On Monday, June 29, Boston Review and Dissent convened a panel of three distinguished scholars of history and politics—Adom Getachew, Aziz Rana, and David Waldstreicher—to discuss their recent essays occasioned by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

The conversation was moderated by historian Nikhil Pal Singh, who published a related essay in The Guardian.

Listen to the conversation on YouTube or via The BR Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. The following transcript has not been fully edited and may contain errors.

Nikhil Pal Singh:Thank you to Boston Review and Dissent for organizing this amazing panel of scholars. It’s great to see all of you colleagues and friends, and I’m looking forward to our conversation.

When we talk about the American Revolution, we’re often being confronted with this question of, what kind of inheritance is it? And I think these moments always ask us to think about its relationship to the present. Just to give you an idea of what I have in mind, when Obama was elected in 2008, he spoke of the dream of our founders being alive in our time. Obama was very good at sort of knitting together these kinds of emancipatory milestones in American history, whether it was the New Deal, or women’s suffrage, or the civil rights victories of the 1960s, up to and including, say, marriage equality—which, although Obama was ambivalent about at first, passed during his first term. If we think of these all as moments in the expansion of democratic possibility in the United States, up to and including his own election, it’s not that long ago that this sort of redemptive story held.

But after more than a decade in which a figure like Donald Trump has dominated American politics, I’m wondering whether any of you would really want to defend that kind of progressive emancipatory story in the current moment. I think that’s an open question for us today. Certainly there’s been influential scholarship, a lot of public-facing discussion in recent years, including something like, say, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which has been inclined to read contemporary injustice and inequality in light of the deep American past. So rather than the idea that the founding is some kind of affirmative, usable past that we can hold on to, it is something that enchains us and continuously drags us backward.

Sitting here on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, reflecting on what we might think of as the disappointments or unfulfilled promises of the Obama presidency, the fallout of something like the 1619 Project, and then the rise now of the bombastic pro-American Trumpian defenses of 1776 and the great American State Fair—including, of course, attacks that are happening now on unpatriotic U.S. history taught in our universities—can you all take a minute to situate your own approach to the American founding, the revolutionary narrative, and how you situate that approach in relationship to these alternative currents, emphasizing the disavowal of that inheritance or the affirmation of that inheritance? Of course, I know you all fall in sort of a nuanced place in between those poles, but I’d like to get you to start by reflecting on that. Aziz, why don’t you start us off?


Aziz Rana:Sure. So first, thanks so much to all the organizers of this event at both Boston Review and Dissent, and thank you so much, Nikhil, for moderating and those really challenging and helpful reflections to begin.

My own view about the revolutionary heritage is that the best way to think about that moment in the late eighteenth century is as a particular settler revolt, and a revolt both against the English crown, but also, really importantly, against the kinds of threats posed by various other communities on the North American landmass, in particular Native peoples, French Canadians, and enslaved persons. And this means that the revolution is best understood as really having elements that are worthy of profound disavowal, but also worthy of affirmation. I’d argue that the colonists had a really rich internal account of republican freedom that emphasized political participation and economic independence, but that required conquest, land expropriation, and it also required workers to engage in coerced forms of labor that were inconsistent with internal ideas of free labor and independence. That mix wasn’t something that was an uneasy compromise, but was pretty profoundly ideologically linked, and that, in a way, meant that the long story of the American project isn’t about fulfilling inherent liberal values or traditions, but about whether or not it’s possible for later generations, including those that benefited precisely from this project of settlement and conquest, to actually extricate their values of emancipation from precisely the structural conditions that gave them life: expansion and enslavement. That’s an ongoing and continuous struggle that has marked the American experience and that is grounded in persistent structural features that have never quite had a proper accounting.

