Men always praise (but not always reasonably) the ancient times and find fault with the present; and they are such partisans of things past, that they celebrate not only that age which has been recalled to their memory by known writers, but those also (being now old) which they remember having seen in their youth…. I do not know, therefore, whether I merit to be numbered among those who deceive themselves, if in these Discourses of mine I shall laud too much the times of the ancient Romans and censure ours. And truly, if the virtu that then reigned and the vice that now reigns should not be as clear as the Sun, I would be more restrained in talking, being apprehensive of falling into that deception of which I accuse others.
—Niccolo Machiavelli[In the religious conservative vision for America] America would look much as it did for most of the first two centuries of its existence, before the social dislocation caused by Vietnam, the sexual revolution, Watergate, and the explosion of the welfare state. Our nation would once again be ascendant, self-confident, proud, and morally strong. Government would be strong, the citizenry virtuous, and mediating institutions such as churches and voluntary organizations would carry out many of the functions currently relegated to the bureaucracy.
—Ralph ReedFootnote 1Preliminaries: Nostalgia, Golden Age, and the Jeremiad
A fascination with the past, with distant founding eras and the larger-than-life personalities who inhabited them, has long characterized the history of political thought and action. The Greek poet Hesiod—who, if he did not coin the phrase, certainly is responsible for the widespread association of gold with an idealized and harmonious past time—had the good sense (or perhaps the strategic foresight) to place his own version of the golden age outside of human history, safe from the prying eyes of skeptical historians.Footnote 2 But political theorists and actors have rarely shown such restraint, offering a variety of historical candidates for the status of Golden Age: classical Athens, the Roman Republic, the medieval village, the American founding and early national period. The dramatic contrast between a virtuous past and a degenerate present energizes the accounts of thinkers from classical Chinese Confucians to contemporary Americans; from Machiavelli's paeans to the Antonine emperors to Rousseau's lament over humanity's movement out of the state of nature.
But suggesting that the solution to present difficulties lies in a reappropriation of the past need not involve such large-scale feats of historical imagination. Another way of turning to the past for a political ideal has also animated political thought and action over the years. As opposed to reaching back into antiquity, or to distant founding eras, a politics of nostalgia valorizes a far less distant ideal, the world of the comparatively recent past, the world of childhood (the childhood of its proponents, or their target audience, or both). Machiavelli beckons toward this distinction between nostalgic and Golden Age politics in his comments about individuals who “celebrate not only that age which has been recalled to their memory by known writers, but those also (being now old) which they remember having seen in their youth.”Footnote 3
Although virtually all social criticism and political theorizing are animated by dissatisfaction with present conditions, nostalgic and Golden Age politics depend on the further claim that some aspect of the past offers the best way forward in addressing the inadequacies and corruptions of the present. In other words, they depend not only on the claim that present-day society is badly disordered, but on the further contention that, in some specific way, things used to be better. Both sorts of critiques appear in the form of historical narratives, whose creators construct compelling accounts of past political life or institutional arrangements and lament subsequent departures from those ideals. Like all stories, nostalgic narratives present characters that propel their plots forward; through such plots, and such characters, they advance a moral tale centered on the superiority of the past over the present.Footnote 4
In this paper, I assess these different ways of drawing on the past in political debate, and offer a critique of nostalgic and Golden Age political thinking. To probe these dynamics, I turn in the article's second section to the jeremiad, a form of political rhetoric that explicitly invokes the past as a corrective to the problems of the present; and more specifically to the American jeremiad.Footnote 5 In the third section, I focus on the traditionalist jeremiad offered by the Christian Right in American politics, since this movement is an important political actor in its own right and offers both nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric in pursuit of its political agenda. I argue that, despite the significant political and rhetorical power that they bring to political life, both nostalgic and Golden Age politics represent a constraining political ideal, a failure of historical and political imagination that bodes ill in an increasingly pluralistic American society. In the fourth section, I outline a different way of drawing on the past, a progressive jeremiad epitomized in the thought of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. This progressive jeremiad, like the traditionalist one, is anchored in the past, but it is characterized by a more capacious understanding of the American past as well as its contemporary landscape, and thus offers a more compelling way forward into a diverse and pluralistic American future.Footnote 6 I begin, though, by attending to a few important definitional issues.
The Jeremiad and the American Tradition
Although the Oxford English Dictionary traces the term back only to the evangelist Hannah More—who observed in her memoirs that “It has been long the fashion to make the most lamentable Jeremiades on the badness of the times”—the tendency to lament the present and look to a more virtuous past certainly long predates the eighteenth century.Footnote 7 The term refers us back, not only to Jeremiah, but to the long line of prophetic critics who, driven by a sense of crisis and a deep anxiety about their community's health, interpreted Israel's violation of its covenant with God as a story of decline that threatened God's punishment. (Conversely, in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the subsequent Babylonian exile, jeremiads often took a more retrospective approach, viewing such events as resulting from the covenant's violation.)Footnote 8 But if Jeremiah provided a rationale for the misfortunes that the community was experiencing—they had abandoned the covenant sworn at Sinai—the prophet also held out the hope of restoration: “Return, O faithless children, I will heal your faithlessness” (Jeremiah 3:22).
Jeremiads generally involve several discrete sets of claims:
1. Jeremiads identify problems that signal decline vis à vis the past. Jeremiahs claim that their societies have gone badly wrong, and offer vivid examples or statistics to back up these claims. Such critiques are not merely the territory of talk show commentators and Christian Right political activists. In recent academic scholarship, for example, critics from divergent political perspectives have argued that America is in the midst of civic and moral decline. Perhaps the most prominent recent example was Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which marshaled an impressive body of statistical data to argue that late-twentieth-century Americans were not as civically engaged as their parents and grandparents had been.Footnote 9 Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent also traced the rise of individualistic rights-talk over the course of American history, making a parallel argument to Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart and calling for the reappropriation of the civic republican tradition in American political life.Footnote 10 (Many of these works owe a great debt—often, more than they admit—to Wilson Carey McWilliams's magisterial The Idea of Fraternity in America.)Footnote 11 Sentiments of loss and longing, of regret for a road not taken and dismay at the contemporary consequences, fill such jeremiads and their accounts of contemporary decay.
