The Brooklyn Rail

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
–Pericles

“An ‘I’ without a body is a possibility. But a body without an ‘I’ is utterly impossible.”
–Edith Stein

“Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
–Sir Isaiah Berlin

This nation first began with the Pilgrims and Puritans fleeing to Holland (then the Dutch Empire) to be free from the severe religious persecution under the Church of England between 1607–08. But because they did not want their children to become Dutch citizens, they set forth in search of a new world: the Mayflower landed on Cape Cod Bay in November of 1620.

This leads us to remember that our nation began with two related ideas: toleration of religious freedom and openness to immigration. The ethos of tolerance and diversity has been a driving force not only behind the emergence of the United States of America as a moral exemplar, but also an important element of its economic prosperity. The end of such tolerance would severely damage the moral esteem with which the United States has long been regarded. Immigrants and refugees should not be used as political pawns, as we’ve experienced with unrelenting aggression under the Trump administration. To do so is in fact un-American.

It is also important to remember and respect what both sides of the political spectrum contribute to our identity. The right-wing traditional religious and ethical values of the country can be traced back to the Pilgrim and Puritan settlers, and inevitably led to countless strands of complex thought and belief. Among these are strong feelings about limited government and individualism, religious conservatism and moral absolutism, and about the way in which capitalism and the “Protestant work ethic” have become essentially synonymous. It is also important to remember that the American left-wing was also deeply embedded in faith, motivated by its “social gospel”: a Protestant Christian intellectual movement that in turn created several indispensable policies such as labor rights, child labor laws, and social justice.

An important point of social differentiation emerged, however, when the progressive left became the cultural left, which to many working people seemed to be insulated from everyday reality by the walls of higher learning institutions. As a result, those left-leaning intellectuals have often lost the public platforms that once mattered to their fellow working-class Americans. Consequently, a cultural divide has opened up within the country that has created a most precarious condition, which requires us to rethink what it must be like for a reluctant empire such as ours to exist without pulling itself apart with internal divisions.

It is important to recognize that due to the broader “secularization” of the Democratic Party and American liberalism, which quickly accelerated after the end of Cold War I in 1991, the increased division within society was so gradual that many did not see it coming. It is equally important to point out that the core values of the left, which once gave it substantial leverage in social negotiation, have fallen into what the right considers an abyss of irrelevancy or illegitimacy. This has been given particular force by the right’s aggressive prioritization of the so-called white, native-born, Christian identification over multiculturalism. At the same time, our geopolitical landscape has also changed, for what once was considered the West’s greatest strength—its awesome arsenal of democracy—was replaced around 1993 by a “From Containment to Enlargement” policy that followed the fall of Berlin Wall in 1988 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the US as the world’s sole superpower. This naturally brings to mind François Rabelais’s maxim, “The appetite grows with eating”—by which our foreign policy was firmly defined by the belief that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism had won permanently.

But in fact, continual effort is needed to maintain democracy, and also enough flexibility of thought and policy to develop in a positive way as circumstances change. If we believe America is an ongoing experiment, as it has been since the beginning—admired for the way in which it has constantly fought for freedom—then what we must at all costs avoid is accepting its opposite—namely, un-freedom. Both the right and the left can take advantage of state power, or presidential power, but the idea of some balance always remains, even in such extreme previous times that prevailed under ideologically different leaders, such as with the cases of Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and between Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and now Donald J. Trump—all of whom were to some extent personifications of their own particular kinds of governance and successes and failures.

We the people, citizens of the United States of America, are empowered indeed with our own agencies to elect whoever we feel is worthy to represent our voices and concerns. As James Baldwin once famously stated, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” We can in fact evoke Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” from which he argues that all of America’s successes have been the result of the American people instead of the American government. We should all remember that a standing government can be perverted and corrupted to serve the ambitions of a few powerful people instead of all people; hence, it’s in our collective interest to recorrect our mistakes and our failures, and constantly recalibrate our intense focus on rebuilding our social capital at all cost, as our counter-friction against any form and shape of autocracy.

Onward, upward with love, courage, and cosmic optimism as ever,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to Theodore S. Berger (1940–2026), the most brilliant advocate and unwavering champion for the arts and social justice and a mentor to many, whose impact has shaped generations of cultural and civic leaders; Jesse Jackson (1941–2026), Dr. Martin Luther King’s protégé, a legendary civil rights activist, politician, ordained Baptist minister, and one of the earliest LGBTQ rights activists; Frederick Wiseman (1930–2026), a legendary filmmaker and documentarian. Together, their contributions to our world were profoundly significant in all matters regarding freedom of expression while exploring American institutions for their inadequacies with incisive criticism. We are thrilled to welcome Anita Contini as a new member of the Rail’s Board of Directors, and Invar-Torre Hollaus as a new Editor-at-Large with enormous enthusiasm.