At the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance gave a speech that can only be described as a glaring example of Orwellian Doublethink that left its audience reeling:
If you recall George Orwell’s 1984, Doublethink meant:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself…” (Orwell, 1984)
Indeed, Orwell’s novel provides a primer for many of the actions and propaganda now emanating from Washington D.C. The following terms, all taken from 1984, eerily invoke our present danger:
“Memory hole: a small chute leading to a large incinerator. Anything that needed to be wiped from the public record (embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts) would be sent into the memory hole. As a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith often has to throw things into the memory hole to revise history and keep current with the ever-evolving Party dogma.
“Newspeak: a purposefully ambiguous and confusing language with restricted grammar and limited vocabulary used in Oceania, according or Orwell, “to diminish the range of thought.”
“Thinkpol: a Newspeak word to describe the secret police of Oceania, who are responsible for the detection, prosecution, and elimination of unspoken beliefs and doubts that contradict the Party. They use audio-visual surveillance via the telescreens and offender profiling to monitor the populace.
“Unperson: someone whose existence has been excised from the public and private memory in Oceania.”[1]
Back to the Munich Security Conference and our audience of stunned Europeans watching the postwar world order – with its strengths and failures – crumble before their eyes. I don’t know enough about the history and politics of the Security Conference (an annual event since 1963) or its current attendees to comment on these. Probably my own politics would not find a simple home there. However, the point here has to do with the death knell of Europe’s faith in transatlantic alliances and support, strained during Trump’s first regime and unlikely to recover from the second regime, with Ukraine the first major casualty.
As for Americans growing up in the postwar period, we have long taken for granted that what we say to Europe is for the most part ‘good,’ ‘morally justified,’ and in the service of democracy. I know this because I am one of them. I still walk the beaches of Normandy with a sense of pride. Of course, this narrative was always suspect, as our bloody record of foreign policy and interference shows (we have only to read Chomsky and others). Yet the narrative held aspirational truths within it, even during the worst of the Cold War years. Elevating our hopes for a more peaceful world, here was a story that Americans believed in and so did many Europeans.
So, two days after Vance’s speech, when Conference chairman and German diplomat Christoph Heusgen gave his closing remarks, I cried along with him. For the end of the story. The end of naïve dreaming. With more than half my lifetime now spent this side of the Atlantic, I felt the full weight of old-world sadness and disappointment before yet another round of new-world swagger and condescension. Heusgen, like me, seemed to be living a moment of personal grief about it all. In his youth, he had been a high school exchange student in Ohio. Later, he studied at Georgia Southern University. My strong guess is that here was a man who held genuine knowledge and love of the U.S. and now, his heart had been broken.
Into my mind came the old trope, a baby boomer’s schoolbook memory of American confidence, how we viewed ourselves (and believed others viewed us too) in that postwar period (1945-73), the years that Fredric Jameson once referred to as the “brief American century… the stability and prosperity of a pax Americana…”[2] It was during those years that I first recall hearing my nation described as a “city on a hill.” It was how we were taught to view ourselves during that period, and how we grew up believing others must surely view us too. So I remembered – in general terms – where the phrase came from, but I looked it up again.
Enter Perry Miller.
“It was in Africa, while unloading barrels of American oil, that he [historian Perry Miller] claims to have had an epiphany. Thinking of the famous historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Miller explained that he, like Gibbon, found his purpose far from home: ‘It was given to me, equally disconsolate on the edge of a jungle of central Africa, to have thrust upon me the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States.’ To that cause he would dedicate his mind, his career, his classroom, his pen, and his public speaking. He spent the rest of his life trying to find out and convince fellow Americans what America really means.”[3]
In City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Abram Van Engen has given us a comprehensive history of the origins myth that has animated U.S. cultural and political history since Perry Miller’s detailed study of the Puritans, and more specifically, of a single, largely forgotten text. In 1630 (year of the founding of Boston), John Winthrop gave a lay sermon aboard the Arabella titled A Model of Christian Charity. It was in that sermon that the now iconic line appeared: “we shall be as a city upon a hill.”
“Before Miller began his career, no politician had turned to “A Model of Christian Charity” as the origin of America or sought national office by quoting, citing, or invoking it. Hardly anyone knew this sermon existed, and no one described the nation as a “city on a hill.”[4]
In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan began to marry the line to his political fortunes:
“Tracing the story of America from John Winthrop forward, Reagan built a powerful articulation of American exceptionalism—the idea, as he explained, “that there was some divine plan that placed this great continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom and a special kind of courage.”