2. Jeremiads identify a point in the past in which the harmful idea or practice responsible for decline first made its appearance, and trace out the injurious consequences from its earliest inception to the present day. In addition to explaining what is wrong, the jeremiad must also suggest an answer to the question of “Why this decline? Why these events? When and why did we begin to go so wrong?” Jeremiads usually propose a specific time period in the past when the destructive ideas or practices responsible for decline first appeared. Many contemporary Jeremiahs pinpoint the turbulent years of the late 1960s as key to understanding the civic, moral, and political decline that afflicts the nation early in the twenty-first century. Of course, they interpret them quite differently, with traditionalist jeremiads blaming a host of post-1960s personal “vices” on departures from traditional moral behaviors, and progressive jeremiads emphasizing the continuing structural and systemic contexts in which those individuals are nested.Footnote 12
Rhetorically speaking—and here we begin to see the intersection between jeremiad rhetoric and nostalgic and Golden Age political thinking—much of the account of what has gone wrong in recent years involves simultaneous reflection on what previous generations did right. Founders and virtuous ancestors—be they Washington or Jefferson, or Putnam's “long civic generation”—provide concrete historical examples of virtuous politics and rightly ordered societies; departure from their ways is the beginning of error. This unfavorable contrast between the glories of times past and the ills of times present is a key to the jeremiad's rhetorical power, and a link to the central concerns of this paper. In this way, certain strands of jeremiadic thinking often claim, convincingly, to represent the most loyal patriotism even while engaging in the most strident dissent. Consider Martin Luther King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963: King's “refus[al] to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt” skillfully blends an endorsement of fundamental American ideals with a lament over the realities of American life. King had no illusions about the social realities that obtained at the time of the founding, but he located the power of the “check” guaranteeing liberty to all Americans in the radical potential of the American founding. In the jeremiadic tradition, founders and virtuous ancestors represent a standing reproach to degenerate present-day Americans.
3. Jeremiads call for reform, repentance, or renewal—a specific course of action to reverse contemporary decline and to reclaim the original promise of communal life. Whoever the American Jeremiah—whether it be Increase Mather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jerry Falwell, Robert Bork, or any of the countless others who have made, and continue to make, these sorts of critiques—we can be sure that hand in hand with a narrative of American decline will go claims about what must be done to arrest these alarming developments and set the nation back on the right path. New England and Civil War jeremiads, often delivered in times of acute conflict or distress, concluded with exhortations to their audiences to recapture the community's founding promise and to do so with a specific set of political actions (free the slaves, honor the Sabbath, refrain from ostentatious displays of wealth, amend the Constitution). The twenty-first century is no different: late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century jeremiads are almost always enmeshed in debates about sexual morality, revised divorce laws, public school prayer, protection of the environment, the appropriate scope of government, and so on. In all of these cases, Jeremiahs attempt to mobilize Americans and to bring state power to intervene on one side of a divisive cultural or political issue.
But there is much more to the American jeremiad than a simple narrative of decline from founding promises or practices. The American aspect of the American jeremiad adds a sacred story—often related to the notion of American chosenness—tied intimately to the particularities of the nation's origins and socio-political development.Footnote 13 Such a view had its American origins in John Winthrop's evocation of the “city on a hill” delivered in his sermon on board the Arbella, journeying to Massachusetts in 1630, and the more general Puritan tendency to draw parallels between themselves and the ancient Israelites.Footnote 14 These presuppositions were deepened and strengthened by the events of the 1770s and 1780s, in which the notion of an American Israel throwing off oppression in order to take up its national mission settled ever more deeply in American public rhetoric. This link was only strengthened by the Revolutionary experience, the great evangelical revivals of the early nineteenth century, and the nation's first movements westward.Footnote 15
If the progeny of the founders of this “Chosen Nation” have strayed from the path of rightly-ordered politics and society, then, the consequences are not merely social and political, but much more world-historical, even transcendent, in nature.Footnote 16 Images of national chosenness throughout American history have been reinforced by a widespread interest in millennialism, the idea that God's kingdom was at hand and that the United States had some role to play in the unfolding of God's plans for the end times, especially in the nineteenth century.Footnote 17 Indeed, such a role explained both the origins and promise of the American nation, and the bitter trials through which it was currently passing. The rhetorical power of the American jeremiad grows out of its ability to frame political discourse from the early colonial period all the way down to the dawn of the twenty-first century, in this perennial and dynamic tension between perceived decline and enduring national promise.
Nostalgia and the Golden Age: Traditionalist Jeremiads and the Politics of Constraint
Nostalgic Politics: Longing for the World of Childhood
Although the term emerged out of early modern European medicine, where it referred to extreme forms of homesickness observed among seventeenth-century army recruits, by the twentieth century nostalgia had come to describe, not a medical condition, but an affective state, “a universal experience, present and prevalent across the lifespan” that “attracts or afflicts most levels of society.”Footnote 18 Nostalgia is characterized by positive, yet bittersweet, associations with some aspect of the “personally experienced past,” a past that is favorably contrasted with a degenerate present.Footnote 19 Far from simply the work of malcontents and Luddites opposed to all change, or of disaffected elderly pining for the world of their youth, nostalgia is at once both deeply personal—recalling to mind the world of childhood—and eminently political, capable of serving as a rallying-cry especially powerful among individuals of the same generation or who share certain background characteristics.
