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Over 150 years the concept of the Great American Novel was invented in The Nation magazine. The mission of this proposed literary “American epic” was to capture “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence.” Today, The Nation is a hodgepodge of woke rants. The magazine no longer believes in the greatness of America. And how can there be a great American novel without a great America?
America, as a recent essay at the magazine mocking the idea of the Great American Novel puts it, is an “absurdity.” The American novels that the magazine and its leftist ilk praise are either outrages or absurdities. The topics under discussion are identity, race and class, that indeed appear to make any notion of a single America singularly absurd.
That now ancient essay calling for a Great American Novel in the aftermath of the Union’s supremacy in the Civil War had assumed that there was to be a unified America, but the Confederacy’s multicultural great-grandchildren reject the Union as anything but a tool for forcing their preferred radical policies on the country.
But if indeed there is no America, if we’re just Yugoslavia with a variety of unhappy warring tribes struggling against oppression, why not break the whole thing up? Without the rationale of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the conviction that America is a grand experiment worth fighting for, why fight for her at all?
Officially the ongoing purpose of America is to atone for the existence of America, redistributing wealth, power and rights, and reallocating them to the formerly ‘oppressed’ and redistributing narratives, replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day, the national anthem with the black national anthem, and American history with the 1619 Project. Only the complete inversion of America can atone for America.
But why not take a short cut to this tribalist utopia by just breaking up America?
The ‘People’s History’ reading of America as a race and class based tyranny is universally accepted now among the NPR and Harvard set and yet the same regional bureaucrats who begin their sessions with land acknowledgements to vanished Indian tribes never give a thought to breaking up the United States. They are not out to undermine the national governing structure of the country: only its culture.
It’s that notion of an American epic grounded in a national identity, at times tragic but ultimately heroic, that they are coming after. They don’t want to destroy America as a state, but as a nation. When we talk about them wanting to destroy America, we don’t mean that the Left wants to destroy FEMA, the Department of Education, the FBI, local state governments, the local community public schools and parking authorities or any of the structures that they falsely claim are “systemically racist”.
What they want to destroy is the idea of America, the spirit of it, while leaving the dead bones of it intact. They want American power, without the American soul. It’s the machinery of government that they want, the stone and the steel, untethered from any limits, constitutional or electoral, retasked with the mission of building a totalitarian state.
That’s why the Left chose a cultural war rather than a civil war. It’s not the government they’re at war with… it’s with us. As long as there are people who call themselves Americans and have it mean something, the leftist grip on power will be threatened.
To subjugate us, they have to destroy our culture and our identity through our stories.
And so they’ve replaced the national epic with a national anti-epic that anyone who has been to school or college in the last quarter century is already intimately familiar with. Instead of discovery, there is colonialism, instead of hard work, there’s slavery, instead of the journey westward, there’s genocide, and instead of progress, there’s oppression.
The search for the Great American Novel was a foolish proposition. America was always its own story, too great and intimate, overarching and personal, to limit to the pages of any book. The Great Anti-American Novel is a simpler narrative in the way that the antithesis to greatness, the dark mirror and satirical distorted image, is cruder than the work they set out to tear down, but that makes it easier to grasp. America in its true form is hard to encompass, but call it racist and it becomes all too easy to sum up.
America, they’ve been telling us for at least a century, is stupid, ugly, greedy and mean. It’s slave ships, not frontiers, imperialistic wars not patriotic last stands, genocidal massacres of Indians, not pioneers carving out homesteads from the wilderness. We’re racists who tell ourselves dumb stories about liberty, and we’re the mass murderers who bombed the innocent of Dresden and Hiroshima. We do not deserve to exist.
The only thing to do, they tell us, is to let go. Stop fighting. Stop believing. As Oprah put it, we just have to die, as individuals and as a nation, and let our enemies take over
That way they don’t have to go to the actual trouble of killing us if we erase ourselves.
The Great Un-American Story is genocidal in that way. It’s meant to wipe out a people. Us. It’s a poisonous epic that dominates art, literature, music and film. It pervades academia as thoroughly as Marxism-Leninism filled the Soviet university. Patriotism never had a fraction of its grip on our society at any time in American history.
And if we are to survive unto the next generation and the one after that, we must meet that culture of death with a culture of life. It is not enough to attack the Left, we must affirm what America was, is and shall be, to write our own Great American Novel, not perhaps in words, but much more importantly, in the stories we pass down to our children and grandchildren, because if we do not tell our story, they will.
The Left got this far in no small part by telling a compelling story. Telling stories is at the heart of what it does. And it understands, sometimes better than we do, that the stories we tell make us who we are. Once upon a time the stories we told were of the Bible, of Valley Forge, of Andrew Jackson and Pearl Harbor, now they’ve been displaced by pop culture, and some rage and complain that the pop culture, always liberal anyway, is now ‘woke’, and that it promotes an even more extreme version of the Un-American Story.
But that is what happens when we outsource our stories to corporations, to their class of leftist writers and actors, and then complain that they don’t like us, rather than telling our own stories, singing our own songs and taking root in our history and our faith. The culture is not Hollywood or Amazon, that’s consumer culture, the true culture is us. The key to reviving America is not out there, it’s in us: it’s in the stories that we tell ourselves.
We can still tell our Great American Story. And we can make it great once again.
