In my Junior Literature class, I teach John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
If that title and author hold no meaning for you, I recommend simply Googling the piece and taking the two to three hours required to read it. If the opinion of a state university graduate in English bears any weight of credibility to you, I’ll wager an opinion that Hersey’s work represents some of the highest quality non-fiction prose you can find: a result of both the author’s skill and the unprecedented circumstances in which he wrote.
Hersey was the right man for the right time.
Fresh off his 1945 Pulitzer Prize win for “A Bell for Adano”, he traveled to Japan in 1946, shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On The New Yorker’s dime, he interviewed six survivors of the atomic attack on Hiroshima and then published the story six months later. The result is surrealism, a strange, irreplicable blend of subjective literary description and barebones fact.
After Hiroshima’s publication, Albert Einstein attempted to buy 1,000 copies of the magazine to send to other scientists. Decades later, in 1999, a 36-member panel of journalists voted it the finest piece of American journalism of the 20th century.
Beyond its self-evident merit, I teach the book for all the usual English teacher reasons. Hiroshima is a masterclass in the use of subjectivity and perspective. It’s an insight into the literary power that exists in painfully truthful descriptions of the real. And, if nothing else, it’s a chance for students to experience history outside the context of their textbooks.
My interest in the story is different.
What keeps me coming back to Hiroshima is the shift in American culture brought about by the Atomic Age, subtly foreshadowed in the novella’s pages. As the blast wave hits one of the buildings, one of Hersey’s survivors finds herself crushed under a row of shelves: There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books. The line is a singular sentence among thousands. But it’s a moment in a story otherwise preoccupied with telling the facts in which Hersey indulges in a bit of editorializing. If you listen closely, you can hear the click, click, click of the gears turning in his head. There is something *wrong* with this picture, Hersey tells us. Something wrong with technological advance, with the trajectory of our advanced societies. And we see in Hiroshima’s pages the birth of a new skepticism. The rest of American culture would not be far behind.
In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood pointed out that in the 19th century the focus of speculative writing was utopic. The legacy of the Enlightenment, at least until the advent of WWII, had been a story of progress. Mankind was on the cusp of realizing its destiny. Its trajectory, built upon the power of technological and scientific progress, was aimed for the stars.
It's with modernization where the story starts to shift. The paradisiacal future promised by scientific and democratic advance would be seen as a false promise. Gone was the dream held before the early half of the 20th century, a dream of hope in the power and progress of technological change, and in its place a growing cynicism. The optimism, perhaps best symbolized by the Golden Age of Science Fiction, would come to be hollowed out and replaced with any number of grim, dystopian futures.
The 60’s radicals looked with despair at the systems of government and political thought that had led to the Holocaust, to two World Wars, to thousands vaporized by a cutting-edge weapon. The advent of nuclear and chemical weapons, the weaponization of bureaucratic government (the systematic record-keeping used for the Holocaust) bred cynicism in the political projects of modernism. Marxism, which had prided itself on perfecting scientific rational thought and applying it to history and economics, had proven to be a useful tool of totalitarianism. Fascism had come cloaked in “biology” and Darwinist theory, warped and twisted of course, but garbed nonetheless in the robes of scientific rationale.
The intellectuals and tastemakers who wrestled with these thoughts in the post-war period left a rot of cynicism in their wake, ready for fermentation into further cultural change. Soon, a further thought emerged: perhaps the problem wasn’t just science, perhaps the problem extended to reality itself.
The instinctual drive of the 60’s was about more than peace, love, and the war in Vietnam. It was a rejection of reality. If science, in its craving to arrive at objective, fundamental reality, led to what had transpired during the first half of the 20th century, then perhaps we’d be better served to live in fantasy.
You can see the impulse in art and in music: the retreat of the real and in its place a hunger for fantasy. The Golden Age of American cinema, grounded in realism, gave way to the indulgent desire to escape from reality. Experimental cinema became vogue. (The Hollywood of this period is best symbolized by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which a detective fails to save the woman he loves and, obsessed by the memory and myth of their relationship, ends up in a twisted struggle to recreate her, fetishizing her look and appearance. As David Bentley Hart writes, “Nothing becomes a fetish until its actual material history has been forgotten and replaced by a myth.”) You can see it too in religion, as mainline churches lost their grip on the public mind and Pentecostalism and other experience-based religions began to grow in their void.
What I’ve described in these past few paragraphs is a history of postmodern thought; it’s the story of the cultural reaction to modernity. If you’re a student of cultural history, you’ll likely know it well.