Yet we should also be clear that, as an empirical claim about the way that things “really” were, nostalgic accounts are often sorely lacking. In his noted study of memory and the past, David Lowenthal points out, rather gently, that that “the recollected past substantially diverges from the original experience.”Footnote 20 Nostalgia represents a “cognitive-emotional” phenomenon, evoking memories of past experiences set in sharp contrast to a present seen as sorely lacking. But the connection between these affectively-charged memories and the past they claim to describe, and for which they long, must be established and not assumed, as nostalgia is subject to all the vagaries of individual and collective memory. Scholars often note nostalgia's double distortion: an overly positive affect toward the reconstructed image of a personally experienced past on the one hand, and an understatement of positive aspects of the present on the other (in layman's terms, it wasn't so great back then, and it isn't so terrible now). According to Arthur Dudden, nostalgia gives voice to “a preference for things as they once were, or, more importantly, a preference for things as they are believed to have been.”Footnote 21
At the same time, if nostalgia presents an idealized portrait of both the past and present, it is nonetheless a powerful and politically effective one. As a psychological process, nostalgia serves important functions, and we should be careful not to underestimate the power of the particular combination of regret and longing that nostalgia offers, especially as this psychological effect is not randomly associated with the historical past, but returns individuals to times and places of real significances in their lives: childhood, the formative stages of significant relationships, and so on. “Nostalgic narratives … typically feature the self as central character, and revolve around interactions with important others…or momentous events.”Footnote 22 In addition, nostalgia represents a powerful coping mechanism, helping to maintain identity continuity during times of social upheaval. In this way, it helps individuals deal with existential threats that arise in times of rapid social change.Footnote 23 This coping mechanism seems to operate on a collective level as well, and nostalgia can serve to strengthen relational bonds among subcommunities who perceive themselves to be under threat.Footnote 24 Here we see most clearly the political aspect of nostalgia; in post-1960s America, for example, the Christian Right has deployed nostalgic jeremiads to enormous political success, rallying defenders of “traditional values” at a time when long-accepted standards of personal and public behavior are perceived to be under assault.
A more sustained treatment of a concrete example will make many of these points about nostalgic politics more clear. Consider perhaps the most politically effective nostalgic movement in recent American history, the Christian Right, which rose to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In articulating a social and political ideal that predated the upheavals of the later 1960s—emphasizing traditional family structures and gender roles, a friendly relationship between government and religion as epitomized by public school prayer and the display of religious symbols on public property—the Christian Right made a pointed generational claim, hearkening back to the formative social world of their target audience (white, middle-aged, American evangelicals). The political mobilization of the Christian Right gathered steam during the late 1970s, helped propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency, and continues to buttress (primarily) Republican candidates into the twenty-first century, driven by a powerful jeremiad of imperiled national promise, of a prodigal yet once-chosen nation that had forsaken its moral and spiritual foundations in favor of secularizing liberal humanism.
Given the nature of traditionalist piety, its cultural conservatism around issues of sexual morality and authority, it is not surprising that the social protests and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s—not to mention Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion, as well as an increasingly powerful federal government with an increasingly long reach into areas previously left to local institutionsFootnote 25—were perceived by such believers as a stark break from past practices, a signal of the onset of national decline. Christian Right leaders pointed to the state of American public education as evidence of a declining public morality, and laid responsibility for that decline at the feet of a Supreme Court that had removed prayer and Bible reading from the public schools in the early 1960s.Footnote 26 According to Jerry Falwell, “we have outlawed Bible reading and prayer. We have kicked God out the back door. The result of the exclusion of God from the public school scene is evident. There is a drug epidemic raging…. moral permissiveness literally pervades the atmosphere of the public school.”Footnote 27 Falwell noted that, for many years, American public schools were the best in world, incorporating Bible reading, singing, and prayer with an education in basic knowledge and skills. However, “our public schools no longer teach Christian ethics…. The decay in our public school system suffered an enormous acceleration when prayer and Bible reading were taken out of the classroom by our United States Supreme Court.”Footnote 28 (Falwell later blamed the September 11 attacks, in part, on the removal of prayer and Bible reading from the nation's schools.)
Nor are these simply the words of political outsiders trying to get in: they are voiced at the pinnacles of American political power, by members of both political parties. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), in a speech on the Senate floor in July of 2000, focused on the Supreme Court's decisions “since 1962” to disallow public school prayer as a fatal break with the traditions of the nation, while Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) made essentially the same points in his 2006 book It Takes a Family. Footnote 29 Pat Robertson lamented that, since 1963, “despite 340 years of biblical education of our children, one atheist and a handful of judges stripped the Bible from all the schools of the nation. The moral education of our children was trampled underfoot by a tiny left-wing minority.”Footnote 30 While acknowledging that correlation does not indicate causation, Ralph Reed could not help noticing that the nation had seen a 560 percent rise in violent crime since 1960, along with overcrowded prisons that led a decreasing number of criminals to serve out their sentences; as well as declining SAT scores, a rise in divorce rates, and so on. “There can … be no doubt,” writes Reed, “that there is a correlation between a decline in the role of religion in our society and the rise of social pathologies of every kind.”Footnote 31
In the Christian Right's nostalgic narrative of national decline, the removal of prayer and Bible reading from public schools represented just one example of a shift in the nation's broader culture, especially among elites in government, media, and education.Footnote 32 Religion's important role in American public life, Senator Byrd argued, has been rejected in recent years in favor of a “prejudice against the influence of religious commitment and moral values upon political issues.”Footnote 33 Tying together all of these concerns—“the collapse of ethical principles and habits, the loss of respect for authorities and institutions, the breakdown of the family, the decline of civility, the vulgarization of high culture, and the degradation of popular culture”Footnote 34—is a critique of a new, post-1960s ethic, variously labeled (by various critics) as hedonism, selfish individualism, paganism, secularism, secular humanism, or moral relativism, which radically moved away from the self-restraint and discipline that had historically tempered American individualism with a sense of community or religious obligation.
Of course, since they are deeply political, nostalgic narratives beckon forth not only potential allies (grounding inter-generational solidarity and social movements to reclaim lost virtues) but also counternarratives with quite different political agendas. For example, the Christian Right narrative leans heavily on the pre-1960s “traditional family” as a fundamental social institution, and laments changes in family structure—the reentry of women into the work force; the rise of feminism and the movement to pass an Equal Rights Amendment; the nationalization of abortion under Roe v. Wade; growing movements for gay and lesbian rights—in its account of post-1960s decline.Footnote 35 By contrast, Stephanie Coontz narrates a history of the American family in which the traditional family of the 1950s was itself a novel phenomenon, perched precariously in the immediate postwar years and dependent on economic prosperity, an ethic of domestic consumption, and the willingness of women to return to the home from positions in the economy during the 1940s. In Coontz's telling, the “traditional family” so central to the nostalgic politics of the Christian Right turns out, on closer examination, to be “an ahistorical amalgam of structures, values, and behaviors that never coexisted in the same time and place.”Footnote 36 Interlocutors like Coontz do not simply present data to refute the Christian Right's valorization of the traditional family, but propose a counternarrative, arguing that in certain key ways today's families are in fact more connected than those in the postwar era.Footnote 37 Yet even the most convincing of these efforts can offer only a partial (and often highly partisan) view of the past that they claim to describe. All narratives are partial, moralized tales, and narratives duel with each other in the political sphere not merely by offering statistics, but by attempting to present a more compelling story and by appealing to their audiences' sense of concern about the future.
