America Needs to Grow the Fuck Up

Once you understand the moral psychology of America's immaturity, everything about America's 250th birthday makes sense.

Happy 250th Birthday, America — I guess.

I suppose one can look at 250 as this neat, little milestone of a number that demands some sort of intrinsic, unearned respect.

Nah, fuck that. I don’t automatically respect America at 250.

If anything, the only thing I can think of is how America is still a young, spoiled brat of a nation that no one is able to discipline.

Yeah, I’m writing this in a shitty mood because the environment in DC has been literally fucked up lately.

Maybe it’s the three-digit temperatures here in Washington during this heat wave. On top of that, the massive amounts of fireworks and jet fuel from the excessive air displays are literally burning taxpayer money into the air and threatening to produce god-knows- what amounts of pollution. Oh yeah, and remember that massive White House UFC fight a few weeks ago? Yeah, turns out that the backyard trailer park fight on steroids ended up completely destroying the White House Lawn and killing the grass. An Ohio-based lawn care company run by a Trump supporter has pledged $1 million to fix the lawn.

Bless their slow little hearts. We all know you can’t reseed intelligence into the soil of stupidity.

The rot isn’t just in the ground or in the (now algae-fied) water of the reflecting pool. My personal and political irritation with America comes from a thousand different directions beyond the natural and man-made heat in the air.

It is especially heightened for me because I returned to live in Washington just in time for the shitshow unleashed on this city over the last two years. Many friends and acquaintances have lost their careers thanks to the DOGE machine. I’m still having to deal with the fact that I was absurdly fired from the Washington Post last fall for not stripping my clothes and performatively grieving for a white Christian nationalist— under the direction of a new opinion section that has actively decided to purge all of its full-time Black writers— by any means necessary.

Indeed, as I type this, the white nationalist group Patriot Front is marching throughout DC with Confederate flags and various neo-Nazi symbols— a reminder that the North never fully defeated the Confederacy after the Civil War.

And instead of disciplining these assholes, people are taking photos of them, sharing these masked KKK-wannabes for content on social media and clickbytes, and maybe some photojournalism honors. At least so far, I have not seen evidence that groups are countermobilizing to meet and disrupt them with a larger, physical presence, and drive these khaki-wearing, mask-donning Party-City Nazi-crybaby cowards the fuck out of the city and back to whatever miserable mayonnaise existence they came from.

This refusal by liberals and moderates to confront and discipline these violent forces is also a form of political immaturity. As Tad Stoermer writes in his recent book, “A Resistance History of the United States”, resistance movements often fail in this country because when the question of force or violence comes into play, all too often counter-movements back down or fracture.

Or, as I have argued before— outright racism, terror and white supremacy for too many people is a titillating performance, which people will observe, witness and comment on but not disrupt. And as we share images of these white supremacists on our social media— I wonder if is doing so without disrupting them is on the same spectrum of those who went to lynchings and made photocards as souveneirs of the spectacle—- but did nothing to stop the terroristic display.

Yup, this is a snapshot of a toddler country in the middle of its terrible two (hundred)s with no one able to put it in its place.

America under Trump is trying to assert its strength, to tell you that he’s a big, strong boy now. Meanwhile, he’s making messes, killing the grass, and expecting (usually brown or Black) people to clean up after him, while also telling them they don’t belong in positions of power— or in your country at all.

What is complete with displays of a white nationalist tantrum while forcing everyone to sing happy birthday—- or ELSE.

No singing here today. America at 250 is a time to reflect upon America’s immaturity.

America’s Immaturity, As Seen by Foreigners

I’m not the only one who sees that America is stuck in perpetual adolescence.

Foreign observers have long been fascinated and quite often dismayed by the country’s moral psychology—its unique habits of mind, emotional temperament, relational skills and national character.

Specifically, foreigners have been warning about America’s developmental deficiencies for decades, if not centuries.

French political writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited America to get a sense of what the nation was. In his 1835 book, Democracy in America, he famously said, “I know of no country where there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” He observed that Americans were impatient, were susceptible to conformity, and confused mass opinion for truth or wisdom. He also saw that anti-Black racism in America would be the one aspect to eat the country from within, and that no laws would change the “imaginary inequality” that European whites had constucted against Black people.

“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe.” wrote British writer DH Lawrence about 100 years later. “In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play.”

This quote sticks with me a lot: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

As I have said many times before, the French-Cuban writer Anaïs Nin mirroried Lawrence in her analysis, writing, that America suffers from a “cult of toughness and a hatred of sensitivity” and that one day it may have to “pay a heavy price for this.”

