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 lan…