Foundings and Golden Ages: The Lure of Antiquity
Like nostalgic ideals, Golden Ages are also distinctly retrospective phenomena, activated by a yearning for qualities perceived lost in the transition from past to present. In presenting their idealized portrait of a community's foundational moments, Golden Age theorists simultaneously make claims about the community's essential qualities and illuminate political fault lines in the present. Thus, like nostalgic narratives, the Golden Age is a story told by some members of a community against others; it is also the basis for political movements dedicated to recapturing those lost virtues. Such movements rely on origin myths and stories that “do more than simply uncover beginnings: they authorize implicitly particular solutions.”Footnote 38
But unlike nostalgia, the rhetoric of the Golden Age reaches well back beyond the life experience of any member of its audience. Often connected with (literal or figurative) founding moments, the Golden Age provides a touchstone for a whole family of political narratives that call the community to repent and recapture lost virtues or values. Again, a sense of loss is intertwined with claims about the superiority of the past over the present. The notion that attention to founding moments or figures illuminates something essential about the communities they lead is hardly limited to the United States, of course; note, for instance, Rousseau's reflections on the importance of the legislator and, more particularly, on Moses, Lycurgus, and Numa.Footnote 39
In narrating such foundational moments in the life of a community, theorists of the Golden Age evoke concrete qualities of a bygone age—faith, political courage, selflessness, community spirit—as a distinct antidote to the many failings of the present.Footnote 40 The qualities purported to have been present in the Golden Age vary from theorist to theorist, of course, yet they are precisely those that the critic laments as having vanished in the present: David Lowenthal calls the Golden Age “an imagined landscape invested with all [critics] find missing in the modern world.”Footnote 41 Unlike nostalgia, however, the appeal of Golden Age politics is not an appeal to personal experience, but a link to a purer and in part mythic past.
Once again, considering Christian Right jeremiads will be instructive. In addition to championing a nostalgic pre-1960s ideal (as discussed earlier), Christian Right thinkers present a Golden Age account of the nation's founders and founding period. Such accounts narrate the founding period as a national Golden Age, where individuals subordinated their particular interests to the common good, and a Judeo-Christian consensus structured public and private life more generally. The Golden Age is presented as possessing precisely the qualities that contemporary society is lacking: sexual restraint, public religiosity, a commitment to the common good, deference to traditional sources of authority. The founding of the nation in both Revolutionary action and the drafting of foundational documents, according to Paul Johnson, illustrates “the centrality of the religious spirit in giving birth to America.”Footnote 42 Certainly not all Christian Right spokespersons would necessarily agree with Pat Robertson's description of the founders as “students of the Old and New Testaments and…deeply influenced by the life and teachings of Jesus.” But all agree that the Founders—Washington, Madison, Adams, and so many others, even the religiously heterodox Jefferson—represent moral exemplars who never shrank from the opportunity to link Judeo-Christian piety and American national identity.Footnote 43 The American Enlightenment and Revolution, unlike the French, was fired by and friendly toward Christianity. And the American founders “were united by a common belief in the importance of religion as an aid and a friend to the Constitutional order [and] spoke with one voice about the importance of religion in civic life.”Footnote 44 Terry Eastland argues that “as a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers believed that the public interest was served by the promotion of religion.”Footnote 45
In fact, for Christian Right spokespersons, religion and its public role play a central part in what makes the American Golden Age golden. They trace the religious impulse in American history back even farther than the founding period, to the origins of American colonial settlement (the founding of America itself, not just the founding of the United States). Jerry Falwell highlighted the Jamestown settlement, the Mayflower Compact, the early histories of New England and Pennsylvania, and the role of churches in colonial universities, as especially significant roots of the America's religious heritage. These early settlers imbibed the notion of an Elect Nation from their English Protestant background and as a result “religious conviction permeated the bloodstream of American Constitutionalism and American statecraft as far back as 200 years prior to the writing of the Constitution.”Footnote 46 The American democratic proposition, according to Richard John Neuhaus, “emerges from and is sustained by prior propositions about God and his ways in the world.”Footnote 47 Although official disestablishment was the law of the land under the First Amendment, a general (Protestant) culture of religiosity, and a publicly-influential role for churches and church leaders, characterized the nation's public life during these years.Footnote 48
As with their nostalgic counterparts, Golden Age narratives too evoke critics as well. Consider Derek Phillip's provocative jousting with communitarians in his Looking Backwards: after assaying the Golden Ages offered by contemporary American communitarians (classical Athens, the medieval village, and the early national United States), Phillips concludes: “Communitarians emphasize the peace and harmony of earlier times and places, while I see even more domination, subordination, exploitation, and human suffering than surrounds us today.”Footnote 49 As with Coontz's counternarrative of American family life, however, such critiques can only go so far: Phillips's suggestion—that community was not really the way that communitarians present it, but rather was really a negative tale of domination and exploitation—seems merely to substitute one sort of essentialism for another. Such critiques will appeal to those already critical of idealized communitarian views of the past, but are unlikely to address the deep sense of longing that powers the politics of nostalgia and yearning for the Golden Age.
Nostalgia, Golden Age, and a Politics of Constraint
In assessing nostalgic and Golden Age political thinking, the Christian Right presents an especially useful example, since it presents both a nostalgic ideal (post-World War II, pre-1960s) and a Golden Age account (the colonial and early national period when Protestant hegemony was at its peak). In fact, the two are related, conceptually and politically: as we see in the quotation from Ralph Reed that serves as this article's epigraph, the nostalgic, pre-1960s ideal is important not only for its own sake, but for its role as a bridge to the Golden Age.
The two Christian Right ideals explored above share several features: they represent claims about “way things actually were” at some point in the nation's past, and understand that past as a model, a blueprint, for a reformed future. Politically speaking, both types of narratives share an overriding goal: to retain as much similarity as possible between past and present practices. In a political environment characterized by immigration, cultural and religious pluralism, evolving understandings of human liberty and dignity, and a demographic shift away from white majorities—a nation that grows less Protestant, less Christian even, with each passing year—such jeremiadic narratives epitomize what I call a politics of constraint. The critic—the Jeremiah—constructs a past that serves as a limiting or constraining condition on the present, a sort of empirical checklist to hold up in order to assess the propriety of certain features of contemporary life. (The nostalgic jeremiad's checklist beckons to a generation or so previous; the Golden Age's, farther back in time.)
