There has been much talk over the last seven days about reclaiming the moral high ground and restoring, at the same time, the Shining City on the Hill, that, in theory at least, is a beacon for freedom and democracy to a world that lives largely oppressed.
I have to say that we are deluding ourselves.
The idea that we could reclaim the moral high ground presupposes that we actually held it. That the moral high ground was ours, and we lost it.
The truth is that removing Trump will not bring us again to the moral high ground. The truth, the most tragic, the most deeply troubling, the most incredibly disturbing part of this naiveté is that we actually have the audacity to believe that, before Trump, there was a moral high ground and it was ours. Indeed, among all nations of the world, we stood above every other nation, every other people.
That is, that never was, true.
To make such a claim, whether born in naiveté or in the arrogance that is so much a part of the American lie, only serves to show how deeply deceived we are. We have been deceived by a myth that has never born reality in the facticity of American history.
The truth is that American history is littered with genocide, lies, deceit, medaling in the affairs of other nations, racism, sexism, social Darwinism, and rampant imperialism.
Note, for example, when the American embassy in Iran was seized, we were quick to take and hold the moral high ground, and to this day, we apply all the punitive pressure we can as we express righteous indignation. To make such an assertion is to fail to acknowledge the fact that we overthrew their democratically elected government when it threatened to nationalize oil. And more:
- Our own government lied to us about Viet Nam and Afghanistan. We knew neither war could be won, but we waged war anyway.
2. In the case of Afghanistan, we supported the conservative, radical, fundamentalist Taliban as long as it served our need to undermine Russia. Then, for more than 16 years, citing their brutality, we have waged war against the very group we empowered and armed. How is it that we fail to acknowledge that?
3. We were lied to prior to going to war in Iraq about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Whether nor not Hussein was cruel isn’t here the issue. The issue is that we have destabilized the region, and we are responsible for the death and displacement of tens of thousands of Iraqis.
4. We were lied to when the Maine blew up and we went to war to secure the sugar plantations of Cuba.
5. We point to the Statue of Liberty and we claim that we welcome the world with open arms when, in fact, right up to the beginning of the 20th Century, our predecessors did everything they could to stop immigration, to keep immigrants from voting, and restrict the ownership of land to “native born” Americans.
6. We can’t even tell the truth about Lincoln. Not only did he begrudgingly free people held in slavery, but he advocated deporting people of color. He repeatedly said that people of color and white people could not live side-by-side.
7. We ignore the fact that the concept of race suicide — the idea that if white people did not reproduce at a more substantial rate, eventually white people would find themselves enslaved to people of color without a shot having been fired — continues to motivate our collective behavior towards people of color and immigrants. In fact, in the name of race suicide, there were “best of breed” competitions at state and county fairs to incent whites to have more children.
8. For a period of at least 70 years, nearly every state in this country engaged in eugenics, in the form of often involuntary sterilization of our own citizens.
9. We have yet to see that the link between conservative Christianity and white supremacy is not debatable, and, in fact, the link between the likes of Billy Sunday and William Jennings Bryan and the KKK is a well documented fact. To this day, many white conservative Christians veil their racism in their commitment to their faith.
We talk about human rights. We present ourselves as advocates for human rights around the world, and yet, racism is so woven into the fabric of our country that we cannot see the difference between storming the capital to make America white again and responding in anger and anguish to yet another senseless murder of a Black man.
So, here we are. Here we are pretending that deposing Trump will make us moral again. The truth of the matter is that we have never been moral. In the name of National Security, the Manifest Destiny, the Monroe Doctrine and now American Exceptionalism, we have done whatever we wanted, whenever and wherever we saw fit.
If we truly and sincerely want to take the moral high ground, then we need to begin by acknowledging what we have done. However “unmanly” it might be, we need to apologize, whether or not we were there for the atrocities our predecessors have committed in the name of America.
Until and unless we do, we will not only never take the moral high ground, we will remain a fundamentally immortal nation.