I should also say that there’s a second element of my work that focuses on the Constitution. I have, let’s say, a less equivocal relationship with the constitutional tradition than with the revolutionary one. I’d say that the Constitution in the twentieth century is oftentimes combined with the Revolution, when these really should be understood as different historical events. In a profound sense, the establishment of the Constitution and what the institutions of governance have meant over time is really a constraint on what would be an effective way of organizing a multiracial democracy in the twentieth century, and one of the real problems of Founders worship isn’t really even about 1776, it’s about investing the institutions of governance that we see today with a kind of mythos and presentation that it’s near ideal or perfect, in a way that makes it very difficult in the present to both appreciate the extent to which the achievements of American democracy are the product primarily of the twentieth century, and of, let’s say, the Civil War and Reconstruction. To the extent that folks continue to be invested in a story of Founders worship around the text of the Constitution, it’s very difficult right now to appreciate the extent to which it’s precisely those institutional arrangements that have facilitated the rise of an incredibly aggressive form of right-wing authoritarianism.


Adom Getachew:I can follow Aziz. I’ve learned a lot from all of your work, and I’m very happy to be on this panel. I also want to thank Boston Review and Dissent for organizing this and encourage everyone watching to subscribe to the magazines, read them, they’re excellent places where ideas are debated.

I think I would just say, a lot of my work has focused, of course, on anticolonial thinkers from Africa, from the Caribbean, who looked to that revolutionary tradition and saw the kind of inspiration that Aziz describes. And we’ll talk more about this, but I think what I find very compelling about folks like Eric Williams and their approach to the United States and the American experiment in self-government is that it does two things. One, it provincializes the United States. Whereas the story about America internally is one of exceptionalism, they saw it as the first case of a postcolonial experiment in self-government. That’s what they thought could be useful and instructive for their own purposes. It was one of many different cases, rather than a singular or exceptional instance. So that’s one.

The second thing I think that’s part of the narrative, Nikhil, that you laid out would be something like, there’s the pure perfect ideals, and then there’s sometimes these practices that are not in accord with those ideals. That’s this narrative, and then somehow this is a self-correcting project and process. That’s Obama’s vision of the United States. But I think what you see in the cases of Third World actors who look to the United States is: one, they think the ideals themselves have to be transformed and radicalized, expanded. So that something like self-rule includes a really robust sense of economic self-government in addition to political self-government; the ideals themselves are being reinvented and transformed, expanded, radicalized. And the second is that the discrepancy between ideals and practices, say, between emancipatory ideals and imperial practices. . . . being habituated to that gap generates regressive possibilities. It actually corrodes and undermines the ideals over time. So you can’t simply disaggregate them as if they’re on different sides, and over time living with that gap leads to the erosion and corrosion of the ideals themselves. Part of why the ideals themselves have to be reinvented is that they never remained untouched by imperial practices. Figures of the Black freedom struggle in the United States are exemplary of this kind of critique, and a model for this process of reinvention, and I think Third World actors and statesmen also had this vision that at the international level: the ideals needed to be reinvented.


David Waldstreicher:I’d echo everyone’s thanks, and I also want to point out how wonderfully Nikhil’s essay in The Guardian takes up some of these themes, including the centrality of expansion, as well as emancipation, and the interrelatedness of those factors in how the revolutionary tradition has played out and been usable but also insufficient in various ways.

Nikhil asked us to describe our approaches to the revolutionary narrative and how we situate it in relation to current disavowals and affirmations, and the way he asked the question made me realize, as a historian who focuses on the revolution and the post-revolutionary era and political culture, how much I’ve experienced the recent waves of unthinking avowal and critical disavowal as just more extreme versions of what’s always been there cyclically and always at the same time since 1776.

I’d especially point out how contentless the contemporary Trumpian version of the embrace of the flag and of 1776 is. It’s all spectacle, no references to anything actual about the past. You don’t even get the capital F founders, and that post-Bicentennial of the Constitution upraising of the founders as wise men that was so much a part of what Aziz describes as that worship of the Constitution. That was not always there, and it took a century to construct, as Aziz describes in his book. Obama quite deliberately, as a law professor, was reaching for the center when he said Founders. It’s really interesting to me that he emphasized the Founders and how much that was a reach across the aisle to emphasize the Founders and their vision, as opposed to the ordinary people that made the Revolution happen in the streets. There’s no mention of the Committees of Correspondence, the Boston Tea Party, any number of things you could do to emphasize just how active and participatory the Revolution was.

