The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself
Nick Bryant, Bloomsbury, £25

IF you select “virtually any date in US history, it would be possible to find the same poisonous ingredients [that] percolated violently to the surface on January 6, 2021,” writes journalist and historian Nick Bryant in his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.

Donald Trump, and the movement behind him, is both new and old; times are unprecedented but also, to historians of the US, frighteningly familiar. Bryant, a historian by training, meticulously makes sense of these contradictions, methodically unpicking the mythology of US history to clearly argue that Trump — and his support — is the product of that history.

President Joe Biden has repeatedly said this election cycle is nothing less than a “battle for the soul of America” and that this is why he’s compelled to run again, aged 81. But as Bryant so clearly outlines, that battle has been raging for centuries. In the context of its divisions and inherent violence, is it even possible to argue that the US has one “soul”?

The first failure, according to Bryant, is a lack of historical understanding. An inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to “properly excavate the past” was, and arguably still is, “an analytical shortcoming of the media as a whole.”

Rather than being an aberration, Trump’s victory in 2016 was the culmination of political, sociological, economic, technological and cultural shifts that went back decades. 

Bryant’s work of history is as unflinching as it is accessible. It traverses the history of the “imperial presidency,” the “original sin” of enslavement (and how its legacy is enshrined in the living constitution). It also covers the cyclical white backlash to any non-white or non-majority advancement — or even, often, to the perception such advancement might be possible.

Reading The Forever War, you can sense the inescapable, contradictory nature of US history and power.

Bryant seeks to understand, too, how that power has been used. From the nation’s founding, he writes, “The question of presidential power was inadequately addressed.” The presidency, he demonstrates in a particularly important analysis, has always had extraordinary powers. These have been tested, stretched and expanded by most of the men who have occupied the White House.

This allowed for the most egregious cases of “abuse” of the powers of the office by presidents such as Andrew Jackson, who oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and Richard Nixon, who famously attempted to influence an election outcome. Bryant shows, while skilfully avoiding the temptations of false equivalence, that the “imperial presidency” existed long before Nixon came to office.

Even the most revered of presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, “expanded the powers and prerogatives of the executive branch.” Lincoln raised an army (when that should have been the role of Congress) and negated habeas corpus, allowing the government to hold people indefinitely without charge. This in turn “paved the way for the arrest of as many as 15,000 Americans, some of whom were apprehended simply for singing Confederate songs.”

The presidency, Bryant argues, “was always open to abuse.” The failure to adequately define and constrain presidential power allowed for it. But more than that, the fairly consistent reaction to this abuse — or lack of reaction — shows how “Americans could live with a president who violated the rules, especially if he embodied positiveness and national strength.”

In that sense, Bryant argues with signature flair, “when it comes to authoritarianism in America Trump walked through a half-open door.”

The second failure of the media in this regard, Bryant argues, is that it has not quite understood — and perhaps more importantly, not adequately covered — the particular nature of Trump’s “authoritarianism.”

“We were covering an abnormal presidency while trying to abide ourselves by normal rules of journalistic engagement,” writes Bryant. This problem led to adverse findings by the BBC’s complaints unit against Bryant himself.

It found his coverage of Trump was “not offset by the limited, and relatively restrained, criticism of the Democrats, Joe Biden and Congress.” In one case, Bryant had simply observed that Trump was engaged in “mind-bending truth-twisting” — something the former president recently did again in a nationally televised debate watched by 51 million US citizens.

The now widely caricatured insistence on “both-sides” coverage led to a perverse situation: “in trying to remain normal, we normalised him.” That is, they reported him as “a rogue president rather than an aspiring autocrat or, as he later became, a fully fledged authoritarian.”

This normalisation, long a point of contention both inside and outside the US, has not shifted — or certainly not enough. At least partly, Bryant argues, this is due to what he labels a “better America bias” held by much of the media.

Bryant’s great contribution is that he clearly shows there is no such thing as that “better America.” In fact, US exceptionalism — the enduring belief, to put it crudely, that the US is the best country in the world — “has blinded it to the ways in which it is unusually bad.”

The US, does not, as Bryant shows, hold some claim to “unique goodness.” It only is what it is: a terrible, sometimes beautiful mix of a contradictory and violent history. A place forever at war with itself.

Like many who have spent time in the US, Bryant was often confronted by the particular horror of school shootings — not least because his own children attended US schools and participated in lockdown drills. Twelve children are killed by gun violence in the US every single day. “Since Columbine in 1999,” Bryant continues, “it has been estimated that more than 356,000 students have experienced first-hand gun violence at school.”

Living with that gut-wrenching fear alongside the apparently unshakeable “better America bias” remains fundamentally inexplicable and irreconcilable. It explains so much about the US Bryant reveals.

Emma Shortis is adjunct senior fellow, at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.

This is an abridged version of an article republished from TheConversation.com under a Creative Commons licence.