Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
Twilight of the American Idols?
Statue Politics between the Movement
for Black Lives and Trumpism
Michael Weinman
Delivered at the foot of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial,
just outside the aptly named Keystone, South Dakota, in the face of both
a once-in-generations summer of street protests and a ravaging pandem-
ic, as well as a presidential election campaign, (then-)President Donald
Trump’s remarks on the occasion of Independence Day 2020 make clear
the centrality of statue politics to the current political and cultural mo-
ment in the United States of America. In this brief notice, I wish to do
three things: (1) draw out the main idea of the president’s speech and
how it stands at the center of the electoral appeal of Trumpism; (2) set
this idea into relief against the Movement for Black Lives and the focus
activists within that and cognate protest groups place on public memo-
rials; and (3) suggest, through a contrast with President-Elect Biden’s
speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on October 6, 2020 that references
the same day, why a reckoning with the widely-held national narrative
concerning American exceptionalism is inextricably connected with our
statue politics: for, I shall argue, the contestation surrounding both that
narrative and those memorials is ultimately about idol-worship, an ines-
capable aspect of American civil religion.
1 Trumpism and the Idols of American Exceptionalism
In at least one key respect, the only remarkable thing about Trump’s
remarks as president of the United States on the 4th of July are how un-
remarkable, or more precisely how conventional, they are. Namely, like
any number of speeches by sitting presidents or other U.S. officials, they
call upon the audience to commemorate the “immortal” day of July 4,
1776, as a world-historical event in which the unique American experi-
Amerikastudien / American Studies 66.1 (2021): 47-51 47 Michael Weinman
ment was consecrated. We can hear this, for instance, in these words:
“No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the
United States of America. And no people have done more to promote
human progress than the citizens of our great nation.” Not only in his
invocation of American uniqueness and greatness, but also in his articu-
lation of the grounds for this exceptional “city on the hill” status of the
American experiment, Trump’s words are indistinguishable from those
used not only by Reagan or Bush (41 or 43) on such occasions, but also
those used by Kennedy or Obama.
We can see this as Trump continues: “It was all made possible by
the courage of 56 patriots who gathered in Philadelphia 244 years ago
and signed the Declaration of Independence.” These men, Trump says,
“enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said:
‘… all men are created equal.’ These immortal words set in motion the
unstoppable march of freedom.” Finally, in a conclusion that we would
far more commonly associate with versions of American exceptionalism
expressed in the inaugural addresses of John F. Kennedy and Barack
Obama, rather than that of Trump, he (in his Inaugural and in gen-
eral) emphasizes strength and power, and surely not reason: “Seventeen
seventy-six represented the culmination of thousands of years of western
civilization and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philoso-
phy, and reason.” So far, so “normal” as regards American pride.
In a remarkable pivot, though, these remarks become profoundly
Trumpian and divisive in the very next paragraph: “And yet, as we meet
here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our
ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure.” What is this
“growing danger” according to the 45th POTUS? “Left-wing fascism”
and “Cancel Culture.” What does he mean by this? He has in mind “a
merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase
our values, and indoctrinate our children,” one in which “[a]ngry mobs
are trying to tear down statues of our Founders, deface our most sacred
memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of
these people have no idea why they are doing this, but some know ex-
actly what they are doing.” The precise contours of “what they are do-
ing” is left hanging in the air as the president continues his remarks in
a direction where I will not ask you to follow for the sake of the present
argument, but the implication is clear: the tearing down of statues is
tantamount to “wiping out our history” and “erasing our values.” As
such, their aim—as some know and others do not, according to Presi-
dent Trump—is quite simply to destroy America.
