American Dream at a Turning Point

The nomination of U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court may be the most significant symbolic indicator of a shift in America’s political and cultural values since the flag-bedecked election of George Bush in 1988. Where the notion of “rags to Republicanism” would have been laughable only a few years ago, Thomas’ confirmation might enshrine it in the mainstream of U.S. social convention.

Initially, the Thomas nomination was exclusively framed in biographical terms: How could this man who grew up in extreme poverty and unleavened racism become such a bedrock conservative? Although subsequent reporting has focused on Thomas’ legal philosophy, his moving--and inspiring--personal history remains at the center of his quest for a court seat.

But biography, as philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey pointed out, is never just an individual’s life story. It is a reflection of the wider social and historical currents of its time.

Thomas is indeed representative of his era--or so Bush would have us believe. The President offered his nominee to the nation as a “a self-motivated and self-made success.” He and many conservatives argue that the massive social reconstructions that marked the ‘60s and early ‘70s are no longer necessary in today’s America: All that is needed is individual effort and a little elbow grease.

Thomas’ nomination thus challenges long-held assumptions about what is right and wrong with the United States. The evident confusion and disarray among liberals over how to respond to him testifies to the profound nature of this challenge. In Thomas, Bush not only offers a man with strongly conservative views; he also offers a revision of one of America’s most endearing and symbolic fables--the Civil Rights Movement.

Americans often explain themselves through simple and recurring narratives. Crises like Watergate or the Persian Gulf War become stories about who we are and what we do as a nation. When crises are treated in such a narrative fashion, they become social dramas.

Alexis de Tocqueville argued that the definition of the United States lay in its tension between equality and liberty. This struggle can be captured in two story lines: the Epic of Freedom (equality) and the Romance of the Individual (liberty).

The social movements of the ‘60s and early ‘70s represented collective self-determination. They were cast in terms of the Epic of Freedom. Individuals were subordinated to the larger group. Whether it was civil rights, women’s liberation or the youth movement, it was the group’s quest for freedom that captured the American mind. The heroic black figures of the period--Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X--were portrayed as leaders of repressed masses aspiring to freedom. Because the ‘60s made the epic promise to change the world, leaders like King were suitably elevated to fit the story: They were charismatic heroes with nearly supernatural virtues and abilities.

But the perpetually swinging pendulum of political attitudes had begun to move away from the epic narrative when Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. Reagan’s preferred genre, the Romance of the Individual, extols personal achievement and autonomy. His plea for more individualistic concerns at the expense of collective ones began to produce a cultural shift in the American mainstream.

What collectivist liberals viewed as “selfish” became the conservative right’s “self-reliance.” In the ‘80s, self-interest evolved from a pejorative to a more neutral (although never entirely positive) concept. Reagan, too, possessed charisma, but not of an epic stature. It was the popularity of a likeable, successful leader.

The Romance of the Individual is a less dramatic story line than the Epic of Freedom because its aims are neither messianic nor especially ambitious. Rather than changing the world, it is about “cultivating one’s garden.” Like romanticism in general, it is pleasantly self-obsessed.

Bush, of course, has carried on Reagan’s legacy of trying to shape American understanding within the more individualistic narrative. The meaning of his Thomas nomination thus becomes clear: It is an effort to reverse the dominant account of the Civil Rights Movement as a collective, epic struggle. The result could be a major erosion of the liberal account of recent American history.

From the outset, then, the struggle over Thomas’ nomination has transcended politics: It has been a fight over the meaning of American democracy and which groups will be able to determine it. As the primary purveyor and guardian of the nation’s liberal myths and symbols, the national media--from network news to daily papers and weekly magazines--have refused to accept the account of Thomas in Romantic, individualist terms. They have insisted on the epic narrative, portraying Thomas as a beneficiary of the civil-rights infrastructure he has disdained and as a member of a party opposed to collective efforts on behalf of minorities.

Initial press reports juxtaposed Thomas to the man whom he would replace, Thurgood Marshall, who was portrayed in larger-than-life terms. Marshall, after all, successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, a sacred event in liberal American history, and was associated with the era in which the court largely rewrote the rules by which Americans live.