Nostalgia, as I noted above, is a basic aspect of human psychology, and can lead to widely varied political outcomes; certainly the concept admits of more depth and complexity than simply progressives berating conservatives as fearful of all change.Footnote 50 Yet if we take the Christian Right jeremiad as an exemplary nostalgic narrative, we begin to see the ways in which a politics of nostalgia leads to a politics of constraint. In such jeremiads, we find the past presented as a model for the present and future.
The traditionalist jeremiad's political vision for the future involves realignment with these purported aspects of the past: returning to a smaller federal government role in the economy, a more accommodating relationship between (Christian) church and state, traditional gender roles, and so on. Given the kinds of political, religious, and cultural diversity that characterize American society at the dawn of the twenty-first century—the Census Bureau estimates that 90 percent of the nation's population growth in the next fifty years will occur in racial and ethnic “minority” groups, groups that will represent a full 40% of the American population by 2040—such an understanding of the role and relevance of the past for the present and future suggests a constant emphasis on constraint and limitation. And such pasts are remembered quite differently by groups in different social conditions. It is no accident, for example, that the much-heralded efforts by the Christian Right to expand its alliances with African-Americans have come largely to naught. African-Americans may hold conservative views on gay marriage, for example, but they have little nostalgia for a pre-civil rights era America, no matter how skillfully narrated.
It is important to note as well that traditionalist jeremiads are by no means limited to the Christian Right. We see elements of such an approach to the past in the classic New England jeremiads of the seventeenth century, with their contrast between the piety and godly behavior of the founders and their children and grandchildren, their hostility to alternative religious experiences, and their deep-seated objections to commercial growth and mobility.Footnote 51 Nor are such constraining jeremiads, in contemporary times, strictly the property of conservative Republicans. Since the 1990s, communitarian and civic republican social critics—most notably in recent years, Robert Bellah, Amitai Etzioni, and Robert Putnam—have lamented the loss of earlier modes of interaction in an increasingly individualistic American society, and sought to re-establish earlier patterns of social interaction and community involvement.Footnote 52 More recently, progressive critics of developments in American political economy lament a perceived retreat from such American values as a social safety net, the postwar “social contract” between employers and employees, and strong labor unions, due to an ever-increasing collusion of the American government with the forces of globalization.Footnote 53 A politics of constraint can also operate in such cases; nostalgic attachments to the spirit of the 1960s can block political engagement with the realities of twenty-first century global dynamics. In each case, a return to concrete social practices or institutional relationships from the past represents the key to solving the problems of the present.
But Putnam, for example, was able to make such a pointed contrast between present and previous levels of civic involvement only by refusing other modes of engagement—book groups, self-help programs, national-level environmental groups recruited by mass mailing—the status of “social capital.” Like many communitarians, his account remains imprisoned in an exclusive focus on the form of social interaction as it existed in the 1950s and 1960s, the local chapter of national-level organizations like the Elks, Moose, Kiwanis, and Jaycees. An exclusive focus on such concrete forms can easily blind us—as it surely did Putnam—to the reality of new forms of engagement that draw on technological advances and differing modes of engagement among a younger generation.Footnote 54
Recall the phenomenon of double distortion that I mentioned above. In addition to the removal of prayer from public schools and the erosion of many traditional sources of authority, the 1960s, for example, saw the culmination of a mass movement to undo a system of American apartheid that had been in place for nearly 100 years, as well as movements for women's equality and the beginnings of modern environmentalism as a national movement. (To be fair, Christian Right jeremiads do generally acknowledge such progress, although they quickly set it aside and present an overall assessment of a net loss of virtue.)Footnote 55 But nostalgia, to reiterate, does not consist merely of accumulating facts, but is communicated through narrative. Attending too extensively to positive elements of the American present, or negative elements of the past, would undermine the very point of the critique, the sense of inexorable downward movement so crucial to calling forth a political movement for reform. Inherent in such traditionalist jeremiads, be they nostalgic or Golden Age in nature, is an emphasis on the negative aspects of the present and the positive aspects of the past.Footnote 56
Progressive Jeremiads and the Past as Promise
Are there other ways in which one might draw on the past to rectify the perceived deficiencies of the present, ones free from this emphasis on constraint and more compatible with the sorts of pluralism that are part of our contemporary landscape? By way of contrast, let me next offer an example of a capacious use of the past to provide a political ideal for the future, one which I locate in the thought of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The basic elements of the jeremiadic form—lament over contemporary decline, contrast with the past, and call for action—are all clearly evident here. For both Lincoln and Douglass, of course, the crisis of their time was clear: slavery, and a host of social and political disputes that involved slavery in one way or another. Although Douglass had agitated for the elimination of slavery since the beginning of his public career, whereas Lincoln only arrived at such a position after several years of civil war, both saw slavery as implicated in the growing disunity, rancor, and sectional divisions of the 1840s and 1850s, and behind the armed conflict of the 1860s. Lincoln, though no abolitionist, had gone on record as opposing slavery as a young member of the Illinois House of Representatives, and while a Congressman had attempted to introduce a bill for gradual emancipation in the District of Columbia. He repeatedly argued, most visibly in his “House Divided” speech and at Cooper Union, that slavery lay at the heart of the nation's many problems and would demand a national settlement.Footnote 57
When Lincoln and Douglass looked for a solution to the nation's difficulties, they looked to the past, and evoked the spirit of the nation's founders. In this regard, they certainly resemble the Christian Right thinkers explored above. But unlike traditionalist Jeremiahs, Lincoln and Douglass valorized the past not because of its concrete accomplishments or practices, but due to the radical promise of the American founding experience, and each narrated a national experience characterized first and foremost by a founding promise of liberty to all Americans. Douglass located the moral significance of the American founding in its radical principles and not in the mundane (slaveholding) realities of its time. In his famous July 4, 1852 speech, Douglass told his audience that “the principles contained in [the Declaration of Independence] are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.” He described the Constitution in similar terms: “take the constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.”Footnote 58 In the midst of war, Douglass exuberantly (if a bit hyperbolically) celebrated the “principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace.”Footnote 59
Lincoln, too, valorized the nation's founders, although like Douglass he made no claims that they had fully realized their own highest ideals. Rather, Lincoln argued that the founders understood the incongruity of slavery in a nation dedicated to liberty and had placed limitations on it, expecting that the slave system would gradually but inevitably vanish and allowing Congress to take action to halt its spread. In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln described his own position as putting slavery “where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it … in the course of ultimate extinction.”Footnote 60 At Cooper Union, Lincoln covered the history of the federal government's involvement with slavery in painstaking detail, rejecting the claim that the spread of slavery was consistent with the founders' views of the matter: “All Republicans ask … in relation to slavery … [is that] as those fathers marked it, so let it be again marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”Footnote 61
The difficulty for Lincoln, of course, lay in the enormous importance that he placed on the Union as the “last, best hope of earth,” despite its inability to live up to those founding ideals. As Lincoln would finally, and reluctantly at first, come to see the matter after years of war, fidelity to the founders' intentions—those very founders who had placed slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction” but left it intact in their own day—would require nineteenth-century Americans to do away with one of the most enduring conditions of the founders' time, and to strike out beyond slavery into a new American racial reality.Footnote 62 Like the Christian Right jeremiad and New England election sermons, Lincoln and Douglass constructed a narrative that called Americans back to foundational values, by employing plot and characters to proclaim the fundamentally moral nature of the American experience. The idea of a slave power—with its cast of characters including slaveholders, slave traders, and captive politicians and judgesFootnote 63—progressively gaining control of the nation and hijacking the radical potential of the founding moment, provided not only a rhetorically powerful plot but also a potent call for political action.
