[In my annual
end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about
which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on
these and any other 2015 stories!]
One AmericanStudies
reason I’m not quite feeling the Bern.
Most everything
I’d want to say about Bernie Sanders’ campaign for the presidency, I said way
back in May
for The Conversation. When it got
picked up by Newsweek online, they gave it an unnecessarily
incendiary title: “He Can’t Win, So Why is Bernie Sanders Running?” As the
original title (“Run Bernie Run … But Why?”) better illustrates, and as I hope
the piece itself makes clear, I wasn’t trying to make predictions about whether
Sanders can or will win the candidacy nor a general election; instead, I was
arguing that his campaign can contribute significantly to our political and
national conversations regardless of such outcomes. I stand by that argument,
and believe that we’ve seen many such contributions over the campaign’s first eight
months.
At the same
time, as a public AmericanStudies scholar, and one particularly interested in
our collective memories and national narratives, I think there’s something to
be said for symbolic identities and the very real things they can mean in our
society and culture. And in the first post-Obama presidential election, and one
in which so many of the defining issues have to do with the battle between exclusionary and
inclusive images of America, between polar extremes like #BlackLivesMatter
and a resurgent white supremacy (to put it bluntly and reductively, but not
inaccurately), I think the difference between a candidate who would be the
first woman to run as a major party’s presidential nominee and a 74 year old
white man is not an insignificant one. (It’s worth adding that Sanders is
Jewish in heritage, but is in
his own words “not very religious”; and also that Joe
Lieberman’s multiple prominent presidential bids make the possibility of a
Jewish president far less striking than it once would have been.)
Hillary Clinton might
not be a revolutionary candidate or president in many ways, that is, but in one
very important way she most certainly would be—and would represent an
unquestionable broadening of what our highest office, federal government, and
symbolic national identity can and would include. That’s not the only reason to
vote or not vote for a candidate, of course—but even a cursory study of
American history reveals that we overlook such symbolic narratives and images
at our peril. Symbolic doesn’t mean insignificant, and indeed (as Benedict
Anderson knew full well) nations are in many ways constituted out of
symbols and narratives. If electing a candidate like Donald Trump would represent
one kind of symbolic extreme, electing our first female president would
certainly represent another. In what feels like a crucial, constitutive moment
for America, that’s a possibility we should keep in mind.
Next 2015 story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?
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