On the other hand, in the 1619 Project, you get a different version of revolutionary consensus that presumes that because the revolution didn’t abolish slavery, that there was no debate, there was no conflict, there was no ambivalence, there was no course change that led to the future conflicts that actually did lead to the Civil War and ended slavery. It’s not so much that some of the founders were antislavery as it is a mirror image that is useful to construct the current politics around an idea that has a past—that rather than having to get back to it or embrace it, we have to realize how much we have to reject it or how continuous it is, how powerful the continuity is that we have to reject.

So where I come out on these things tends to emphasize the modernity of late eighteenth-century politics, the aspects that are both inspiring and disturbing in it. From the very beginning, what the Revolution was about, what it meant, was fought over and domesticated, and many aspects silenced and forgotten, but also continually conflictual. It’s not a matter of whether it was always hypocrisy or it was always pristine. People back then were both saying it was pristine, and that various aspects were hypocritical. I think it’s more constructive to think in terms of cyclical waves of domestication and repoliticization of the revolutionary legacy that are useful and that are pushed from various ends of the political spectrum with different emphases that may be domestic, maybe international, maybe local, maybe more or less nationalistic, maybe more or less economic, more or less about individual rights, about any number of things that are not just plausibly connected to the American Revolution, but which people then said the Revolution was about, and people continue to say that.

Especially given how much more mythic and distant we get from the actual history, I find myself wanting to emphasize just how much the kind of politics we see around the Revolution in the twentieth century is maybe not as much of a departure from the earlier history as we think, and that that actually maybe makes the Revolution more useful. Counterintuitively—it seems like a very early American historian point to make—but counterintuitively, I actually think it makes the more distant past more useful in the present.


Singh:Those are all such rich, incredibly wonderful answers. Already I find that I’m going to need to abandon the script that I wrote out to try to guide us through this, because now I’m buzzing with ideas, as I’m sure all the people who are listening are as well.

I’d just like to pull back a little bit and summarize a couple of points. I think there seems to be too-strong, affirmative claims that progressives and leftists will make on behalf of the revolutionary story. One would be the idea that it set the basis for what Danielle Allen has called the universal franchise and Paine called the universal struggle for liberty. So even though, as Aziz pointed out, it is not universalist, and as Adom pointed out, it is not universalist in practice, it is universalist in theory. And so there is a way in which this strong, what Aziz called rich account of republican freedom, and what David has described throughout his work in very rich detail, the kind of ordinary struggles that manifested how ordinary people understood what the Revolution meant at the time that it was being contested. These meanings retain a lot power, and we can think of them in the smoothed-out progressive terms that Obama laid out, which I think all of us would now reject, that there’s a teleological progression and it just keeps building to a more and more inclusive whole, or, I think more productively, as David has put it, we could think of the cycles or the backsliding, the reaction, the retrenchment, the way in which there’s a dialectic or a dynamic that unfolds, and that is sort of being fought out, in some ways in every period.

If that’s one kernel of the emancipatory story—that there’s this rich account of republican freedom that is universalizable—the other dimension of it would be the way Adom discusses it in her work, that it has a kind of a global remit, that it is not actually an exclusivist U.S. story. Not only is it not exclusive to the struggles of, say, elite white men, or even white men in general, or even men in general at a certain point, or Americans in general, but it has this broader resonance that then gets taken up in various moments. One of the things this discussion is making me think about is the different visions of history that we operate with in the back of our minds. I think for a long time we’ve operated with the dominant vision of history as the progressive one, and that’s why I started with Obama. And then I think nowadays we have a vision of history that is actually quite starkly regressive, in the sense that it suggests our history is regressive. Not that the people who are articulating that history are necessarily politically regressive—in fact, they’re often on the left—but suggesting that there’s certain aspects of our historical past that are, as Saidiya Hartman put it in one piece, set in stone. That we’re weighed down or anchored by certain historical realities or inheritances. And as Aziz put it in his opening comment, this conflict between the rich account of freedom and the structural conditions. We might think of the structural conditions as part of what that weight is. So how do each of you think through the nature of this impasse in more detail? I have a question for each of you to prompt you a little further. I know I just kind of ruminated in a way that may or may not be helpful.