When Lincoln did praise the founders in more particular ways, it was usually Jefferson, and always as propounders of an ideal, articulators of principles of liberty and equality. He praised Jefferson as the man “who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”Footnote 64 His attack on Stephen Douglas's reading of the Declaration contrasted the letter and the spirit of the document, with Lincoln placing the supreme importance on its enduring principles: “Douglas' version of [the Declaration] … confines its meaning to an assertion of the equality of British subjects in America with British subjects in England.”Footnote 65 Stephen Douglas would have nothing but the words, the literal text on the page, a constraining interpretation (said Lincoln) if ever there was one. The Declaration grounded Lincoln's political outlook in fundamental ways, and he later described it as the “apple of gold” which the Constitution was drafted to realize (and not the other way around).Footnote 66
When it came to political agendas, both Lincoln and Douglass viewed their tasks, although structured and bounded by the examples of the founders, as essentially about moving founding ideals forward and into a new American future. On this point Douglass was unbending from the beginning, and we can see a development in Lincoln's own thinking: his early Lyceum speech displays elements of both traditionalist and progressive jeremiads. On the one hand, the Lyceum speech is a plea for strict adherence to the law in the context of rising mob violence. Lincoln called on Americans to swear not to violate one letter of the law: the past, indeed, plays a traditionalist role, and he calls for obedience to the law to be taught as a new political religion.Footnote 67 But at the same time, the speech displays Lincoln's realization that the duty of his generation involved moving beyond the founding generation: members of that generation, he told his audience, “were the pillars of the temple of liberty; and now, that they have crumbled away, that temple must fall, unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.”Footnote 68 The pillars must be replaced, certainly, in order to buttress the nation's founding principles, but they will be hewn from different materials than those supplied by the founders. In such a way, the task of the founders will be advanced in a new setting. For Lincoln and Douglass, the nation's promise lay in its ability to grow out of its earlier shortcomings. (And if it refused to do so, Douglass reminded his listeners that “prouder and stronger governments than this have been shattered by the bolts of a just God.”)Footnote 69 The Lincoln-Douglass jeremiad called Americans to action and reform: not to a set of specific social structures or institutions that had existed in the past, not to recreate an American Golden Age of harmony and unity, but rather to reclaim a birthright inherent in its founding documents.
The jeremiads offered by Lincoln and Douglass display what I call a progressive orientation toward the American past and future: they emphasize the past not as a model for the future, nor as a set of empirical conditions to be replicated as closely as possible in perpetuity, but as a promise or birthright, a source of emancipatory principles and ideals entailed by previous actors and the events that they set into motion.Footnote 70 The founders were every bit as significant in Lincoln's and Douglass's plots, rhetorically and politically speaking, as they would later be for Falwell, Robertson, and the Christian Right. But they were important for different reasons, and in different ways. Lincoln certainly did, at Gettysburg, emphasize that “our fathers” brought forth the nation; but Lincoln's nation was always founded on a proposition, and a human document to be worked out by human actors, unlike Falwell's America, founded on a particular religion's holy book. Douglass looked forward to the emergence of a new, purified Union after the Civil War, while Lincoln, with characteristically less bombast, concluded his Second Inaugural, with an exhortation to commence the work of reconciliation.
As with the traditionalist jeremiad, the progressive jeremiad is not limited to these two nineteenth-century thinkers. We see this type of thinking at work in other American historical movements, and it has a twentieth-century face as well. Consider, for example, Franklin Roosevelt's articulation of an “Economic Bill of Rights” in his 1944 State of the Union Address. As he looked forward to the eventual end of war, Roosevelt laid out the premises of his story of American nationhood—“This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights”—and went on to note that “as our nation has grown in size and stature … as our industrial economy expanded … these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” He continued by linking his vision for the future with the Declaration of Independence's “self-evident” truths and the Constitution's fundamental guarantees of freedom for all Americans:
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence…. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
A renewed campaign for “true individual freedom,” then, the continuing struggle to achieve the ideals of 1776, will involve a commitment to economic opportunity and a political campaign against those economic royalists who have always sought to deny the radical implications of the Declaration's promise. Such themes had long occupied Roosevelt's rhetoric and joined political concerns with economic ones in a ringing endorsement of foundational American principles in a time of great crisis.Footnote 71
Or consider Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. King narrated the story of America as based most fundamentally on a founding promise, a birthright of sorts: the “check” written to all Americans by the nation's founders, “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” By pointing out the nation's default, that the check had been returned unpaid, King identified the crisis of his day. Yet his imagery of African-Americans coming to Washington to present the check again skillfully accomplished two rhetorical purposes: in true jeremiadic fashion, it blended a lament over the realities of contemporary American life (the check has been returned marked “Insufficient funds”) with an endorsement of fundamental American ideals (“we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt”). King reached deep into the American tradition and into the American past—as he put it, his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream”—not to recapture a set of past practices, but to reclaim a promise, to make good on a debt, to fulfill the radical potential of those founding principles. Like Lincoln, King embraced a capacious understanding of the symbolic, and not merely the literal, meaning of the Declaration and Constitution: “This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, a check that declared that all men were created equal.”
