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Review: The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself – Nick
Bryant (Viking)
If you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find
the same poisonous ingredients [… that] percolated violently to the surface on
January 6th, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new
book,
The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.
Over two centuries ago, in 1787, Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president
and principal author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote: “The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
The quote has been repurposed by Donald Trump’s supporters: you can even buy a
MAGA T-shirt emblazoned with it.
According to Pew, “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological
lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point
in the last two decades.”
This often leads to the conclusion that Trump, especially, is uniquely
unprecedented in US history – as is the particular threat he poses to American
democracy. It seems contradictory, but this is both true and untrue.
Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are
unprecedented but also, to historians of America, frighteningly familiar.
Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these
contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly
argue that Trump – and his support – is the product of that history.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly said this election cycle is nothing less
than a “battle for the soul of America”, and that this is why he’s compelled to
run again, aged 81. But as Bryant so clearly outlines, that battle has been
raging for centuries. In the context of its divisions and inherent violence, is
it even possible to argue America has one “soul”?
The battle is, and perhaps has always been, over which soul – which version of
America – should reign supreme, and who gets to decide. In that sense, the
attempted insurrection on January 6 2021 was not a departure from America’s
history, but a continuation of it.
“All politics is history. All history is politics,” Bryant writes. And that is
the only way, really, to understand modern America and what is at stake in the
November elections."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
