It is difficult, especially in these days and times, to believe that America is essentially a kind of Utopia. But it is.
“Utopia”, of course, is from Utopia by Thomas More.
The full title of the work is: Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia. A little, true book, not less beneficial than enjoyable, about how things should be in a state and about the new island Utopia.
The Greek word “utopia” has the prefix “ou”, which means “not”, and topos: “place”, ending with the suffix -iā. That means “not place” or “no place”.
In other words, Utopia is nowhere; a place that does not exist. America as Utopia does not exist either, but that has not stopped Americans from trying to find it. To be an American is partly to be a utopian.
The USA, created by many peoples and individuals, has at its root the kind of Protestantism that is utopian and also individualistic. It is a belief convinced of its own innate goodness and truth. A solitary belief, if necessary.
It is this innate belief that Ronald Reagan was talking about when he said that the goal of America was to be “The shining city on the hill”.
That America had progressed towards that goal in no small part by enslaving African peoples and the routing of Indigenous people from their land was beside the point. The point was to believe in that shining city and to take steps to reach it.
Expressions like “Black Lives Matter” are intrinsically utopian: the belief that the “shining city on the hill” of racial equality is out there, just over the horizon: to be achieved.
Both the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump share the same utopian qualities of vision and reward.
And like twins: “Yes We Can” and “Make America Great Again”, those presidencies existed within the same arc of time: an exhaustion of the American Dream.
There are plenty on both sides of the American political divide who believe that the defeat of these two visions was because of the Deep State. The Hidden.
American colonisers held the belief that Indigenous people were ruled by some “super chief”, someone hidden in the background guiding operations; making the plans.
Conservatives in the 1960s began to believe that the civil rights movement, feminism and the anti-war movement were the product of the machinations of the remaining communists that they did not manage to get to and lock up in the 1950s through the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Despite being routed, the theory went, the commies were still secretly in charge via the Deep State.
You can hear echoes of this today when Liz Truss and The Daily Mail explain that despite 12 years of Conservative rule, the Deep State is still controlling Britain and choking the potential of Brexit.
The American left believes in the Deep State too. Three Days of the Condor has its best scene at the end of the movie, when Robert Redford is escaping a CIA-hired assassin through the streets of Manhattan, convinced that the government is out to get him, his face a map of shifting glances as he examines every person who passes him by.
In The Godfather, when someone suggests that the government does not have anyone killed, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone tells her in ironic tones that she is naive.
The Watergate cover-up was Deep State for real. And the federal government did run an illegal surveillance operation supervised by the FBI. It was called COINTELPRO — CounterIntelligence Program — and existed from about 1956 to 1971. Its aim was to nail the alleged communist influence in the civil rights movement.
Today, the Trumpian right believes that same FBI is a tool of a left-controlled Deep State that is behind the raid on Mar-a-Lago.
They have their own media telling them that the Deep State is real — including radio host Alex Jones, able to make millions peddling the lie that the massacre of teachers and children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 actually never happened. That this tragedy was actually a fantasy created by the Deep State.
Now he will have to pay £40 million (A$68.7 million) to Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of one of the children killed at Sandy Hook, after a court defeat that his supporters will no doubt blame on the Deep State.
The Deep Staters have their ring master in Donald J Trump, barker for his own lethal carnival. He has weaponised the idea of the Deep State with much more effectiveness than even senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s.
The FBI’s execution of a warrant recently to search his estate in Florida for classified material, taken there without clearance from the National Archives, allows him to extend the idea of Deep State among what can only be called his cult.
Many of those cultists are not utopians but millenarians. They believe that America is heading towards a final battle, an apocalyptic event that will finally deliver the promise of the shining city on the hill.
And that meanwhile it is the Deep State, ultimately the work of Satan, that is preventing the call and the battle.
The Deep State has been reality in the form of COINTELPRO and it is also the nation’s dream state. It is subtext and uber-text and if you cannot grasp this, even a little, you cannot grasp something intrinsic to America.
TS Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, published 100 years ago this year, a question that still applies:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish?”
When reading these lines, I hear after the poet’s question: “In the land of the Free. And the Home of the Brave.”