Adom, you talk about this idea of anticolonial appropriations of the American Revolution, or re-deployments of the American Revolution, and occupying this site of strategic leverage between the gap between practices and ideals, suggesting that these ideals allow us to move beyond these corrupt practices. And even more, you suggest that in the anticolonial context, the ideals themselves are going to be transformed. But of course, even in the anticolonial context, we can see how that dynamic has in some sense collapsed. So how do you, in your work, account for how this leverage worked in the past? How do you understand how this leverage worked, why it has collapsed? And then what we’re left with in the current moment in terms of the operations or prospects of salvage? Do we return, for example, to some idea of strategic leverage and some effort to renew this tension between ideals and practices? Or is that just over and done with? In other words, is there still cyclical energy in the contexts that you have studied and the histories that you have studied that we might look to in the current moment?


Getachew:I wanted to say one thing first about just the point you were making, Nikhil, around the sense of stuckness or regression. I think what David said, that it’s a moment of a modern revolutionary project, is one thing that connects 1776 through the twentieth century. These are actors who are modernists in the sense that they think they have the capacity to remake the world. They have a Promethean sense of their own capacities. I think that’s a really important way to think about the connection of Third World revolutionaries to the American and French Revolutionary periods. It does seem to me that Promethean sense of capacity to remake the world does not characterize contemporary social movements or actors we might think of as having a progressive vision of the world, and that, in the words of someone like David Scott, there is a real rupture or transformation, a kind of decline of that form of revolutionary self-conception, revolutionary politics. What comes in the wake of that, what sorts of ways people are thinking about futures and futurity, I think is a question worth thinking about and talking through in the contemporary moment.

But to the specific question about anticolonial strategic leverage, I think what I try to show in the essay is that—it’s interesting, actually, even if you look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a number of not-yet-anticolonial actors, colonial subjects around the world, did think with the American example, but in ways that were strikingly different from 1945, in the sense that often in the early twentieth century, the United States was, say, in the case of West African writers, an example of a bad route to go. This is the country of Jim Crow, and they’re using the American example in that case to compel Britain to act differently vis-à-vis its West African colonies.

In the early twentieth century, the United States is this third site that helps colonial subjects negotiate their own relationship to the imperial power that they’re subjected to. By the mid-twentieth century, precisely as the United States comes to play such a dominant hegemonic role in the shaping of international institutions and international politics, and also in a moment where the kind of contours or the shape of that postwar world order is still open, there’s a different way of relating to the United States, drawing on its own ideals in an effort not just to these are what your ideals say and this is how they should be realized, but actually, in this moment in the mid-twentieth century, your ideals mean a universal right to self-determination. I think that universalization of a right to self-rule is really an anti-imperial, twentieth century inheritance project, rather than one from the American Revolutionary period. The thing that makes that strategic leverage in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s possible is both U.S. hegemony and a sense that there is political opening, that the terms of that international order are not yet set in stone, so there’s space for a radical reimagining of it or transformation of it. It’s in that moment that this strategic leverage is possible.

That leverage seems not possible in this context for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, I think the social and political forces of the Third World aren’t there in the same way, but it also seems like, in a context where you have a form of American global dominance that no longer has a moralizing or legitimizing language, it’s very difficult to turn to the resources within that tradition. I think that we don’t have to think of that as simply a Trumpian product. It’s not entirely unprecedented. It goes back to what I was saying earlier. I mean, even if you’re in the Obama era, and on the one hand, you have this soaring discourse about American ideals and their progressive realization, at the same time, you have war, drone strikes, etc., that are happening without any of the checks and the restraints that international institutions were meant to produce. I do think that consistently having lived since World War II in that context of idealization of American power on the one hand, and a practice of imperial power that consistently undermines those ideals and also is unrestrained by all the forms of restraint that were created in that period, really makes it difficult to believe that there’s something to be gained from occupying that space of the gap.

