United States

Each year the Macquarie Dictionary convenes a panel to select a word of the year. In 2019, the panel chose ‘cancel culture’, which it defined as ‘the attitudes within a community which call for or bring about the withdrawal of support from a public figure’. Since then, cancel culture has been a preoccupation of Australian journalists and politicians, with cancellation serving as shorthand for punishment for expressing dissenting views, and sometimes just for being out of favour with a powerful and homogeneous cohort of unnamed leftists.

How can a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants,’ asks Brianna Nofil, the author of The Migrant’s Jail, ‘also be a place that imprisons tens of thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees?’ In answering that question, Nofil, an assistant professor of history at William and Mary, researches the history of the crucial role of local county jails and their widespread deployment by the federal government to build the largest migrant detention and deportation system in the world. Incarceration was the prelude to deportation.

When Ronald Reagan died in 2004, Americans of every kind, ‘in rows three to five deep, thronged Pennsylvania Avenue to catch a glimpse of this melancholy but historic funeral procession’. In a note the presidential historian Richard Norton Smith wrote to Reagan’s widow, Nancy, he assured her that ‘their grief was equalled by their gratitude for a life that had become synonymous in their eyes with the nation itself’.

As leading US historian Eric Foner wrote in his classic account, The Story of American Freedom (1999), it is the ‘story of freedom’ that conveys Americans’ favourite idea of itself. Of course, its meaning and uses change over time. It is a flexible value. We only need to look at candidates’ promises in the US election, with Kamala Harris declaring, ‘We choose freedom’ and Donald Trump (‘We believe in the majesty of freedom’) planning to build ten new futuristic ‘freedom cities’.

What a difference a decade makes. When the second decade of the millennium opened, the United States was advocating an open door for trade and investment with China. In November 2011, President Barack Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, revealed Washington’s new strategic and economic policy: the Pivot to Asia.

Though scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

It was a young Abraham Lincoln’s prediction that the United States ‘must live through all time, or die by suicide’. Nick Bryant wants us to believe the latter is coming true. America has been popping pills from the very beginning. Now the fatal overdose is inevitable. This time, we are reaching an ‘extreme polarization … 250 years in the making … a second civil war’. Rather than the hysteria for and against Donald Trump being an aberration, ‘the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today,’ Bryant argues, ‘are in fact a core part of America’s story’. It has been on this path since 1776; Trump is less a waypoint than a destination.