Thread by @jsmian

1) In "The End of Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America," historian Greg Grandin explores the meaning of the frontier over the long course of US history.

2) He shows America’s constant expansion, either over land or through markets and militarism, symbolized a future of endless promise and laid the foundation of America’s belief in itself as an exceptional nation.

3) "No myth in American history has been more powerful, more invoked by more presidents, than that of pioneers advancing across an endless meridian. Onward, and then onward again."

4) "There were lulls, doubts, dissents, and counter-movements, notably in the 1930s and 1970s. But the expansionist imperative has remained constant, in one version or another, for centuries."

5) As Woodrow Wilson said in the 1890s, “a frontier people always in our van, is, so far, the central and determining fact of our national history.” “There was no thought,” Wilson said, “of drawing back.”

6) "And when the physical frontier was closed, its imagery could easily be applied to other arenas of expansion, to markets, war, culture, technology, science, the psyche, and politics."

7) After World War II, the “frontier” became a central metaphor to capture a vision of a new kind of world order.

Borrowing language used by Andrew Jackson, postwar planners said the US would extend the world’s “area of freedom” and enlarge its “circle of free institutions.”

8) "Past empires established their dominance in an environment where resources were thought to be finite, extending their supremacy to capture as much of the world’s wealth as possible, to the detriment of their rivals."

9) "Now, though, the United States made a credible claim to be a different sort of global power, presiding over a world economy premised on endless growth."

10) Th US helped organize and stabilize an international community understood as liberal, universal, and multilateral. The promise of a limitless frontier meant that wealth wasn’t a zero-sum proposition. It could be shared by all.

11) Frank Norris, in 1902, hoped that territorial expansion would lead to a new kind of universalism, to the “brotherhood of man” when Americans would realize that “the whole world is our nation and simple humanity our countrymen.”

12) In 1966, the historian William Appleman Williams wrote the idea of expansion was “exhilarating” since it could be “projected to infinity.”

13) The constant fleeing forward allowed the US to avoid a true reckoning with its social problems, such as inequality, racism, crime, and violence.

Not anymore.

14) The combined catastrophe of the mindless wars in the Middle East, the 2008 Great Recession, and now the Covid Crisis means an entire generation’s expectations have been radically shortchanged.

15) With Trump, catapulted to the presidency by the rise of reactionary populism and racist nationalism, America finds itself at the end of its myth, says Gardin.

Political passions that had long been directed elsewhere finally returned home.

16) "A nation that used to believe it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but that now finds itself trapped by history. People who used to think that they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.”

17) It is true what the Canadian poet Anne Carson once said, “To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.”