No End Save Victory

Against the Nationalists

The Avenue in the Rain, 1917, Childe Hassam

Human history is the history of ideas. It’s what animates us. It’s what drives us. We see our highest hopes and dreams in the abstract aspirations that we aim our creative energies towards.

What the United States is—what it has always been—has been an idea of man seen equally. There is nothing about America that is rooted in traditions bound to soil.

Home and hearth mean nothing to the framework of America. We are a Nation bound by a common belief in a march ever forward towards fulfilling the great promise of our founding documents.

We have seen periods of retreat before.

Alexander Hamilton and John Jay failed when they created the New York Manumission Society.

Ulysses S. Grant was followed by Rutherford B. Hayes.

Woodrow Wilson slammed shut the door of the Federal Government to Black men.

Yet Abraham Lincoln beat the Confederacy.

Reinhold Niebuhr, the NAACP, the ADL, the FBI, and Superman beat the Klan.

JFK, LBJ, MLK, and the 101st ensured the end of segregation.

Every long stretch of American history where the most base impulses have won out was nothing more than a temporary delay in the march forward of the promise of America, the Idea.

No nativism, no demagoguery, nor any appeal to our instinct to pull the ladder up behind us can ever remove the concept of an idea unfulfilled. We take risks and fight to see change in the world to see our dreams realized.

We want to see the world left better than when we entered it. We want a crusade against the injustices that we encounter around us. We want a struggle. We don’t all get to live to see that dream fulfilled, but we keep the fire alive in others to follow after us.

Even in the bleakest moments, when it seemed like the United States had given up on our mission as a Nation, people have fought relentlessly to attain the promises that were made to them in our Declaration. 200,000 Black men fought in the Civil War. Hundreds were killed by the Klan. Freedom Riders died in the South.

Decades—at times—passed without America moving closer to fulfilling her promises.

Yet, every time, we struggled. We will this time too.

Reaction, Nihilism, and appeals to the mob can never create meaning in the way that an idea of a truly free and equal people can. Corruption and the dispensation of pain against some imagined enemy cannot provide any sort of movement that lasts.

The notion of America as just some blood and soil nation is as much an abstract an ideal as our highest version of ourselves. But it promises nothing higher. It is rhetoric absent an ideological passion to see ourselves as an exception in the world. It is nothing more than a recurring abasement of what so many before us have fought fought.

It does not uplift us. It does not create good people in a community seeking out how to create a world worth living in. It is nothing more than a craven attempt to give up on being who we’re supposed to be.

It is a betrayal of our foundation as a Shining City Upon a Hill.

But we as human beings demand heroes. We need a cause worth believing in. We know, truly know at our core, that we can move the course of history towards a better path. We demand to be seen as equal citizens in a community of equals.

It is the great promise of a Republic. That we are known—regardless of who we are—as a citizen like any other. By nothing other than our collective faith in our shared project.

Americans—true Americans—have never accepted such a base notion of our country as being exclusive to descendants of some arbitrary date plucked from history. We are Americans here and now. It is on us to recognize and create the Nation that we ought to have.

It is a question of who we are—in our core—of how we wish to be. We know when the conditions in which we live are not congruent with who we should be. We always have. We’ve fought against laws and politicians who have told us otherwise.

Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman. Sadao Munemori. James Baldwin. Harvey Milk. They all fought to see the United States as it should be. They all believed in the soul of America.

If others have done so before us, we will do so again. There is no end save victory.