It was this story I was surprised to find in the pages of Bruno Macaes’s History Has Begun. And even more surprised with the weight given by Macaes to its implications.
In 2020, when I first picked up the book, I was expecting a geopolitical analysis of the type found in his previous book, The Dawn of Eurasia. I would go on to discover that Macaes, who had originally done his Ph.D. in political philosophy under Harvey Mansfield, had devoted History Has Begun to a larger endeavor, a story both broader and far more speculative.
History Has Begun
Macaes notes that History Has Begun had its genesis in a conversation, an exchange recorded during a podcast in 2018:
COWEN: Is your vision of the United States fundamentally Tocquevillian or not?
MAÇÃES: I’m still very puzzled, even though I lived here, on the whole, for eight years. I’m still very puzzled about what America is about. I cannot find a book or a particular understanding by any author that I’m entirely happy with about America.
America still remains a big mystery.
Very well. As Toni Morrison writes, “If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
Macaes’s answer to the mystery of America comes in the form of History Has Begun, an ambitious insight into the bizarre world of 21st century America through the dual lens of political philosophy and global politics.
In its wrestling with liberalism, History Has Begun is better understand as belonging to a recent spate of books that sees our present moment as a moment of crisis for liberalism: Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, Alexander Dugin’s The Fourth Political Theory, and others on the topic published in the past two decades. The reference to The End of History in the title of History Has Begun is hard to overlook. To reject the “End of History” is to claim the discovery of a new form of politics, one that transcends liberalism in producing a higher form of civilization both in increased happiness and prosperity. The challenge is simply this: discover a “superior alternative to Western liberal democracy.”
Since 2016, a series of global crises have made the flaws in the liberal political model increasingly clear. As Maçães argues in the preface to History Has Begun, the struggles of the last few years represent a growing window of opportunity for a new and improved form of politics. Western political values, he writes, “no longer seem inevitable. They may triumph in the end, but the playing field has been leveled...In this new world, no triumph is ever definitive, which is to say that no triumph is ever a triumph.”
A loose consensus has formed around the idea that this new set of ruling values might be found outside the West: in China or perhaps even Russia. Maçães himself has written as much. His 2018 book, The Dawn of Eurasia, describes a scenario in which China manages to consolidate Asia and Europe under its own economic and cultural influence. Such a disruption in the global power structure could lead to a shift in the ruling set of political values. With the decline of the West’s power comes an implied threat to the longevity of the liberal democratic project.
But it is here where Maçães breaks from consensus and offers, instead, the conceit at the heart of History Has Begun, hidden within the book’s subtitle: “might not the challenge to the ruling values come from inside the system rather than outside?” Is it possible, in other words, that the successor to liberalism, this new and improved form of politics, is developing within America itself? The decline of the West and liberal democracy need not necessarily mean the decline of the United States. America could remain at the head of the global hierarchy, but with one caveat: It would no longer be a Western country. “The United States,” Maçães writes, “may yet reveal itself as a shape-shifter. This prodigious child of the Enlightenment might not hesitate to shed Western, liberal principles if it becomes convinced that they have been refuted by time and experience.”
Is such a transformation possible?
If the United States were undergoing a national rebirth, it would explain the feeling many have of simultaneous dynamism and decay. Unlike China for instance, America’s relationship with liberalism is parental. When America deviates from liberalism, Maçães writes, “it does so more often than not in response to its inner limits and contradictions.” The picture of America that emerges in History Has Begun is that of a nation in between stages of death and revival. In Maçães’s view, the America of the Founding and its inherited European values are passing away in order to make room for a newly created America of the second founding. “The current moment in American history,” he writes, “is both a moment of destruction and a moment of creation.” In its energy, creativity, resources, drive, and imagination—America may be the only nation truly capable of transcending liberal politics.
Yet it is hard to imagine America shaking loose its powerful attachments to the past without a dramatic, devastating revolution. And as Maçães himself admits, the European roots of the American political tradition run deep. “The hold of the past over the American mind,” he writes, “is the main roadblock in the way of a genuine national rebirth.” For most of its early development, America looked to Europe to inform its political values. The United States was understood by Europeans to be a loose replica of their own society. Many across the Atlantic saw a parental relationship existing between the two civilizations resembling that of ancient Rome and Greece. Tocqueville, for instance, in Democracy in America, writes of America as the pure embodiment of European principles, unshackled by the long history and traditions of the Old World.
