Studying America
I was an American Studies major in college, which was a hard one to explain at family parties forty years ago. Even now, people may have some understanding what it means to major in other “impractical” liberal arts subjects like English or Anthropology, but hardly anyone can define American Studies. I can barely define it myself and usually just joke that I chose an interdisciplinary major because I couldn’t make up my mind.
The website for my alma mater, Middlebury College, currently states that “American Studies is about intersections” and looks at “the intersections between history and popular culture, art and identity, politics and literature, diversity and citizenship.” I don’t know exactly what that means either. When enrolling in the major as a sophomore in 1983, my understanding was that by examining American history and politics and literature and art and religion and sociology, I would come to a better understanding of America’s unique standing in the world. Of what it means to be an American.
The good stuff, of course: freedom, democracy, the Bill of Rights.
But the bad stuff, too: racial injustice, imperialism, isolationism.
Because as special as America may be, it is all those things, good and bad. Because Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” has always been a work in progress.
Tomorrow is Election Day. It is without a doubt the most momentous presidential election of my lifetime and, for those of us who believe Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country, the most frightening. Putting aside his many other issues, Trump has already undermined or destroyed many of the core principles to which our country has at least aspired for more than 200 years:
Obedience to the rule of law.
Tolerance for differing beliefs.
Respect for the democratic process.
Commitment to the peaceful transition of power.
In the absence of these core principles, it’s not clear that America as we know it— what George Washington called “the last great experiment for promoting human happiness”—will continue to exist.
Kamala Harris might not be your favorite person. You might not like her laugh or her Converse sneakers or her policies. Your family and friends might all be Republicans, and you might have always voted Republican in the past. But before you do that tomorrow, please consider what your vote might mean. Please consider what so many leading Republicans—public officials and economists and generals and national security experts and even Trump’s own Vice President—have concluded in repudiating his candidacy. Listen to their warnings. And vote for the type of leader a shining city on a hill needs and deserves.