“O Lórien! The Winter comes, the bare and leafless Day;
The leaves are falling in the stream, the river flows away.
O Lórien! Too long I have dwelt upon this Hither Shore
And in a fading crown have twined the golden elanor.
But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”
—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Galadriel’s Song”
Writing these words on the American holiday, Memorial Day, in an election year, whilst sitting in an Austrian apartment is a poignant experience. It is always sobering to contemplate the legions who have died for the well-being and safety of the United States of America, but never more than in an election year, when everyone in public life is out for themselves, and very few appear to think about the common good for which the honoured dead gave their lives. This year, the very nature of the country is part of the debate. Indeed, I cannot help thinking—as an American in Europe often must—about the identity of my country and its relationship with the Mother Continent. In some ways, we Americans, a race of exiles, can never be truly content. We unconsciously yearn for a completion, a wholeness, that often eludes us, whether we be immigrants just naturalised or Mayflower descendants. The song The Girl I Left Behind Me was brought over the Atlantic in the 17th century; like the Ashokan Farewell, I think it captures that yearning perfectly. We may cross the water as much as we like (and I often do), but it is an ocean of time as well as space that separates us from our origins. Even the America that we more consciously seek to regain is increasingly remote.
It is fair to say that there have been—in time—four Americas, the last three of which occupied roughly the same space. We are currently making the transition to a fifth, and this coming election and its accompanying dramas will play a large role in that transition. After a look at the first four, we can speculate on what the next might be like.
The first was Colonial America. Its beginning and ending dates are extremely hard to pin down, due to the irrelevance of the current border to the colonial map, the different nations that took part in our foundation, and the differing times when our various bits of real estate came into independent American hands. Does it begin with the discovery of the New World in 1492? Or the Spanish Conquest of Cuba and Mexico, from which came the first settlements in Florida and Mexico? Or the founding of Quebec by the French, which would result in their settling the Mississippi valley from the Great Lakes to New Orleans? Or even the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, as the beginning of the first of the 13 colonies? Add Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, the Northern Marianas, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands to the mix, and both beginning and ending dates and contributing nations become far more complex. But we can at least agree that the colonial era ended East of the Mississippi and North of Florida in 1783, when the Revolution ended, and George III both absolved his subjects of their allegiance and recognised the United States as an independent country.
Inheriting the whole panoply of religion, law, and local government from the British, the Constitutional Convention ushered in what might be called our first republic. Lasting until our second civil war (the revolution being our first), the Federal government began functioning, the political boundaries of the county were extended to the Pacific and filled out (as far as the continental United States are concerned) to their current extent, the western Indian tribes began to be subjugated, and westward settlement commenced in earnest. Immigrants poured in from Europe and elsewhere, and the colonial era population was greatly diluted. Catholicism became firmly established as a result. Nevertheless, the American character was being established, as Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Cooper, and Longfellow ushered in American literature; Stephen Foster began the Great American Songbook; and the Hudson River School started a uniquely American style of painting both in subject and technique. The American civic religion (with its secularised Calvinist view of the United States as a chosen people, inherited from the Puritans) was founded early on, and the vaguely Christian moral consensus inherited from colonial days carried over, providing a foundation for the civic faith. But that all ended with our second civil war in 1861.
The Southern States’ attempt to emulate their grandfathers’ secession from the British Empire failed; but President Lincoln and the North’s attempt to restore the Union they had known also failed. What emerged, complete with Reconstruction and its child, Jim Crow, was our second republic. No longer a union of semi-independent states, the oldest of which had won their independence themselves, it was a strongly unified Federal Union. This was reflected in the grammatical error that was substituted for correct English usage: “The United States is” replaced “the United States are.”
Nevertheless—and despite massive immigration and the racial issues of the postwar South—in many ways, the American nationality and its culture were fixed. The country became a world power with the defeat of the Spanish in the war of 1898 and our (in the long run) disastrous intervention in World War I. From 1865 to 1941, American culture produced a number of “Golden Ages” in illustration, Broadway, radio, Hollywood, comic books, pulps, crime fiction, science fiction, and on and on. Although it had begun prior to the 1861-65 war, the American manner of celebrating holidays gelled during this era. The civic faith and moral consensus flourished. Musically accompanied by George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin, and depicted by Norman Rockwell, this republic’s end began with the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the introduction of his New Deal in 1933.
