The Brooklyn Rail

“Things do not change; we change.”
–Henry David Thoreau

“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
–Confucius

Having recently read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter again, I began to think about how young America is. It only began with the Pilgrims and the Puritans who migrated from England to North America, primarily New England, during the first Great Migration between 1620 and 1640. And the formal creation of the United States of America came only after the Declaration of Independence in 1776, less than 250 years ago. While the Pilgrims and the Puritans were both groups of English religious reformers, they held very different views of Christianity, which have persisted to this day.

As we remember, the advent of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century gave the non-clergy population access to the Bible in their native languages for the first time. And a short while later, the Protestant Reformation swept across Europe after Martin Luther nailed his famous “Ninety-five Theses” to the church door in 1517. England experienced its own split from the Roman Catholic church when Reformation arrived to the British Isles. In 1534, when King Henry VIII wanted a divorce without the Pope’s consent, he created the Church of England, which was similar to Catholicism, except that it was the king himself who became the divine authority instead of the Pope. Those who worshipped in favor of the purity of early Christian services rather than those of the established church identified themselves as Pilgrims or Separatists, and fled to the Netherlands, another maritime superpower that was far more religiously diverse and tolerant than England. But fearing that their offspring would lose their English cultural heritage, the Pilgrims decided that the only way to live as true English Christians was to separate themselves even further and establish their own colony in the New World.

Unlike the more radical Pilgrims, the Puritans thought they could reform the church through a form of worship and self-organization called “the congregational way.” Their approach held that the head of the church wasn’t a Pope or King, but Jesus Christ himself, as revealed in the scriptures. As an organizing principle, these Puritan congregations were bound by a “covenant,” and selected their religious leaders democratically. However small the difference might be between the Pilgrims and Puritans, that difference had major consequences. The Pilgrims ended up on the margins of society, since they preferred an extreme form of autonomy that led to working-class status, while the non-separating Puritans expanded their wealth. In thinking hypothetically, if Vice President Vance were to be seen as a Pilgrim Christian, and President Trump as an opportunist pagan posing as a Puritan, we could perhaps see the contentious relationship between illiberalism and liberalism in a new light, for both are equally embedded in our nation’s history—not at the margins, but at the center of our social and political arena.

Whatever forms have preceded the European colonization of North America and classical liberalism—ideas about rights, hierarchies of nations, race, and gender; cultural and religious differences or uniformity; the use of exclusion and expulsion, among other ambiguous aspirations—we’ve come to realize that the access to maintain power, justified by the legitimacy of political violence, has always been about the will of the people, which can potentially be cast over the rule of law. Here we’re reminded of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation:

I have a passionate love for liberty, law, and respect for rights. I am neither of the revolutionary party nor of the conservative. Liberty is my foremost passion. … But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.

This brings us to think about whether free people are all equal, and equal people are all free, or the opposite—that people are not all equal, and equal people are all not free.

This leads us to think about a strange fact: Americans—instead of looking backward at their own history, which is inadequately thin compared to Old-World cultures—constantly project their mythology into the future. In other words, given the previous history of violence of cowboys shooting at each other in “do-or-die” circumstances, all the invented fictional superheroes in comic books are to be seen as American mythology. As Ra’s al Ghul, the supervillain adversary of Batman, pronounces in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins:

Crime. Despair. This is not how man was supposed to live. The League of Shadows has been a check against human corruption for thousands of years. We sacked Rome. Loaded trade ships with plague rats. Burned London to the ground. Every time a civilization reaches the pinnacle of its decadence, we return to restore the balance.

Many Americans now know they have taken a huge risk in re-electing Trump, an entrepreneur opportunist/pagan, and his new sidekick, a political opportunist/Christian, with the hope they can create a new nationalism—a post-Trans-Appalachian West as a reclamation of the republic of white Christians. What is happening now reminds one of the 1924 controversy over the Johnson-Reed Act (described at the time as “the melting pot comes to an end”), which intended to limit immigration at a time when the KKK was among the largest social movements in America. And now in 2025, the desire of the white Christians to promote and enforce a similar mandate of deportation and expulsion of those whom they consider culturally unassimilable or politically objectionable is no more or less than a symptomatic impulse of a short-lived nostalgia. However, while the Trump administration is aggressively flooding the zone with one radical shift after another—including the tariff hikes now getting so much attention—their core agenda is an assault on our universities, especially the communities of research. What once made America’s scientific establishment the most successful in human history—attracting the world’s best and brightest minds—is now in real jeopardy. It is good to remember that since 2000, over one third of the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in science were immigrants, and almost forty percent of all software developers in the US are immigrants. This raises the question of whether a remaking of the America First movement won’t end up making us a second fiddle to China.

In solidarity with love, courage, and cosmic optimism to us all,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to the extraordinary lives and works of our friends and mentors Tony Bechara (1942–2025), Alice Notley (1945–2025), and Marcel Ophuls (1927–2025), all of whom have made profound contributions to our world of culture. For Tony, the simultaneity of artmaking and philanthropy was a natural inherent condition that he was able to embrace practice throughout his life. For Alice, whose poetics of disobedience and contradiction have carved out a monumental space in our poetry firmament. And for Marcel, whose epic The Sorrow and the Pity has forever changed how documentary film aspired to greater heights among individual and collective inevitabilities. We send our deep condolences to immediate members of their respective families, friends, and admirers here in the US and across the world.