But even if that’s the case, I think there are other reasons that U.S. global politics continues to be very important for the rest of the world for a variety of reasons, whether it’s cuts to USAID or immigration policy. So it’s not to say that it’s no longer a place that people are attentive to, and I think another reason that it always captures people’s imagination is because of the forms of domestic progressive politics that are still possible in the country, that have to do with the Black freedom struggle. Increasingly, the whole world is in the United States. It is a Black and brown coalition that’s out on the streets, whether it’s 2020 with George Floyd, or more recently with the ICE raids. So I do think this David and Goliath story within the United States continues to be a source of inspiration and energy for global politics around the world.


Singh:I think that’s a great point, and it makes me think about some of the banal observations of the World Cup; the horrors of U.S. conduct in denying visas, in forcing terrible, unequal conditions on the Iranian team, not allowing many, many fans from any part of Africa to even come into the United States, these differential kinds of scrutiny that have been applied to different teams depending upon their national origin, and then the stories of ordinary conviviality, which are not necessarily the stories of resistance that you’re referring to in places like Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country around ICE and the immigration politics of the Trump administration, but nonetheless these quite inspiring stories of quotidian cosmopolitanism even in places where we don’t think of that being present. I think of the long piece I read about the diner somewhere in Kansas where all the Algerians were being treated to waffles by some local guy. Of course, I don’t want to romanticize that and turn this into a story about the goodness of the ordinary person. But it does bring me back a little bit to some of David’s thinking on this.

I wonder, David, if you could elaborate a little bit more on this idea in terms of the domestic resonance of the revolutionary project, not necessarily just in the current moment, but throughout this long past where ordinary sort of struggles have taken up a revolutionary spirit or aspiration in the streets, as you say. You point out that it’s almost impossible as a radical person in the United States, as a left person in the United States historically, to not at some point to return to that possibility. You say, quoting Staughton Lynd, every variant of American radicalism has “taken the Declaration of Independence as their point of departure and claimed to be the true heirs of the spirit of ’76.” I love that idea. I still think it’s hard to kind of embrace it in the current moment because of the weight of this idea that our history is so regressive, and of course that’s been amplified a thousand times by Trump. But are there these moments that you can refer us to, and what do you make of that idea in the current context?


Waldstreicher:I don’t want to let go of that other image of a diner in Kansas, which is such a tonic compared to the usual invocations of what’s really going on in diners and what they mean politically. But maybe I’ll start with Staughton Lynd.

That quote’s drawn from Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, which I consider to be a classic that deals with these very questions. Staughton was trying to talk back to a tendency he associated with the New Left, which was rejecting everything about the past and taking right-wing accounts of the American past and centrist accounts at their word and thus not finding anything useful in it. What he did was take the story back to seventeenth-century English radicalism, as well as forward to the abolitionists, to Debs, to Martin Luther King Jr., and trace the continuity of ideas and rhetorics. One of the reasons I find it so useful to go back to that book and why I find things in it that surprise me even after multiple re-readings is that he very concisely finds a lot of quite specific and material tendencies that aren’t just about invocations of rights or even universal human rights, although he does trace that, but also controversies over self-government that became useful at specific moments when the government was oppressing radicals and progressives, and people like Thoreau were objecting to wars and to taxes and to specific kinds of oppression that could be felt on the local level, but which had national and international implications. Yes, this was a nationalist tradition, but it was also international and universal. And he does use words like cosmopolitan in explicating it; he’s being quite self-conscious. He’s writing during the Vietnam War, for which he was most famous, rightly, for being an activist against.

