The U.S. Was Never the Greatest Country
And it never will be.
The U.S. is not the greatest country in the world. It never was, and it never will be. That’s not to say the U.S. is a shithole country, though it’s working overtime to achieve that distinction. The U.S. isn’t the greatest country in the world because it’s a bullshit title. There’s no such thing as the “greatest country.”
This pervasive American myth is harmful. It has made us worse. It has made us cruel. It has cultivated a superiority complex that supplies us with the infinite capacity to rationalize atrocities committed upon any people with the temerity to not be American.
God help you if you come to this country looking for grace or hospitality. We’re fresh out. Come at your own peril. It doesn’t matter what your situation is, whether you’re fleeing war, poverty, or persecution. We don’t want to hear it. We don’t care. We’re a heartless people.
There’s a thin line between pride and prejudice, between nationalism and xenophobia, a line that many Americans cannot discern. As a result, we find ourselves on the wrong side of that line more and more.
“The United States of America is the greatest country in the world” is our unofficial slogan, a slogan with a conspicuous implication, that every other county is in the world is inferior. Either we don’t notice the implication, or we don’t care. That’s not patriotism. That’s jingoism.
You can have a favorite country, but to claim a country is the greatest is childish and reductionist. Greatest? By what measure? Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama, The Newsroom, got it right in its opening scene.
Will McAvoy, a famous news anchor played by Jeff Daniels, sits on a panel at a university. McAvoy is coy and evasive until a college student activates him with the following question for the panel:
“Can you say why America is the greatest country in the world?”
The first panelist answers, “Diversity and opportunity.”
The second panelist responds, “Freedom and freedom.”
McAvoy tries to evade, but the moderator manages to prod him into the following rant:
“…there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where we spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies…So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Yosemite?”
Sorkin tapped into an uncomfortable truth: American exceptionalism may not be so exceptional. Unfortunately, Sorkin didn’t have the conviction to stick the landing, as McAvoy goes on to rue, “It sure used to be.” No, Mr. McAvoy (Mr. Sorkin), it never was. Our sins were there from the start.
To acknowledge the sins of the United States isn’t sacrilegious, as some would have us believe. It’s healthy. That’s how we heal, move on, and get better. I’ve never been more critical of my country than right now, and it’s precisely because I care that I criticize.
Refusing to acknowledge how this country’s moral failings reverberate throughout our culture and within our structures keeps us yoked to that radioactive past. The only way we can move forward is to see the past for what it truly is, warts and all. Sounds simple enough, but we’ve never managed it.
That doesn’t mean you can’t love your country in spite of its flaws. I do, but I acknowledge that love for one’s country is necessarily biased and subjective. And that’s OK. Subjectivity doesn’t preclude value. Some of the most wonderful things in the world, the things that add depth and texture, that imbue our lives with meaning, are subjective—beauty, love, art, culture. We run into problems when we try to standardize the subjective. That’s exactly what “greatest country” reductionism attempts.
That the current administration has taken a zero-sum, anti-globalist, anti-immigrant, protectionist approach is no fluke. It’s the consummation of a philosophy with a long, problematic history, one that underpins the “greatest country in the world” ethos: America First, a nativist creed favored by the Ku Klux Klan.
Charles Lindbergh was a vocal “America First” proponent, opposing U.S. involvement in World War II. Though not an overt Nazi sympathizer, he espoused anti-Jewish sentiments, including blaming Jewish people for attempting to drag the U.S. into a “European conflict.” Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, imagines an alternate history in which Lindbergh becomes president, prompting a dark turn for the U.S., especially with regard to the treatment of Jewish people. The similarities to the current MAGAification of the United States are eerie.
America First was racist from the start and dangerous. It helped embolden Hitler and reaffirmed a sinister American proclivity—to rank the value of peoples—a tendency that invariably turns inward. Lindbergh delivered his “America First” speech on April 23, 1941. Ten months later, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which led to the internment of Japanese Americans.
We rank Americans.
This tendency is encapsulated by the militiaman played by Jesse Plemons in A24’s Civil War.
A journalist, played by Wagner Moura, pleads with the militiaman who has detained them, “We’re American.”
“What kind of American are you?” the militiaman replies.
I detected a chilling echo of such American sectarianism in a recent AP article, which reported that Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost, while on a tour of the Everglades immigration detention center, colloquially known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” said he overheard one of the detainees yell, “I’m an American citizen!”
But what kind of American?
We rank Americans. We rank immigrants. We rank people.
Americans born in the U.S. to American parents born in the U.S. are most prized, but if you follow this ranking to its logical conclusion, you gravitate inexorably toward eugenics. Americans born to immigrant parents are next best, but only if they came here the so-called “right way,” which is why this administration is working hard to get rid of birthright citizenship—a loophole for the “wrong” kind of immigrants, immigrants like my parents, one of whom, my mother, is now a U.S. citizen.
Naturalized citizens are the lowest on the citizenship totem pole, which this administration has made clear by giving the Department of Justice a mandate: To prioritize the enforcement of denaturalization. With this mandate in place, naturalization becomes a provisional citizenship, a de facto second-class citizenship, subject to perennial scrutiny and potential recission. Second-class citizenship is always the hallmark of an immoral, tyrannical government.
Below them all are noncitizens. Green card holders top this group, but even they are threatened, as more and more permanent residents are detained for innocuous activities, like writing op-eds or participating in protests. Asylum seekers have lost temporary status protections (TPS) virtually overnight in some cases, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrants in the lurch.
Then there are migrants with no protections, who work steadily, increasing leery of the expanding maws of ICE. As well they should be, lest they be sent to CECOT or Alligator Alcatraz over a nothingburger immigration infraction, which is happening more and more frequently, as evidenced by the growing number of detained noncitizens with no criminal history. Noncitizens are the canary in the coal mine, the focus group for fascism,
And across the board, from migrant without legal protections to U.S.-born citizen, opposition to this administration has become a force multiplier for vulnerability. Citizens are no longer safe. Neither are politicians, as we’ve seen with ICE’s detention of Trump’s political opponents.
I love my country, but my love is conditional. I don’t tolerate the vile mistreatment of human beings, the egregious disregard of due process, the targeting of political opponents, the insatiable desire to jettison all services that contribute to a greater social good, like healthcare and the arts, complicity in evils taking place around the world, either through action or inaction, and the strategic pitting of Americans against each other. What better way to divide us than to rank us?
If you never allow yourself to criticize something, you don’t love it. You worship it. Blind worship is the widening crack in the foundation of democracy. It’s the lifeblood of any ascending autocracy. I criticize my country because I love it, because I want it to be better. I don’t want to “make America great again.” I want to make it good.
I have more reactions to this post than I have time, so will just say a few words.
That movie clip was unsettling. I could never show it to my wife because she’d tell me again that she would want to go home.
My other initial reaction was (ashamed to admit) that although I am aware of the historical class ladder (social classification) of the peoples of Mexico, and perhaps of all Latin America, where those born in Spain had the most rights, and the indigenous were at the bottom, I never really thought about the fact that we have the same thing here. But it’s not history. It’s what we live in now. Thanks for pointing this out, as sad as it is.