The American myth always came at someone’s expense. Now, it’s all but collapsed

The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs

Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.

In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.