2 The Movement for Black Lives as Iconoclasm
So much for the meaning and the message of the street protests of
summer 2020, as seen from the unique gloss on American exceptionalism
given by a president who addresses “American people” who are “strong
48 Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism
and proud, and they will not allow our country, and all of its values,
history, and culture, to be taken from them.” Time prevents a robust en-
gagement with the self-description and self-understanding of those who
remove controversial memorials, most notably with the Robert E. Lee
and Stonewall Jackson memorials in Charlottesville, Virginia, which
provided the pretext for the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017, and
made “Charlottesville” a metonym for the political violence and racial
terror associated with the “alt-right,” Trumpism, and White nationalism
in the U.S. today (Howard-Woods, Laidley, and Omidi). Nor can we
seriously engage with what undergirds the attempt to rewrite the his-
toriography of the American experiment that intersects with the legal,
political, and direct action attempts to take down the statues that physi-
cally and publicly present one or another historiography, especially that
found in the epochal and controversial 1619 Project, initiated by Nikole
Hannah-Jones for The New York Times. 1619 has proven so influential and
debatable because it seeks, in essence, to replace July of 1776 with August
of 1619 as the sine qua non of the American experiment. As Jake Sil-
verstein writes in (re-)introducing the Times project, it was at this date
that “a ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia,
bearing a cargo of 20 to 30 enslaved Africans”; while this “is sometimes
referred to as the country’s original sin,” he continues, “it is more than
that: It is the country’s very origin.”
We can, however, follow the observation of Phillip Morris that the
question of “How should history be taught?” brings with it “an explosive
calculus” insofar as “using contemporary values to judge the moral fail-
ings and atrocities of ancestors and to reevaluate the lives and legacies
of canonized leaders” can involve the “moral deconstruction of the past
to understand and improve the present.” At the bottom, perhaps, the
assertion behind both forms of critical reconstruction—statue removal
and retelling history in narrative form—is the belief that, again quot-
ing Morris, the “removal of monuments and symbols to a racist past is
an important step to a more just future.” It is precisely this conviction
that informs the response to Trump’s view of American exceptionalism
Biden aimed to provide in his speech at Gettysburg in October 2020, to
which we turn now.
3 Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and the Inescapable Reckoning
to Come
Like Trump’s speech at the foot of Mount Rushmore, with the
stone-carved image of Abraham Lincoln literally hovering over him
and looking over his shoulder, Biden’s speech and its location of delivery
are an express attempt to identify with “the best of American history”
while also insisting that the nation’s history is distinctly not unambigu-
ously exceptional in the moral sense. Biden uses an earlier (Democratic)
president’s own appropriation of Lincoln to do so: “A hundred years
Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 49 Michael Weinman
after Lincoln spoke here at Gettysburg then Vice President Lyndon B.
Johnson also came here and said: ‘Our nation found its soul in honor
on these fields of Gettysburg … We must not lose that soul in dishonor
now on the fields of hate.’” Hate, in particular, Biden is saying is also
part of the “American legacy.” For this reason, in order for “America to
be America again” (as Biden puts it, reminding his audience of the title
of a famous Langston Hughes poem), Americans cannot merely and
passively not engage in hate. Rather, Biden insists, they must fight in-
equality actively: “From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, we’re at our
best when the promise of America is available to all. We cannot and will
not allow violence in the streets to threaten the people of this nation. We
cannot and will not walk away from our obligation to, at long last, face
the reckoning on race and racial justice in the country.”
With his three metonyms, Biden identifies the struggle for equality
for women, for Blacks, and for LGBTQIA+ communities with Lin-
coln’s own words at Gettysburg: “We cannot, and will not, allow ex-
tremists and white supremacists to overturn the America of Lincoln and
Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, to overturn the America that
has welcomed immigrants from distant shores, to overturn the America
that has been a haven and a home for everyone, no matter their back-
ground.” This passage strikingly places Lincoln, Tubman, and Douglass
on one side of the historical ledger, with the Confederate rebels against
Lincoln’s Union and defenders of slavery as an institution, alongside
those who would publicly commemorate them today, clearly excluded
from what Biden considers America at its best. This comes across as
one attempt to rewrite history where at least Lincoln, often hailed or
interpolated as the (second?) greatest president, can be held onto as some
kind of hero, even as the standard narrative is, if not subverted, at least
profoundly challenged.