More recently observers from eastern Asia have also been commenting on America’s character and relative youth and inexperience as a nation.

Speaking in 1965, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew commented on why he would not “go on with the Americans”. “By and large, the administrration lacks depth and wisdom, which come out of an accumulation of knowledge of human beinds and human situations over a long period of time. That’s lacking. And it’s not their fault. What have they got, three, four hundred years of history? And they’ve become a nation just recently. I’ve only had three experiences with the Americans, and they didn’t intend any harm… but the tragedy was, they did real harm.”

Last year, during a Channel 4 News interview about the Trump administration’s trade war with China, the Chinese diplomat Victor Gao shrugged at American threats, reminding people that the United States was not the only market in the world. “We don’t care. China has been here for 5,000 years,” he said. “Most of the time, there was no United States, and we survived.” He said that if America wanted to continue on its selfish ways, China would adjust. “We expect to survive for 5000 more.”

America’s immaturity, as seen through race

Race is a central lens for viewing America’s regressive, toddleristic tendencies.

Think about it: European colonists came to America and imagined it as a tabula rasa for their imaginations and purposes. Far from being a nation of immigrants, America’s real story is about a young, inexperienced country making other races do the work and then taking the credit.

White settlers created elaborate systems in which they forced enslaved Africans to do the hard work of the American group project in the South, before turning to Chinese labor to build the railroads in the West, and then to Latino labor. Throughout history, when these groups have asked, largely politely, to share in the same rights, freedoms, and dignity, or at the very least, have protested being lynched, massacred, and forcibly disappeared, white America 1) Pretends said harms never happened 2) Covers its ears and shouts “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” really loudly. 3) Literally will pour acid or concrete in a pool and then share it with free Black people.

Speaking of brawling, tantrums and race, the historian Gerald Horne writes in his book “The Bittersweet Science: Racism, Racketeering and the Political Economy of Boxing” about how part of what enraged white America about the end of slavery is that they saw Black people— their property, their toys, their status objects, their sources of entertainment literally walking around free, reminding them of literal economic and psychological loss. We would then see the failures of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the increase in terror attacks against Black people in the early 20th century. In other words, a white national temper tantrum against free Black people.

Seeing neo-Nazi groups comfortable enough to march en masse in DC during America at 250 is a reminder that the white nationalist temper tantrum over losing slaves never really ended. It just changed into khakis, polo shirts, and baseball caps.

It is this political immaturity that shows up in the fact that this country refuses to consider meaningful reparations for Black people in the same vein that it has done for other groups, including Japanese Americans and Holocaust survivors. We see that it is capable of considering repair for some groups but not Black people.

This immaturity, I have argued, has come in the form of the election of Trump after having President Obama for two terms.

This political immaturity shows up in the rollbacks in voting rights, attacks against racial integration (I largely refuse to say DEI cause what we are talking about is a move towards resegregation), and attacks on birthright citizenship. This is a white America that not only can’t share freedom and opportunities with Black people, women, and other non-whites, but it is willing to deny itself good, life-improving policies if it is shown that Black people will benefit. (This is directly tied to the racism of why D.C., a long majority Black city, has long been denied statehood). This, as I have argued, is to ensure that a Black man and his family would never occupy the White House to rule over whites ever again.

And for the liberals who naively believe in America’s innate goodness, American culture doesn’t respect human dignity instinctively; it respects and follows power. At 250 years old, America still needs written legislation, amendments, backed with the force of the state— to tell people to not commit hate crimes and that people with different skin and hair shouldn’t be treated badly.

Moreover, the same people throwing the White Nationalist tantrums are being coddled by privileged centrists/moderates who think we just need to understand them and let them scream and cry it out. And for how long? Another 50 years? 100? 200? As James Baldwin once said, how long am I to wait for your progress?

So all in all—- is there much to celebrate about America at 250? A young, immature country that has more strength than sense? That still mistakes power for wisdom, and force for maturity, and violence for legitimacy?

For Black people, we are wondering if we just have to run for cover to let the tantrum pass without having our lives destroyed by it. Or others are just leaving the country altogether, represented by the fact that net migration out of America has increased to Great Depression-era levels.

I know this is a country with an audience that needs hope, endless reinvention, and to forget the past. I dont have any of those empty platitudes to give today.

All I can wish that America will stop the toddler tantrums, and grow the fuck up.