The first half of History Has Begun, then, is an argument for how America could manage to break its long ties to the European political tradition. The solution offered is a picture of the United States as fundamentally different from Europe and therefore capable of significant, natural change. Maçães writes that Tocqueville’s understanding of America as a replica of European culture ignores much of the inherent difference between the two civilizations. Unlike Europe, America possesses a multi-cultural heritage, a preoccupation with religion, in short— “fundamental differences of culture and feeling.” Differences that allowed America to form a unique identity after the end of European hegemony. At first glance, one might be tempted to assume that the break between the Old World and the New occurred during the American War for Independence, but Maçães rejects this idea. Instead, he situates the breaking point during the decades spanning World War I and II. It was during this period that the United States, as the newly most powerful nation on earth, began to forge its own ideological path. The postwar generation represents the first uniquely American generation, one which sought to establish its own political values outside of a European context. The America of the second founding has its roots in the 60’s. The latter half of the book is dedicated to describing this emerging new America: “a decidedly postmodern and postliberal experiment.”
The 60’s represent a cultural reaction to the problems of modernity. Rather than attempting to reform reality, however, America’s solution was to transcend it entirely. Maçães sees the driving principle behind American society and culture as a desire to escape from reality into realms of fantasy. In this view, television represents the quintessential American artform, taking the real and morphing it into something sleeker, dramatic, and entertaining.
It was only a matter of time before this cultural desire for an escape from reality manifested itself in American politics.
Two postmodern trends in American politics, Ronald Reagan’s stardom and the tabloidesque quality of the Clinton years, reach their apex in the form of Trump. As a reality TV star, he represents the quintessential new American politics, a harbinger of things to come. Maçães argues that Trump uses his political office as a platform for performance. Far from being a strict authoritarian, Trump’s obsession is his public image. He offers to the American public a dramatic escape from the bland, boring tedium of politics as usual. Similar trends can be seen on the left as evidenced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: a pie in the sky legislation proposal that resembles more closely a piece of performance art than any attempt at tangible policy.
This, in short, is Maçães’s thesis: For most of its history, America modeled itself on European society. Now, as the global superpower, America is free to enact its own values, changing them, if need be, in the face of a postliberal, postmodern world. In so doing, America is forging a new model of politics that will ultimately succeed liberalism by offering an escape from reality.
Fact or Fiction?
But is Maçães right? History Has Begun is, first and foremost, speculative. The second founding, if there is to be one, has not come yet. And the arrival of this postliberal politics Maçães describes could just as accurately be portrayed as the beginnings of a slide into illiberalism and decay. The explanation offered by Maçães, “America is becoming a developing country but is doing so ironically,” is acceptable only during this uncertain moment. Time ultimately will tell whether rebirth or decline is the American fate. In the short term, death throes and birth pangs can look startlingly alike.
Still, the measure of any good theory is its ability to make predictions. There are, of course, other ways to tell the story of America. If Maçães’s understanding of America were accurate, what might we expect to see? Since the book’s publication, the headlines have been in Macaes’s favor: A president whose priority in the middle of a national health crisis was keeping up appearances; An emerging form of politics labeled already in the press as the “successor ideology”; Dynamism and creativity in our tech sector while long-standing institutions decline. The trends Maçães picks up on have only been exacerbated in recent years.
But if History Has Begun is most right about one thing, it is that America’s trajectory is by no means certain. Surely all of us living in 2020 can attest to that. Labeling the United States as solely in decline ignores many of the countervailing forces at play. And historically, at least, “great civilizations have always lasted much longer.”
There is also a stunning amount of intuitional truth to be found in the idea that our crises are amplified by our obsession with media. The whole of America is now Hollywood; each of us is free to create our own private world, our own customized escape from the boring tedium of reality. As Milton writes in Paradise Lost, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” For some, to escape reality might be getting caught up in the drama of fighting a fascist president. For others, perhaps it is reclaiming a national heritage out from the clutches of anarchists. Are these bespoke fairytales the beginnings of our postliberal paradise?
For now, it is hard to say. Most of us, myself included, still hold to the “End of History.” Straying from our liberal norms and values certainly does not feel like transcendence. Imagining our current struggles as anything other than decline is difficult at times, seemingly impossible at others. Yet even if Maçães is wrong about the trajectory of the future, History Has Begun offers a powerful theory for understanding our current American moment, one rooted in a far too-often overlooked history. His words are a timely reminder that America’s path is unpredictable and that what seems to us to be the approach of a definite, turbulent end is often just the beginning of a new phase in our Great Experiment.