Van Engen goes on to remind us that in 2012, this myth of origins and historical ‘purpose’, this belief in American exceptionalism, now deep in the American psyche and summarized by the phrase “shining city on a hill” (Reagan had added the word shining), became part of the official platform of the Republican party. Indeed, after Perry Miller’s scholarly attention to the text, nearly every president (of both parties) to hold office – before and after Reagan – would invoke the key line. It appeared in speeches by John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Miller’s study gave the text a cultural life beyond Washington D.C. Finding its way into countless writings and speeches, school textbooks and literature anthologies, the myth endured numerous iterations, taking it far from Winthrop’s original meaning which had more to do with Protestantism and intellectual life than a socially constructed and anticipatory vision of American exceptionalism.[5]
Back (for a moment) to Perry Miller the person, the historian who (it can fairly be said) lit the flame that spread the fire. Miller, I do believe, would be furious. Had he not drunk himself to death one month after the Kennedy assassination, he would surely now be drinking heavily again. Miller, the self-identified “goddamned atheist” and liberal historian who turned Winthrop’s sermon into “the key text of American origins” did not live long enough to see it appropriated by the Republican Party to become a celebration of corporate capitalism, Christian nationalism, and U.S. imperialism and power.[6]
Yet, it might be said that Miller saw the fate of his work almost before the ink on it had dried:
“…the content of Winthrop’s sermon—what Miller thought Winthrop was actually saying or proposing as a model—differed radically from what Reagan and others would make of it. According to Miller, this sermon called on Puritans to model radical communal solidarity. It had nothing to do with the American Dream, nothing to do with bettering one’s life, nothing at all to do with making money or getting ahead.[7]
And again, almost before the ink had dried, Miller feared for the fate of the nation, for its loss of just and moral purpose:
“The success of the United States, its sudden wealth and power, would soon prove the nation’s undoing. According to Miller, this paradigm had been repeated in a host of societies scattered through the leaves of history. The downfall of the Roman Empire, which Miller explicitly compared to America, also came about through dissolutions wrought by its own success. For Miller, history was fundamentally ironic.”[8]
Two years before his death, Miller warned of the decline of the American project and the failure of the origins myth he himself had helped create, noting that “[h]istory is littered with the corpses of civilization that reached the limit of expansion, dug in behind walls and moats, and there yielded to decay.”[9]
Van Engen treats Miller’s work for its eccentric (if backfiring) brilliance in “making Winthrop’s sermon the cornerstone of American culture,” but he also underscores its most serious flaws and omissions. Miller failed to include indigenous and black voices in our history. The postwar historian’s intense focus on the Puritans would prove a blind spot to other histories, and other historians, writers, and cultural commentators. The works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and so many others found no home in Miller’s work. The Civil Rights movement was only a few years away. Even if Miller himself had not felt his project to be a failure already, these omissions would later haunt it: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” Du Bois prophesied in 1903. Yet the problem of the color-line appears nowhere in all the mighty works of Perry Miller.”[10]
Van Engen further notes that the privileging of Puritan history had a geographical consequence. It located our myth of origins in New England, thereby facilitating the exclusion of other groups, histories, locations, and cultures:
“A strength of Van Engen’s argument is the realization that the question needs to be amended, because so many people for so long have been saying that New England is the origin of the “American mind” that, at a certain point, the myth transforms into reality. As he argues, ‘Puritan origins did not invent the myth of America. Americans, much later, invented the myth of Puritan origins.’”[11]
And so, to this moment, this latest round of self-invention by our nation that loves to invent itself. When Ed Simon reviewed Van Engen’s book in 2023, one Trump presidency was behind us, one threatened from the wings. Simon remarks that the only recent presidential politician who seems never to have referenced Winthrop’s sermon has been Trump, “who rejected the idea of America as a beacon unto the world in favor of an “America First” ideology that reduced international relations to a Hobbesian contest.”[12]
We cannot know whether Trump or the architects of Project 2025 will appropriate Winthrop’s line in yet another exercise in extremist Orwellian Doublethink. If they do, it will only add sadness to the layers of sadness that have attended the origins myth throughout the years. For it was only ever good as a dream. Something to reach for. An imagined national hope and aspiration rather than something true, real, or fully attainable. What innocence and arrogance it gave us! And it has left us singularly ill-equipped for self-criticism, and strangely unable to see the imminent danger to the nation. As for me, I have rarely felt more European than when I saw Mr. Heusgen cry.
[1] The applicability of the terms to our present situation should be immediately apparent. (With thanks to the George Mason University, Center for the Arts for providing this short glossary prior to their 2019 theatrical production of 1984. One can only wonder whether such a production might soon be impossible. Orwell’s novel has long featured on the list of books most banned in the U.S. and it remains so in 1925. Here is the link to the glossary - use it while you can as it may disappear down a ‘memory hole’ at any time: 1984 Terms. )
[2] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (1991).
[3] Abram Van Engen, Humanities, Winter 2020, Volume 41, Number 1. (See How America Became ‘A City Upon a Hill’: The Rise and Fall of Perry Miller) Van Engen’s book, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism was published by Yale University Press in 2020.
[4] Ibid.
[5] See Van Engen’s work, and a helpful review of his book by Ed Simon, “When Perry Miller Invented America,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 5, 2023.
[6] “When Miller died, his obituary in the Harvard Crimson compared him to Melville’s mad Captain Ahab: ‘Those brawling sentences, the brooding manner, the great, obscene chuckles whose delight it was impossible not to share, all were touched with something superhuman, something demonic. He lived intensely, self-destructively even.’” For more on Miller’s life, relations with his students, and sad death, see Abram Van Engen, Humanities, Winter 2020, Volume 41, Number 1.
[7] Van Engen, Humanities, Winter 2020, Volume 41, Number 1.
[8] Ibid. “He [Miller] brought John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” before the public and turned it into the key text of American origins. Miller pronounced it the first articulate statement of community, a sermon expounding the idea that America would be dedicated to the life of the mind. He read in Winthrop’s text a monumental testimony against the basic premises of the American Dream. The irony of history—one that Miller might well have appreciated—is that in promoting Winthrop’s sermon, he caused it to become the key statement of all that he most feared and lamented.
[9] Perry Miller, The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines, 1961 (cited in Ed Simon, “When Perry Miller Invented America” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 5, 2023).
[10] Van Engen, Humanities, Winter 2020, Volume 41, Number 1.
[11] Ed Simon, “When Perry Miller Invented America,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 5, 2023.
[12] Ibid.
An epic piece of work here Amy. Lots to think about and brilliantly written as usual.