Johann N. Neem responds to the Epilogue in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
The Ongoing Conversation
At the heart of Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America is the premise that America has always been a conversation, a set of questions. Many of us have lost faith in the power of that conversation. Intellectual transformations associated with what Daniel Rodgers called the “age of fracture” emphasized America’s diversity, but lost sight of the need for a common national story.[1] In addition, Americans’ ideological and economic embrace of globalization hollowed out not just America’s manufacturing but also the ideas that sustained the nation. Indeed, one might argue that since the 1990s, ideas unmade America. Nonetheless, the era of neoliberal globalization may be coming to a close, along with intellectuals’ hopes of transcending the nation-state. In the years ahead, we will need ideas as much as ever to remake America.
Where has this conversation gone since her book was published in 2019—or even as it was being written? What happened to that Pragmatic spirit?
I don’t know that we—scholars, intellectuals, educators, activists—have the ideas on hand that can help remake our country. By picking up where Ratner-Rosenhagen ends and by drawing on her argument, my goal in this essay is to trace why we find ourselves without the ideas we need right now. For her part, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes Ideas That Made America with Richard Rorty’s revival of America’s Pragmatic tradition. Rorty considered Pragmatism a way of engaging the world to make it better, a philosophical tradition of hope that was nimble enough to avoid rigidity and dogmatism. In his book Achieving Our Country, Rorty criticized those intellectuals and activists who would reject America and its history or, worse, portray the nation as simply a catalog of horrors.[2] Instead, he wrote, ideas make us, and thus we must offer historical narratives that provide a usable past of how we—as a people—can imagine a newer, better future. Intellectuals should “not take the point of view of a detached spectator,” Rorty argued. Yes, “we should face up to unpleasant truths about ourselves, but we should not take those truths to be the last word about our chances for happiness, or about our national character.”[3] The past should not trap us; instead, we should choose to find in it a conversation about who we want to be to inspire us to reach our goals—to achieve our country.
As her book comes to a close, Ratner-Rosenhagen invokes Rorty’s spirit. Rorty urged public intellectuals to “remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of” by telling “inspiring stories.”[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen ends by asking us whether we can rebuild solidarity in a nation as fragmented as ours amidst the tensions of globalization. “Should the United States be American citizens’ primary allegiance, or in the era of globalization, should they aspire instead to be citizens of the world?,” she asks, but then quickly follows with, “If we cannot even get intergroup reciprocal loyalty in the United States, how can we possibly achieve it internationally?” Until we can find some answers to these questions Americans “will—and should—keep posing these questions and collaborating to find answers.” America is, after all, our ongoing conversation about what America is. She urges us to keep asking, keep talking, and keep generating new ideas “so the conversation of American thought continues” (179-80).
The Pragmatists’ Trap
Where has this conversation gone since her book was published in 2019—or even as it was being written? What happened to that Pragmatic spirit? Among public intellectuals and elected leaders, globalization won the argument. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the most influential Pragmatist ever, Barack Obama.[5] Obama, it turns out, demonstrates that the conversation was becoming rigid. He confused Pragmatism as a philosophy of ends with a philosophy of means, a way of adapting to the world instead of changing it.[6] He depicted those who questioned globalization as stuck in the past instead of changing pragmatically with the times. Get with it! There is no turning back the clock. “We have no choice but to move forward” to a more globalized future, Obama said in a speech reflecting on Donald Trump’s first election. No less a controversial figure than conservative thinker Steve Bannon recently noted that when he was at Harvard Business School, globalization was treated as “a natural property that could not be questioned.”[7]
By accepting the necessity to adapt to the world as it is rather than remake it for ourselves, Obama stumbled into the Pragmatist’s trap that Randolph Bourne recognized during World War I, a critique Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses in her book. Bourne was furious at John Dewey for supporting America’s entry into the war in the hope that the war would spur national revitalization. In his essay “Twilight of the Idols,” Bourne wrote of the “inadequacy of [Dewey’s] pragmatism as a philosophy of life in this emergency.” In a line that is equally applicable to Obama, Bourne wrote of Dewey, “it never occurred that values could be subordinated to technique.”
