mr. Johnson’s native state elected only Democrats to the office of governor during the 126 years beginning in 1874; no Democrat has won a statewide race in Texas since November 1994.
“We haven’t gone through the kind of radical changes Americans have gone through,” said Principal Christopher Adams, a political scientist and poll expert at St. Paul’s College in Winnipeg. “The United States is a less moderate country than Canada, and we haven’t had the kind of major realignments that have happened in the US. Here the Conservative Party has generally remained a Conservative party. It has moved to the center or to the right, but it has not represented a very different part of the political spectrum.”
A woman holds an American flag at a Black History parade in Atlanta on June 18. This year marked the first time that June 19, or Juneteenth — a commemoration of the end of slavery in Texas in 1865 — was a federal holiday, as was July 4 Elia Nouvelage/Getty Images
While July 4 usually sparks national celebrations, there’s little party atmosphere in 2020’s America.
This year there will be nothing remotely like that of Charles Francis Adams (1807-1886), father of Henry Adams, who in 1876 marked the centenary of American independence by saying, “Let us work continually to to preserve the progress of civilization as it behooves us to do after the struggles of the past, so that the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which we have honorably secured, may be firmly imposed on the ever-increasing generations of humanity.
Today, progressives refuse to buy pillows from a company headed by a Trump supporter. Conservatives are waging a cultural war against the Walt Disney Company. Today, the phrase “civil war” is thrown around in lowercase. Today, Americans view with sadness and dread both the prospects for democratic rule in the United States and the idea of ”the next civil war” that Canadian author Stephen Marche expounded with ruthless realism in his 2022 book with that invigorating title.
“If the American experiment fails, and it fails, the world will be poorer, bolder and less,” wrote Mr Marche. “The world needs America. It needs the idea of America, the American faith, even if that idea was only a half-truth. The rest of the world needs to imagine a place where you can become yourself, where you can shake off your past, where contradictions that lead to genocide elsewhere grow into prosperity.”
Today, Americans who grew up with the slogan “greatest nation on earth” can view with bitter recognition the view of British historian Andrew Roberts, who wrote of Americans in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 20th Century: “Like the Romans, they would sometimes be ruthless, sometimes self-indulgent, and they, too, would sometimes find that the greatest danger to their perpetual empire came not from their declared enemies outside, but rather from vociferous critics of their own society.
But the greatest sorrow can undoubtedly come from an American who comes across Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel Hotel Savoy, which wrote of a protagonist’s adoration of all things American: “He loved America. When a cudgel was good, he said ‘America.’ When a position was well reinforced, he would say ‘America’. To a ‘good’ lieutenant he would say ‘America’, and because I was a good shot he said ‘America’ when I scored in the bull’s eye.”
Today no one would write that. And for many Americans, if not for others elsewhere, that’s the biggest and by far the saddest change of all.
David Shribman on U.S. politics: More from The Globe and Mail
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