This promise was the American birthright, and a birthright implies a story, a narrative. Indeed, the language of birthright is crucial when discussing the historical nature of the jeremiad, as Sheldon Wolin has observed:
A birthright is defined by the historical moments when collective identity is collectively established or reconstituted. For Americans, these moments include the seventeenth-century beginnings in New England; the revolutionary founding and the redefinition of it symbolized by the ratification of the Constitution; the Civil War, with its vision of a nationalized society and its inconclusive attempt to radicalize republicanism; and two world wars that have affixed collective identity to the dream of world hegemony … Birthrights are transmitted, and because of their meaning will have to be reconsidered amid different circumstances. We inherit from our fathers, but we are not our fathers…. We cannot, for example, experience the past directly. We can, however, share in the symbols that embody the experience of the past. This calls for a citizen who can become an interpreting being, one who can interpret the present experience of the collectivity, reconnect it to past symbols, and carry it forward.Footnote 72
As a war president, Lincoln referred to “the struggles our people are making for the preservation of their precious birthright of civil and religious liberty.”Footnote 73 In 1864 he assured the 166th Ohio Regiment that their cause was just; “in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright—not only for one, but for two or three years.”Footnote 74
And yet, if I earlier pointed out the constraining nature of nostalgic and Golden Age jeremiads for leading to a politics of constraint, we should not assume that progressive jeremiads bring with them no liabilities. On the one hand, the progressive jeremiad is not susceptible to the sorts of critiques we saw above regarding nostalgia and Golden Ages, because it does not make empirical claims about past practices, and certainly not strong arguments that those practices ought to be mirrored in the future. But its historical element, like that of its traditionalist counterpart, is also a narrative construction, and therefore its own partial and moralized tale of the past. The claim that the meaning of the American founding, for example, is not exhausted by the concrete conditions extant in 1776—as we saw in Lincoln's objections to Stephen Douglas, or King's confidence in bringing the “check” back to Washington—represents an extraordinary confidence in the emancipatory potential of American ideals, and requires a degree of hope about the ability of such concepts as liberty and equality to expand and encompass new groups. Certainly there have been many in American history who have not shared this capacious understanding of American ideals. William Lloyd Garrison, Stephen Douglas, the Black Power voices who denounced King, and other American skeptics were not somehow less “American” than King, or Frederick Douglass, or Lincoln. They denied the progressive jeremiad's hopeful narrative of American founding promise; either by denying that there was any promise beyond what they could see around them, or by asking why, if these concepts had such radical potential, American institutions and elites had taken so long to come to such realizations.
The examples of King and Lincoln, in fact, suggest that one needs more than simply a compelling narrative or faith in American founding promise to achieve the sort of realization that the progressive jeremiad calls for. One needs also a powerful political interest to align with a particular expansionist reading of the Declaration, or the Constitution, in order to have any hope of such a view getting a widespread hearing.Footnote 75 We might put an even sharper point on this observation and note that what one really needs, in order to see the victory of one's view of the American birthright, is a successful military campaign. Lincoln had an army, and his lament over the rise of the slave power and his vision for a transformed Union would have been stillborn without Grant's Virginia Campaigns of 1864 and 1865, or Sherman's March to the Sea, to back it up. Roosevelt pointedly linked the successful prosecution of the war to his promotion of the Economic Bill of Rights and in 1963 King skillfully positioned himself as the only thing preventing violent racial conflict in the United States.
So the achievement of such capacious understandings of the promise of the American past depends on a rare confluence of circumstances, including a sympathetic populace (or at least one willing to be awakened to sympathy), a political and legal environment amenable to the expansion of rights (coerced, if necessary), and a compelling narrative (and narrator) who can articulate the connection between the controversial proposed extension of American ideals and the relatively uncontroversial text of the Declaration or Constitution. Besides the fact that such confluences tend to be quite rare in American history, one wonders if there might not be some inherent limits to the project of imagining ever more “perfect” instantiations of the American union.
One might also ask just how capacious the progressive jeremiad can be, just how expansive its birthright, so long as it remains wedded to an image of the United States as God's chosen nation, or to some form of American exceptionalism that relegates other nations to a secondary or inferior status. This seems a very important point, and at the same time a very difficult one to answer adequately. The only way to know just how capacious the progressive jeremiad is capable of becoming, it seems, is for discontented citizens to continue pressing its outer bounds, not only regarding domestic American politics, but also in global terms. For one example of how such “pressing of the outer bounds” might look, consider Martin Luther King, Jr.'s late speech “Beyond Vietnam,” a blistering critique in which he admits that “the world now demands a maturity from America that we may not be able to achieve.”Footnote 76 King here calls his nation to move beyond such metaphors as “Chosen Nation” and “last, best hope of Earth” and into a more subtle relationship with the rest of the world. His later career provides an intriguing example of the convergence between the political rights championed by Douglass and Lincoln, and Roosevelt's notion of economic rights mentioned above; and it is no accident that as King's disenchantment with America's role in the world increased (as evidenced by his movement from the soaring rhetoric of “I Have a Dream” to the profound disillusionment of “Beyond Vietnam”) he became an increasingly unpopular, controversial, and polarizing figure in American politics.