As a conscious response and rebuke to President Trump’s Inde-
pendence Day remarks, and especially given its delivery on the “sacred
ground” of a battlefield that has become a metonym of the Civil War,
Biden’s speech makes one thing very clear. Namely, the destruction of
public memorials to figures important for both the formation of the
United States of America as a sovereign state and the propagation of
chattel slavery and the extermination of the Indigenous peoples of
North America is a crucial feature of a larger, ongoing debate about
what self-image Americans have and ought to have about themselves
and their regime. As Aaron Tugendhaft notes, “[t]he images the people
serve are intimately connected to the political regime under which they
live: to ‘serve images’ (the literal meaning of the Greek idol-latria, idol-
atry) is to serve the sovereign who rules through them” (12; emphasis in
original). Thus, within the horizon of the Abrahamic faiths, and begin-
ning with the example of Abraham / Ibrahim himself, the destruction
of graven images of false gods holds permanent status as a fundamen-
tal trope of political prophecy and activism: bringing about the better,
50 Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51Twilight of the American Idols? Statue Politics between the Movement for Black Lives and Trumpism
truer people through the destruction of a false sovereignty and its false
religion at the same time.
The relevance of this understanding of iconoclasm as a response to
idolatry for the chiasm of statue politics and American exceptionalism
(along one axis) and civil religion and politicized Christianity (along
the other axis) in the contemporary febrile climate of culture and poli-
tics in the United States could not be clearer. The stakes are very high
for the protestors and activists who wish to remove memorials, some
of which commemorate segregationists, committed racists, and slave-
holders while others commemorate “American heroes” whose ties to
White supremacy and racial terror are far more ambiguous. They are no
less pronounced for those who mobilize against their mobilization. For
both groups, and for all Americans, there is no avoiding all four points
of this entanglement. Insofar as public polling consistently suggests
that strong majorities of American society seem to have a favorable
view of both Black Lives Matter and the standard narrative of American
exceptionalism, it appears that a deeply polarizing debate about the
removal of memorials of all kinds is not going to end any time soon,
and certainly not simply on the basis of replacing President Trump with
President Biden.
Works Cited
Biden, Joe. “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.”
C-SPAN. 6 Oct. 2020. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://joebiden.com/2020/10/06/
remarks-by-vice-president-joe-biden-in-gettysburg-pennsylvania/.
Howard-Woods, Chris, Colin Laidley, and Maryam Omidi, eds. Charlottesville:
White Supremacy, Populism, and Resistance. New York: OR, 2019. Print.
Hughes, Langston. “Let America Be America Again.” 1935. The Collected Poems
of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. 189-91. Print.
Johnson, Lyndon B. “Memorial Day Remarks, Gettysburg, PA, May 30, 1963.”
The Gettysburg Foundation. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.gettysburg
foundation.org/gettysburg-revisited/inclusivity.
Morris, Phillip. “As Monuments Fall, How Does the World Reckon with a Rac-
ist Past?” National Geographic. nationalgeographic.com, 29 June 2020.
Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/
confederate-monuments-fall-question-how-rewrite-history/.
“1619 Project.” New York Times. New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019. Web. 13 Nov.
2020. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-
america-slavery.html.
Silverstein, Jake. “Why We Published the 1619 Project.” New York Times. New
York Times, 20 Dec. 2019. Web. 13 Nov. 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/
interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.
Trump, Donald J. “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount
Rushmore Fireworks Celebration.” The White House. The White House, 4
July 2020. Web. 13 Nov. 2020.
Tugendhaft, Aaron. The Idols of ISIS: From Assyria to the Internet. Chicago, IL: U
of Chicago P, 2020. Print.
Amst 66.1 (2021): 47-51 51You can also read