Hate to break it to you, but Trump is too ignorant, self-centered and psychologically damaged to be the “ringmaster” of anything other than his breakfast order from McDonald’s.
He is more like the elephant that can stand on its hind legs, or the monkey that can ride a tiny bicycle.
The ringmasters are the cleverer and (even) more sinister people who circle him like vultures around a dying zebra. The Bannons, Flynns, and others whom we don’t even know about yet.
Ah, but he seems to know how to gather great unwashed around him, . . . Have you read comments in murdoch papers et al? they are negative, hateful, dividing, and it is beyond comprehension how misinformed the commeters are .
Trumps and others (and would-be Morrison) trade on this stuff. Divide and rule, while having your ego stroked!
Mike Anger,
Trump is somewhere in between (except for the blatantly self-centered aspect). Occasionally the mask slips in a genuine candid moment. Look for the CNN footage of when they let Trump know, straight after a rally, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. That was one moment where I realised just how much of his public face of ignorance is just an act. There is something very sinister (in aspects at least) to how he has manipulated America in recent years.
Governments of any ilk or your chosen ‘elite’ or whatever privileged group you blame for your lack of progress or wealth in life have no need of Deep State apparatus to keep you down. The things that create, foster & perpetuate disadvantage are all there in plain sight within the ‘shallow’ State. It is the willing ignorance of working & lower class conservatives that keep the status quo for those who are powerful. That’s the ironic tragedy of it all. Many of those who follow these strange ideologies will always vote, or abstain from voting, against their own interests if it means someone they hate more will be more disadvantaged. When a billionaire, New York property developer can somehow convince a large part of the electorate that he can save them from the ‘elite’ you know the fraud is complete.
The unskilled & semi skilled lumpen largely voted for Mrs Thatcher – artisans knew better but they all lost.
The lower middle class tend to be big supporters of authoritarians if only to protect them from their imagined fear of being overwhelmed by a even lower class they escaped.
It is highly unlikely that Alex Jones will pay anything near $40 million. This vermin has already declared bankruptcy, and will – like many American wealthy – perform convoluted accountancy tricks to stay in business. I hope I’m wrong.
It would only be due to a quirk of Texas law………….
…….but he still faces trial on the same charges in numerous other jurisdictions which do not have the same restriction.
…………..so multiply $40 million by about twenty for the potential final figure.
The universality of American delusion about its greatness and virtue is the dominant cult there.
Yes, ‘God bless America’ is their religion. It’s a truly pathological society, with the same degree of self-awareness as the playground bully, who has no logical reason for standing on the toes of kids younger than himself and tipping their lunch into the dirt, apart from the fact that he can and it makes him feel big. By it’s own definition, the USA is both a failed state (can’t even keep its own kids alive) and a rogue state. By their own logic, we should invade it forthwith and bomb it into the stone age, as they have done countless times.
Excellent food for thought but could have joined the dots a little more. Scholars of Moore’s Utopia note precisely it was not a place in reality or one to be reached across time. Rather it served as a point of comparison, against which the real could be (morally) examined and judged. Others also created literary utopias for the same purposes.
Later comes the idea that Utopia is something to be achieved, a destination, marrying with notions of making God’s vision happen on earth. Not surprising, since Moore also lived within that Christianity formed ontology, so what he produced was easily transformed in this direction.
Twentieth century historians of ideas note (at least) two things about Utopia and utopians.
Firstly, if Utopia existed it would be unchanging and totally ordered and thus for most unbearable. Certainly the opposite of the flux, change and uncertainty of modern capitalism. Which might also give it appeal to some of course. What Trumper, whose job and world have gone south in their lifetime, might not yearn for order, stasis and security (freedom from financial and psychological insecurity, a Brave New World).
Second, those of a utopian mindset have the certainty that they are correct, that their Utopia is the beautiful future and destiny. That all that is not the Utopia can be damned. Against this abstraction real lives become abstractions and violence is justified by the utopian ends. Here the right and left utopians meet in totalitarian nightmares.
America has strong Utopian themes in its national imaginary, as the author points out. The times seem to particularly suit their appeal and Trump is astute at tapping into them. Utopia is just a step away from dystopia as soon as it taken as something to actually be built. Utopians of this kind, in their passion and their certainty, are very dangerous.