Pragmatism then as now can become, if not carefully reminded of higher purposes, an instrument to achieve existing ends shaped by those in power. Whether Bourne was right about Dewey is not the question. Bourne discovered a trap that Obama was unable to avoid. As Bourne concluded, “if your ideal is to be adjustment to your situation, in radiant cooperation with reality, then your success is likely to be just that and no more.”[8] Pragmatism lost its own flexibility when it stopped distinguishing between the is and the ought.
In many ways, Obama’s dogmatic commitment to globalization reflects what Priya Satia has called “time’s monster”—the belief that if one is acting on behalf of history one can and must coerce others to come along.[9] Obama’s world order came tumbling down with Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. All Obama could see was reaction; he could discern no positive vision in Americans’ effort to revitalize nationalism. But, as Gary Gerstle has recently argued, Trump signifies the end of the neoliberal era. What Obama conflated with the innate logic of progress turned out to be historically specific conditions that served the interests of some over others.[10]
Globalization was the product of economic and policy choices supported by corporations and economists, not some natural process. It was about ideas—ideas to unmake rather than make the nation-state. Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 herald a post-neoliberal aspiration to reassert the centrality of the nation-state and national identity to politics. The pandemic proved Trump right as Americans struggled to gain basic things—such as masks—that depended on global supply chains. Maybe Americans took a wrong turn when they allowed their industrial base to be off-shored, and maybe this has significant economic, political, as well as national security implications. President Biden embraced Trump’s new order by supporting industrial policies to encourage onshoring and reinvesting in American manufacturing, scientific research and development, and, perhaps too late for the Democrats, the importance of national borders in immigration policy.
After Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is over, but what shall replace it? Ideas now need to be part of how we rebuild America. But recent intellectual history does not seem to offer the resources needed at this moment. Perhaps more than anything, progressives’ tendency to label the American past as primarily a white man’s republic and to center racism as the defining feature of the American story has prevented scholars and public intellectuals from finding a way to continue the conversation of America that Ratner-Rosenhagen tracks and that, at the end of her book, she encourages us to join. The best that we can do is to imagine a future that overcomes the burdens of American history. That, to me, is what interpretations such as the New York Times’ 1619 Project call for: liberation from a history that is reducible to America’s racist wrongs.[11] But it’s not enough.
Neoliberalism is over, but what shall replace it? Ideas now need to be part of how we rebuild America. But recent intellectual history does not seem to offer the resources needed at this moment.
To liberate ourselves from American history is to overturn the nation itself. It leads to a situation in which the histories we tell (or told) are relabeled histories only of white people (not of all Americans) and we end up reducing the past to a catalog of wrongs that they (not we) committed against others. Such a story cannot find room for the kind of Pragmatism Rorty advocated, nor can it support the ongoing conversation about ourselves that Ratner-Rosenhagen documents and urges us to carry forward. In recent years, we instead have witnessed a cottage industry of academic and popular intellectual work that assigns racialized labels to everything in the past and present. This mode of history, like globalization, rejects the nation-state as our common inheritance and makes it that much harder for the United States to realize its ideals and come to terms with its flaws.
By reframing US history so much around racialized categories, American scholars and public intellectuals have oddly reinforced rather than challenged the racialized borders that so many racists in the American past have themselves sought to uphold. As Rorty pointed out and Ratner-Rosenhagen discusses in her conclusion, the secret to imagined communities is that they allow shared stories to emerge. These stories enable a more diverse present in which people can see themselves and others in a complicated and flawed but shared past. If the past is divided up and parceled out to each of us by our race, the American story becomes a story only about and for white people. The rest of us—and I include myself, as a brown-skinned immigrant here—are written out of it because we’re not white.
