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Introduction
Nowadays, it became a common practice, on the part of America’s top-ranking politicians/governmental officials, to praise the US because of this country’s sociocultural “uniqueness” – particularly concerning the ordinary citizens’ presumed ability to exert a powerful influence on the national body politic. Such a claim, however, does not hold much water. The reason for this is apparent – even a brief examination of America’s history will reveal that, just as it is the case in any other country, the essence of the interrelationship between the individual and the government in the US has never ceased being strongly reflective of the main provisions of the class-struggle (Marxism) theory, on one hand, and the intrinsic qualities of the ruling elites’ (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/WASP) psycho type, on the other. In its turn, this implies that despite having undergone some cosmetic alterations, this interrelationship continues to remain essentially the same as it used to be in the late 19th century. In my paper, I will explore the validity of this suggestion at length.
Body
It is a well-known fact that the US takes pride in being considered a “nation of immigrants”. In its turn, this implies that regardless of what happened to be the specifics of a particular citizen’s ethnocultural/religious affiliation, he or she has the same right as everybody else to contribute to the discourse Americana. This, however, is far from being the case because, despite the enactment of the “multiculturalism” policy in the US during the late seventies, the concerned discourse even today has a strong Eurocentric (specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) quality to it. Its main feature is concerned with the Protestant assumption that the richer is the person, the more he or she is favored by God – something that explains why the notion of the “American Dream” is often deemed synonymous with the notion of “material prosperity”. Among the discourse’s other notable characteristics can be mentioned its heavy embeddedness (even if informal) in male-chauvinism and the fact that its proponents often exhibit intolerance towards those who do not share their values.
In this respect, we can refer to what used to be the late 19th century’s realities of the newly arrived Irish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants trying to make the best of their lives in this country. First, these people were expected to conform to the Anglo-Saxon sociocultural conventions (or to be deported). Second, the concerned individuals often suffered from both the implicit and explicit forms of discrimination, with the so-called “Nativist Movement” (consisting of WASPs) in the US making it even harder for them to integrate into American society. Third, it represented a widespread practice among the country’s rich and powerful to exploit these immigrants most mercilessly while paying them “peanuts” for a hard day’s work at a factory/mill.[1] It is understood, of course, that such a state of affairs could hardly be considered compatible with the paradigm of democracy. And, to those who may claim that the above-mentioned no longer applies to contemporary America, I would l like to remind the Donald Trump’s official promises to criminalize all Muslims in this country.
The strongly defined patriarchal quality of the public discourse in America (deriving from Protestantism) helps to explain why it was not up to 1920 that American women were allowed to vote and the development’s technical aspects. After all, the male-chauvinistic society would never grant women voting power if this was to result in the legitimization of gender egalitarianism in the US. Therefore, the Suffragist Movement activists did not have any other choice but to evoke the “appeal to expediency” while arguing that American women must be permitted to cast ballots during the elections.
For citizens to be willing to cooperate with the government while striving to achieve self-actualization, they must perceive its agents as thoroughly competent. There, however, has always been a strong tradition of mistrust towards the Federal authorities among Americans. This tradition can be traced back to the stock market crash of 1929, which triggered the Great Depression – the development that for the first time in history exposed the sheer fallaciousness of the Keynesian idea that the functioning a free-market economy is self-sustainable, and caused many citizens to doubt the Feds’ ability to exercise effective governance. Therefore, there can be only a few doubts as to the full appropriateness of the New Deal policy’s enactment by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, which provided a powerful developmental boost to the economy’s infrastructural sector. [2] Unfortunately, the government did not learn much from the 1929 market crash. After all, both the Great Depression and the financial crisis of 2008 appear to have been caused by essentially the same – the government’s tolerance (and even endorsement) of the sense of irrational greed on people (which drives them to consider making money out of the thin air), supposedly reflective of their “entrepreneurial industriousness”.
During the Cold War, the government has been applying a continual effort into instigating the anti-Communist paranoia among Americans and suppressing people’s dissent with such a policy. The infamous legacy of McCarthyism (1950-1957) speaks volumes, in this regard. Back then, a person could be easily arrested by the FBI as a “Communist sympathizer” for having merely suggested that the USSR does not aspire for world domination – so much for “democracy”. Things have not changed very much since then – the ongoing Media-endorsed public hysteria about the omnipresent “Russian hackers” and the “general evilness” of Russians illustrates the validity of this suggestion. The arguments that it is possible to win a nuclear war with Russia, publicly voiced by many contemporary American politicians (such as Senator McCain), are just as mentally deranged as it used to be the case with the Cold War’s practice of exposing people to the Atomic Alert film and drilling children to Duck and Cover, as something that could effectively protect from the nuclear blast.
During the early sixties (when the USSR already had a man in space), WASPs in the South were still debating on whether African-Americans can be considered fully human or not. This, of course, naturally predetermined the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in America. The government, however, did just about everything it could to suppress it by arresting the Movement activists and even shooting at them point-blank (Kent State University Massacre). The government resorted to essentially the same practice while dealing with the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. The FBI simply “dismantled” it piece by piece with a number of this Movement’s affiliates having disappeared without a trace.
Nevertheless, it was named during the Vietnam War (1964-1975) that the people’s frustration with the government has reached its peak. Such a development was objectively predetermined. It was not only that Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision to send American troops to Vietnam to “fight Communism” did not make any geostrategic sense, but also throughout the War’s entirety the government never ceased making the worst possible tactical calls – something that cost the US 58,000 in casualties. [3] Just as disgraceful as proved to be the Vietnam War, is America’s present-day involvement in training and providing weapons to the “moderate opposition” in Syria, which consists of Islamic fundamentalists who take much delight in beheading children and posting the videos on YouTube for the whole world to see. It is needless to mention, of course, that the government’s contemporary stance on Syria hardly contributes to the strengthening of its links with ordinary citizens – particularly the members of the US military personnel, who fail to understand why it is now necessary for their country to be supporting Al-Qaeda.
The so-called Watergate scandal (1972—1974), which resulted in the impeachment of Richard Nixon, is yet another example of the fact that, despite the government’s formal commitment to acting by the law, the country’s high-ranking governmental officials are naturally tempted to indulge in corruption – provided, of course, that they have a good reason to believe that nobody will find out. It must be noted that the current situation with corruption in high offices is much worse, as compared to what used to be the case during the seventies. After all, Nixon’s crime did cost him the Presidency, and it was only by a stroke of blind luck that he did not end up in jail. Hillary Clinton, however, experienced nothing of this sort – even though she broke several Federal laws and the fact that the “Clinton Foundation” has been exposed as the instrument of money laundering on an unprecedented scale.
Conclusion
I believe that what has been said earlier correlates perfectly well with the paper’s initial thesis. There is indeed a good reason to think that there is nothing fundamentally different between what used to account for the government’s PR practices in the late 19th century and how its contemporary representatives go about serving the public. As the popular saying goes – “nothing is new under the Moon”.
References
Lecture 18, The Sixties & Vietnam.
Lecture 9, Industrialization, Immigration.
Lecture 14, The New Deal.
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