Conclusion
My goal in revisiting the Christian Right jeremiad and the thought of Lincoln and Douglass has not been to leave the impression that there is some sort of “true” narrative waiting to be discovered “out there,” a story that is more “authentic” to the evidence of American history than that of its opponents. Both jeremiads construct an American past compatible with their political outlooks, the unity of their narrative's plot, and the contours of their vision of the American future. Both jeremiads employ the narrative elements of character, setting, and plot to draw a moral lesson that advances a political agenda. In a sense, we can never get beyond narrative, and all stories of the American past are moralized tales seeking to advance political agendas in the present. Decisions about the adequacy of various jeremiads as historical accounts seem ultimately to reflect political as much as empirical judgments. My argument for more progressive jeremiads is not based on the claim that they are more accurate with regard to the facts of American history, but rather that they are more appropriate to a situation of cultural and religious pluralism such as exists in the twenty-first century United States.
The traditionalist jeremiad, in either its nostalgic or Golden Age version, privileges one type of plot, that of decay from primitive unity and virtue. With their attachment to concrete particularities of the American past, such jeremiads tends to overlook or downplay—or denigrate—such developments as the civil rights movement, the explosion of New Religious Movements, the women's movement, the expansion of the franchise in 1971, and the emergence of a variety of therapeutic and non-“worship” based spiritual activities in late-twentieth and early twenty-first century America. Dan Quayle's jeremiad—the noted “Murphy Brown” speech—tied the 1960s to moral decay and a rejection of traditional American values; Ralph Reed looked back longingly to a pre-1960s world. Given the way in which the Christian Right constructs the American past as constituted by a “Judeo-Christian” consensus (one deeply Protestant in nature), its jeremiad must view the growth of new religious movements and Eastern religions since the 1960s not as the flowering of religious liberty, a basic American ideal firmly ensconced in the First Amendment and American culture, but rather as the loss of a previous unity, a decrease in the resemblance between present and past.Footnote 77 Similarly with the rise of homosexuality: the Christian right jeremiad sees not an issue of civil rights, or even freedom of conscience, but an assault on the traditional hegemony of heterosexual monogamy.Footnote 78 The same contrasts are generally offered with regard to the size and reach of the federal government, the rise of feminism, changes in family structure, and so on. Golden Age accounts offer a similar dynamic.
Following calls for reform that evoke a simpler, earlier time of virtue, then, threatens to undo many of the important twentieth-century advances in gender relations and the status of racial, ethnic, or religious minorities. Perhaps even more problematically, however, the traditionalist jeremiad can leave us ill-equipped to deal constructively with American religious pluralism in the years to come. So long as what is essentially American is located in a Christian consensus among northern European white Protestants, pluralism in the American religious and political landscape can only appear as a falling-off from those standards of purity, and never as a new and vibrant cultural production in its own right. Such a view contributes to an ongoing imprisonment in an exclusionary “Judeo-Christian” paradigm that makes it difficult to see how new religious movements of various kinds can be both radically new and wholly American.
Somewhere in the distinction between these two ways of valorizing the past—between the past as model, and the past as promise and birthright—lies the difference between two quite different ways of envisioning the American future. Progressive jeremiads lay claim to founding principles and ideals as part of the American birthright, while traditionalist ones lean heavily on concrete social practices prevalent in the past. At the same time, these two categories are meant as heuristic aids in the analysis of political phenomena, not rigid “boxes” within which one should seek to file particular social movements, narratives, or narrators. On the one hand, the progressive and traditionalist narratives map, at least very loosely, onto the “progressive” and “orthodox” orientations identified by James Davison Hunter in his seminal account of the culture wars in American politics.Footnote 79 And disputes between constitutional interpretations favoring “original intent” and those more inclined toward the view of a “living constitution” epitomize some of the same dynamics and ideological conflicts that I have traced in the traditionalist and progressive jeremiads, respectively. I have identified aspects of the Christian Right and Lincoln-Douglass in order to highlight different ways of understanding the past; but any particular jeremiad (and certainly any particular political movement) will likely include elements of the progressive and the traditionalist approach.
By decoupling a vision for the future from concrete particularities of the past, progressive jeremiads have always urged the nation on to new understandings of the bonds of American citizenship and the responsibilities for ethical action at home. In proposing a rejuvenation of the progressive jeremiad, then, I am suggesting that we move beyond nostalgic laments over declining bowling leagues or a naked public square, and employ the jeremiad in the interest of pluralistic narratives that speak to a religiously and politically vibrant American future from deep within the American tradition; that we refuse to allow the most fundamental understandings of American nationhood to be limited to replicating the demographic, cultural, or religious profile of a previous time. Scholars like John Higham and David Hollinger have urged us to create narratives of American identity that are neither captive to narrow particularisms of class, gender, or race, nor make discredited appeals to the kinds of universals that underwrote American assimilation in years past.Footnote 80
William Pfaff has recently made an impassioned plea to renounce the very idea of American chosenness, as producing a militarized, unstable international political system and leading to all sorts of disastrous American interventions around the world.Footnote 81 Perhaps Pfaff is right. Still, it is hard to believe that such a call will be heeded anytime soon. There certainly are times and presidents for whom American chosenness leads to reckless military adventures. (The reader in 2009 need not look far.) At the same time, American chosenness has also contributed to a sense of American responsibility to alleviate suffering at home and around the world, as William Jewett points out in his argument for “prophetic realism.”Footnote 82 A renewed attention to the progressive jeremiad need not jettison the notion of national mission or founding promise, as we have seen in the case of King, who despite his disillusion retained a deep faith in American founding values. (His dream, he said, allowed him to hew a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair.)
Nor are these sorts of capacious understandings of American identity only the product of post-1960s multiculturalism. In the concluding paragraphs of Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman offered the following meditation on the American future, one directly related to the tension between the traditionalist and the progressive jeremiad:
We see that the real interest of this people of ours in the theology, history, poetry, politics, and personal models of the past, (the British islands, for instance, and indeed all the past,) is not necessarily to mould ourselves or our literature upon them, but to attain fuller, more definite comparisons, warnings, and the insight to ourselves, our own present, and our own far grander, different, future history, religion, social customs, &c.Footnote 83
The progressive jeremiad offers a national narrative deeply grounded in the American past yet open to a dynamic and changing American future. It appeals, as Lincoln said in his First Inaugural, to the “better angels of our nature,” and to King's acknowledgment that “we cannot walk alone.” Only such a capacious understanding of the American past can explain Douglass's remarkable admission in 1852 that, despite the severe oppression being visited on his people, “I do not despair of this country.” Twenty-first century Americans could do far worse than to follow these exemplars into an uncertain and evolving American future.