What we’re seeing, and what I write about in my essay, is that, with respect to some recent books on the Revolution, historians are looking back, and they’re finding a lot that’s quite usable and quite specific in the struggles around the American Revolution. Andrew Edwards writes a book, Money and the Making of the American Revolution, where he says that all those taxes they were complaining about, they’re not just about being taxed and not wanting to pay taxes that are passed by your colony legislature, or we really should have representation in Parliament. It’s about the money supply. It’s about the ability of far-away elites to change the rules and determine how payments are paid and how interest is calculated and everything about the political economy, basically, in ways that that could get worse and worse, and that was a continual issue in the late colonial period that came to a head in over how taxes would be paid in the 1760s and ’70s. These were folks who were just complaining about taxes, even though they weren’t as taxed as much as English people were in the period, is a common line in the mainstream scholarship about the revolution. Suddenly, the American revolutionaries look like people who have a sophisticated understanding that comes out of their experience, whether they’re merchants or whether they’re tradesmen trying to figure out how to get paid by their customers. These are very real issues, and they are products of a banking and financial system where the relationship between paper money and hard currency and speculation is changing and up for grabs, and a site of both increasing wealth accumulation and expropriation of land, and conflict.

That’s just one example. Sarah Pearsall’s book and Richard Bell’s point out a lot of things about the way that the American Revolution was a world war and was understood as having international implications from the get-go, and part of that is questions of strategic leverage on the part of the revolutionaries, quite aware that there’s a British East India company that is being criticized and that is doing things that then might be done to them, just as one example. The political economy of warfare coming out of the Seven Years War, coming out of other things that the empire is doing, coming out of the continuing question of war on indigenous peoples, has huge implications for ordinary people and how those battles are going to be fought. Then there are other books, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s new book and Thomas Richards’s book, that stress how much the debate over what the Revolution had been was open-ended in the early republic, and was not only open-ended, but also had these international dimensions. People were quite aware that broad cosmopolitan international claims for the significance of the revolution helped justify it, helped get foreign aid, and had implications for what would happen, and were certainly always related to the question of it being a settler revolt, but also were related to international politics and the claim that, having achieved this anticolonial revolt which hadn’t been possible earlier and which was a new kind of politics that put the United States into an interesting and uneasy relationship to European powers and to the rest of the Americas, which became increasingly clear and is such an important theme in the recent work on the early republic and even into the into the later nineteenth century, as well as obviously beyond.

I guess the takeaway for me is that the emphasis on ever-expanding rights that we got in the consensus Obama version reflected the civil rights movement and the domestication of the civil rights movement, where the story of expansion and things getting better and better is going to be limited to individual rights. Maybe we can agree on that, and maybe that can be separated from the rest of politics, but that’s not what actually happened in the American Revolution, even though we do end up with a very specific Bill of Rights, which we then later would conflate with, everything that’s great about the Constitution is in the Bill of Rights. Actually, the Constitution is all these compromises, which had all these implications for all these questions of political economy and federalism, and what the government could and couldn’t do, and what ordinary people could and couldn’t do, including the question of future rebellions and separatist movements and politics in the streets and elsewhere.

I’ll just end by reiterating the point that it’s very easy to forget that the American Revolution was a modern revolution. Maybe pre-modern revolutions also had people in the streets and were called rebellions, but there is something about the way that the American Revolution scaled up from local street action through the use of new media to become extra-local and unruly that is distinctively modern, and not only directly inspirational, but also analogous to newer political possibilities that we’ve seen in recent years. I guess the other side of it, though, is that for every—and here, a corrective to Lynd would be, for every way in which leftists and radicals used the American Revolution to advance the cause, right wingers did that too. Conservatives did that too, often creatively remixing, as Nikhil points out in his essay with respect to Indian wars, specifically drawing on the settler revolt and the sense of “we white people own it, and you can’t do that because it’s ours.” That is an important a part of American political traditions. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s been so dialectical.


Singh:That’s great. And it leads to my question to Aziz. I think this has been a great discussion and I think, perhaps even surprising to some of the listeners, how quite optimistic in some ways it is, despite the fact that all of your work is very, very critical. I feel this way about mine too, not to bring too much of myself into this, but I thought my essay in The Guardian was actually somewhat hopeful in some ways, although that wasn’t necessarily how people read it. I think people read any commentary these days, especially from the right, where you’re critical, as you’re trashing America, or you’re saying it’s about white people, or something like that, when in fact, I think all of you are saying that there’s something incredibly rich and powerful in this sort of revolutionary narrative that has been taken up and has led to certain moments of really intense conflict and even advanced certain social goals that we might have. It brings me back to Aziz’s work.

