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Coupled with the recent How to Hide an Empire, it’s quite the one-two punch in the gut.
Heavily sourced, footnoted, supported, it’s a much-needed corrective history — again, like Daniel Immerwahr’s recent book.
Grandin covers a ton of ground in a relatively small space, but primarily just before the founding of the US, through Trump’s first two years or so. He uses the frontier as metaphor, and keys on Frederick Jackson Turner’s view, riffing off of that for variations, alternatives, critiques. The frontier as “safety valve” also comes into play, as a way to forestall internal divisions to a degree . . . and with its close, the chickens come home to roost.
All kinds of takeaways . . . but I’ll note two passages near the end in this post:
But in a nation like the United States, founded on a mythical belief in a kind of species immunity — less an American exceptionalism than exemptionism, an insistence that the nation was exempt from nature, society, history, even death — the realization that it can’t go on forever is bound to be traumatic. This ideal of freedom as infinity was only made possible through the domination of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and Native Americans, as slave and cheap labor transformed stolen land into capital, cutting the tethers and launching the U.S. economy into the stratosphere. And now, as we fall back to wasted earth, the very existence of people of color functions as an unwanted memento mori, a reminder of limits, evidence that history imposes burdens and life contracts social obligations.
and
Put simply, the United States’ dependence on the labor of people of color confirms the social basis of existence, and thus the legitimacy of social rights. In a political culture that considers individual rights sacrosanct, social rights are something viler than heresy. They imply limits, and limits violate the uniquely American premise that it is all going to go on forever.
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