The Drift on America
Too much birthday
“We must be doing something right to last two hundred years,” a country singer croons in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) on the occasion of the United States’s then-upcoming bicentennial. Fifty years later, this logic is more questionable than ever. The most potent political slogan of this century takes the evanescence of American greatness for granted, while the malfeasance of MAGA’s standard-bearer augurs, for some observers, an “American century of humiliation” akin to that suffered by late-Qing China. Meanwhile, in the wake of the 1619 Project, it can no longer be taken for granted that the signing of the Declaration of Independence is even the right place to mark the start of American history.
This country’s “250th birthday” on Saturday, then, is an occasion for critical reflection as well as celebratory barbecuing. In between hot dogs, you can ponder the paradoxes of American national identity with some of our favorite Dispatches, essays, stories, and poems from the Drift archive.
From our Issue Fifteen Dispatches on the Trump administration, Rhiannon Hamam and Elisa Gonzalez examine, respectively, the First and Fourteenth Amendments and ongoing conflicts over their legacy.
From Issue Six, Nick Martin considers the limitations of decolonial efforts to rewrite the narrative of early American history.
From Issue Two, Joel Rhone criticizes the “cruel optimism about what a rightfully realized idea of America could be” displayed in the 1619 Project and other works of liberal, anti-racist historical revisionism.
From Issue Seven, Chanelle Adams challenges the mythology of the national parks system as “one of America’s greatest ideas,” in the words of president-turned-documentarian Barack Obama.
Speaking of presidents and movies, from Issue Two, Rebecca Panovka reviews perhaps the most dubious source of popular understandings of U.S. political history: “schlocky president movies.”
Also from Issue Two, Sasha Debevec-McKenney’s poem stages a visit to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
From Issue Six, Nick Bowlin warns against the caricatured view of “rural America” that leads some Democrats to engage in futile cowboy cosplay.
From Issue Seven, Alec Niedenthal’s short story chronicles one Florida retiree’s romance with a certain “patriotic hat.”
From Issue Three, Daniel Bessner reveals the fatalistic view of America’s role in the world — what he calls “imperialist realism” — baked into the Call of Duty franchise, whose latest installment will appear this fall.
Lastly, from Issue Fourteen, our editors take Kamala Harris’s infamous slogan “Country Over Party” literally, urging us to attend, in the aftermath of Trump’s second election, to the dissolution of America’s “imagined community.”
Help The Drift avoid its own century of humiliation — purchase your favorite back issue to read by the rocket’s red glare.