Despite the key changes to American society and governance initiated by FDR and his administration, much of the artistic output of the New Deal programmes—the Federal Artists, Theatre, Music, and Writers projects, and the buildings and artwork of the WPA and the PWA—was in many ways a tribute to the United States as they had been and were at that particular moment in time. But by expanding the Federal Government to an unheard-of size and removing the country from the Gold Standard, FDR revolutionised the country. Our entry into World War II and emergence therefrom as the senior partner in a Soviet-American dyarchy over the planet signalled a new role, as the “arsenal of democracy.” The second republic made way for the American Empire.
For much of its existence, that Empire justified its role as being the “leader of the Free World” against “Godless Communism.” While preserving a strong sense of continuity with the two previous republics—not least because so many of the second republic’s greatest statesmen, generals, and artists were still very much alive—it was nevertheless quite different, for all that Berlin and Rockwell still toiled away in its praise. Initially, it did retain the civic religion and moral consensus of the two preceding republics. But its new imperial role, while bringing at the beginning enormous prosperity for its inhabitants, also brought with it strains that would hasten its end.
FDR’s desire to destroy the independence and existing empires of our European allies was realised, reducing them from independent collaborators to dependents. This meant the U.S. assuming France’s role in Indochina, and entering its own Vietnam debacle. The newly assumed role of guardian of world freedom forced a reexamination of practises at home—Jim Crow in particular. Moreover, the Civil Rights Movement, while it eventually ended Jim Crow, coalesced with the Antiwar Movement, and became a great contributor to the counterculture of the 1960s. This played a huge role in at last breaking the moral consensus upon which the civic religion had been grounded. Suddenly, everything moral was up for debate, and the result was—amongst other things—the collapse of the family. As the major cultural force in the world, we were able to export this spiritual confusion to our European, Latin American, and Asian protectorates—and we continue to do so.
There was a slight rebirth of Americanist sentiment during the eight years of the so-called “Reagan Revolution.” During that brief, Camelot-like moment, we had a president who appeared truly dedicated to the American Faith and for whom the Empire was only a means to an end. That end was the restoration of sanity at home and the defeat of the Soviets abroad. Ultimately, he (in concert with Pope John Paul II and a host of heroic figures on both sides of the Iron Curtain) would succeed completely abroad, but fail miserably at home.
Indeed, while the end of the Soviet Bloc was a marvellous thing to behold, and although it paved the way for much good from which the entire world still profits, it had some unforeseen consequences. Initially, by ending the Soviet-American Dyarchy, it unleashed nationalist forces in the former Yugoslavia, which had been held in check until then. President George H.W. Bush’s vetoing of the restorations of Bulgaria’s Simeon II and Romania’s Michael made it clear that we would only tolerate a certain amount of national reconstruction on the part of the newly freed states.
Liberated from the need to pose as the defenders of Christian values against the Soviet menace, the Western elites could cease paying lip service to them. They began to impose their opposite values upon the more or less unwilling subjects over whom they ruled. The problem, of course, was that these new values were inherently corrosive to an effective society, The demographic effects upon Western nations continue to this day, calling into question the ultimate survival of Europe and her daughter nations across the globe.
A more recent development was the emergence of wokery, which is the flip-side of the religion of American Exceptionalism in much the same way that Unitarianism so often emerges from various kinds of Calvinism. From being “the last best hope of Mankind” and the “shining city on a hill,” we became the most evil nation that had ever been, founded on genocide and built purely with slavery. In a way that had not been before, we were divided into two countries holding these two opposed civil religions. The COVID lockdown the burning summer of 2020, that year’s hotly fought election and its widely questioned outcome, and the January 6 “insurrection” at the Capitol all crystallised the division between these two countries. The figurehead of the one is a senile old man in the mould of president Hindenburg, while the leader of the other is an assertive figure with a sentimental love of country but no ideological centre (as shown by his agreement with his base’s opponents in such matters as same-sex marriage and abortion). As one who loves his country more than he can say, this writer shudders at what shall result from the upcoming election. But the post-1945 American Empire is on its way out, and her erstwhile protectorates shall increasingly have to shift for themselves.
For Europe, who has her own set of horrible issues and feckless rulers, this presents yet another set of problems. The U.S. shift in attention to its own internal conflicts means that the nations of Europe shall have to deal with their problems entirely by themselves. The conflict with Russia, the internal Islamist threat, the demographic implosion—all these require a new leadership, if they are to be answered effectively. Of one thing, I am certain: if the Mother Continent does manage to call forth new elites who can rise to this challenge, the daughter countries—the United States and Russia among them—shall also benefit immeasurably by them.