The story was an archetypical one: Marshall the Hero-Creator, the altruistic Builder of a world that Thomas came to inhabit, leaving a legacy that the intruder could dismantle; Thomas the destroyer, selfishly and irresponsibly eager to up-end the sacred legal precedents of the past.

Thomas’ claims to Romantic individualism, where high ideas are victorious over humbling reality, were subtly undermined in media accounts of his personal advancement. The day after his nomination, Thomas was described as “an odd, seemingly contradictory amalgam of influences,” an opportunist who has “lost touch with his roots and grown ambivalent about his racial identity.” Rather than express Romantic admiration for Thomas’ hard-won upward mobility, journalists reported the judge’s criticism of his welfare-dependant sister.

The resulting problem for Thomas and his admirers is that he can be accepted only if his individualism is seen in Romantic terms. Thomas himself has stressed his personal story and disdained the epic identity--he did not even refer to Marshall in his post-announcement press conference with the President. And during last week’s hearings, Thomas disclosed that he had not even studied Marshall’s decisions.

It is precisely such a narrative of Romantic (not opportunistic) individualism, moreover, that shines through in the laudatory accounts of Thomas in the conservative press, which have provided the symbolic counterpoint to liberal representations. The Wall Street Journal, for example, described him as “a man who embodies the ideal of personal achievement rather than reliance on governmental programs for a leg up,” and as the “living embodiment of self-help.”

The Thomas Senate hearings last week followed the lines of these earlier struggles for symbolic domination. Thomas insisted upon the institutional importance of his biographical qualifications, asserting that the “obligations and responsibilities of a judge” depend “in essence” upon “basic values.” In opposition, senators such as Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) contended that attention must be focused on “the burning social issues of our time.”

Thomas, of course, could lose the rhetorical struggle and still gain Senate confirmation. A winning vote, however, would still broadcast a significant symbolic message. If individual effort and integrity are sufficient qualifications to gain social advancement, it would seem that the large-scale social reconstruction of America is no longer necessary.

If Thomas succeeds not only in securing a court seat but in rephrasing public narratives, he and his conservative advocates could have a much more profound effect, for they would threaten the mythical status of the civil-rights struggle upon which the moral legitimacy of contemporary liberalism depends. “Discrimination” has been a topic to which Thomas has referred time and again; “oppression” is something he has never even mentioned. Discrimination is something between individuals; it can be changed through the re-education of attitudes and, perhaps, through public sanctions against individual acts. Oppression, by contrast, is a problem between social groups; it is produced by structures beyond any particular individual’s control and can be remedied only by collective social movements and government intervention. If Romantic individualism becomes America’s new story, it would mean the end of government efforts to break the cycle of poverty.

Should Thomas and his supporters succeed, in other words, they could initiate a process that would put the civil-rights struggle on the same liberal scrap heap as the once-unimpeachable fables and dreams of the “Camelot years” and the “Great Society.”

The grand social narrative of American life is what we might call the Drama of Democracy: a messianic, at times apocalyptic, struggle to secure a world where all people will be free, equal, independent and without want. The dramatic tension arises from the struggle to make this “American Dream” available to everyone.

Thomas seems to represent, for all his achievement, the precise opposite of a glorious dream. His career has been fashioned by dispelling illusions in the pursuit of a personal success that has brought him close to the pinnacle of judicial power. If King christened the Civil Rights Movement as a dramatic struggle on behalf of the dream of freedom, Thomas could bring this era to a close by eschewing such dreams for Romantic possibilities.

The cast and character of our national drama is at a critical turning point. After eight years of Reagan, and nearly four of Bush, Americans are seemingly less inclined to the epic genre and more to individualism. We may be entering a world of reactionary Romanticism. Rather than pioneers on the Supreme Court, we have anti-pioneers. Bush’s “vision thing” is about revision--he is trying to tell a new story about our American past. But as the tale of Thomas has unfolded, it is not about a “new” American Dream but no American Dream. What is America without dreams?