From the right, a smaller but influential group of scholars have also concluded that there is little left to salvage from American culture. They blame the excesses of liberalism and progressivism. Like their progressive counterparts, they see no hope from within the American conversation and instead call for “a second American Revolution” or “regime change.” Vice-president-elect J. D. Vance will bring these ideas with him into office. [12]
Making and Remaking the Civic “We”
Our national conversation has reached a dead end, a conversation stopper. That is exactly the opposite of what I think Ratner-Rosenhagen is asking of us. In The Ideas that Made America, she argues that from the very first days of English settlement, people sought to respond to the experiences and circumstances of North America. Yes, some of those ways were racist, as people know now, and many knew then. But Ratner-Rosenhagen’s story is not limited by that recognition. Her story is instead about creative adaptation—a tradition of interpreting the experience of being in America. Throughout her book, we find thinkers expanding and reconfiguring the American idea by using the past, indeed respecting it, without deferring to it.
Americans—and those deemed outside the nation due to indigeneity, color, or immigrant status—all grappled with the idea of America, and in doing so they made America with their ideas. America became a nation that was not limited to Protestants and whites, but—and this is the crucial point—it did so by building on rather than rejecting its past. The story of America became the story of efforts to take a kernel of an idea and make it a reality for more people. This allowed diverse people to see themselves in the American past, and even to see their history in the history of (white) people who may not have imagined them or even welcomed them into the nation. We become Americans by identifying not with a race or ethnicity but by participating in the national conversation itself.
That flexibility, the capability of taking tradition and reinterpreting it without rejecting it, was the hallmark of the conversations that Ratner-Rosenhagen explores in her book. She ends with Rorty so that we might heed his words, but in recent years we have not done so. Globalizers proclaimed a future beyond nation-states, and politicians in the Pragmatist tradition, such as Obama, followed. In the era of neoliberalism, progressives rejected the conversation because America was too flawed; it was unfixable. They did not follow Rorty’s advice to offer solidarity and hope by engaging the American past as a resource rather than a burden. That has left the nation ripe for the most reactionary national ideas out there to seize the day.
Donald Trump filled the vacuum left by lost jobs and lost ideas. He appealed to Americans’ desire to be part of something larger and to have pride in their country. His nationalism also appealed to the worst impulses in human nature. These reactionary ideas are not the ones that made America, according to Ratner-Rosenhagen. Her story is much larger than that. We need to listen closely to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s call. America is a conversation, and for it to remain so, we must all participate constructively and creatively and with love. Ideas made America. Ideas also unmade America. It is time to see if we can articulate ideas to remake America.
As Melvin L. Rogers has recently written, invoking Frederick Douglass and echoing Richard Rorty, we must “see in America’s past a vital principle that is both visionary and realistic. [Douglass’s] intuition is that he can deploy the principle of making and remaking that underwrites the American polity…to reimagine who constitutes the civic ‘we’ of society.”[13] May we—scholars, public intellectuals, and activists, from diverse backgrounds—help make it so.
About the Author
Johann Neem is the author of What’s the Point of College? and Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America. He is a professor of history at Western Washington University.
Notes
[1] Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
[2] Rorty criticized how, for leftist intellectuals, “the two-hundred year history of the United States—indeed, the history of the European and American peoples since the Enlightenment—has been pervaded by hypocrisy and self-deception…Such people find pride in American citizenship impossible…They associate American patriotism with an endorsement of atrocities: the importation of African slaves, the slaughter of Native Americans, the rape of ancient forests, and the Vietnam War.” See Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 7.
[3] Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 106.
[4] Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 3.
[5] On the influence of pragmatism on Obama, see James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
[6] I explored this question in Johann N. Neem, “Obama Cannot Save Us from Ourselves,” USIH Blog, 27 July 2018.
[7] David Brooks, “My Unsettling Interview with Steve Bannon,” New York Times, 1 July 2024.
[8] Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 336, 343, 344.
[9] Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020).
[10] Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
[11] I discuss this question in Johann N. Neem, “A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation,” The Hedgehog Review 24, 2 (Summer 2022), 28-37.
[12] The first quotation is from historian Kevin Roberts, by way of David Kurtz, “Cold Civil War Remains the Best Analogy for America Today,” Talking Points Memo Morning Memo: The American Experiment Has Gone Off the Rails, 3 July 2024; the second refers to Patrick Deneen, Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (New York: Sentinel, 2023). See also Rod Dreher, The Benedictine Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel, 2018). On Vance, see Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups That Have Shaped J. D. Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, 18 July 2024. For a broader context, see Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
[13] Melvin L. Rogers, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), 5.