I think you have a sentence in your essay, Aziz, where you say what I think of as the sentence that best sums up the radical kernel that’s running through this conversation—I don’t know if I would say this is Promethean, but I do want to know if we still believe this idea, and I kind of think that we do, and this is the optimistic part—that organized publics have a collective capacity to “exercise constituent power.” Those are Aziz’s words. And of course, by organized publics, we mean people who become animated by a sense of a problem that affects us collectively. We assert our capacities as a collective by virtue of our ability to organize, to speak with one another, to lobby, to appear in the streets, to vote, to do a whole set of political repertoires that we have available to us, in order to exert this idea of constituent power. And I think that’s the kernel of it. It’s not the constituted powers of those who are already in office or those who already control the levers of the bureaucracy, or those who have all the wealth and the comforts that put them at the top of the society. It’s the powers of people to constitute themselves as a people, as people who can act collectively and make demands and therefore transform and change the dispositions of power and the distributions of resources that really matter. That seems to be the idea that is the revolutionary idea, at least in theory. And one that we would all, I think, probably still hold onto as a possibility of what we mean, maybe by politics itself.

When we think of the collective capacity for organized publics to exercise constituent power, Aziz, in an era in which you say, the American Revolution, as we understand it, is in global retreat, in part because of the countervailing capacities of the powerful, including enormously powerful individuals who have amassed enormous fortunes and who control the levers of government and militaries and police forces to limit our collective capacities, to fragment and fracture our collective capacities, to manipulate our understanding of the world, to encourage us to think of a world that is defined in terms of friends and enemies, and as you say, to sow fear in the collective—and the use of the politics of fear, it seems to me, is a very important part of this—how do you assess this balance of forces and capacities in this moment? Because it does seem that this idea of collective capacity and constituent power that we see as a continuous feature of our modernist inheritance is in some ways on the ropes, but it’s also clearly still very present. It’s clearly still emergent always, and we see it in so many different places, whether it’s what Adom discussed in terms of the struggles in Minneapolis, or whether what we’ve seen recently in the formal electoral arena in New York City, or in the ordinary stories we see of people trying to organize and mobilize in relationship to the various problems that affect them as publics, which is always happening. So where do you take us from here?


Rana:Echoing what Adom and David have already said, for me, when I think about what the most valuable element of the revolutionary tradition is, it’s precisely the fact that the U.S. Revolution is not exceptional. It’s one of a series of revolutionary moments that takes place in the late eighteenth century. There’s the French Revolution, and I would say probably the most significant of these is the Haitian Revolution, a successful revolt of enslaved persons that really sparks what’s going to be the assertiveness of non-white peoples that are colonized across the globe. And then there’s the American Revolution as well. And the heart of it is the idea that if you face oppression by state forces or those in power—this is language that’s sometimes less emphasized in what we invoke from the Declaration of Independence—then the people have a collective right and capacity to replace that government with a form of government that’s consistent with their own accounts of freedom. And that’s a kind of remarkable thing.

I think one thing that’s worth noting is that if you just think about the bicentennial in ’76, and even some of the 250 celebrations now, the Bicentennial of the Constitution, the official story almost always de-emphasizes the unruliness of this revolutionary tradition, and the sense in which it is inherently a project of the oppressed. Instead, it becomes transformed into something quite different, which is turning a story about revolution into a story about order and stability that valorizes a set of elites, Founding Fathers that are themselves deeply gendered. I would say, if we think about why it is that so many Americans from so many different backgrounds over the course of the twentieth century came to identify with the revolutionary tradition—including, I would add, in more complicated ways, Native peoples too, rejecting the idea of the ways in which the Independence Project is an erasure of Native American independent political status on the same landmass, but also invoking arguments about self-determination, even if self-determination is meant to operate alongside or in kind of complicated relationship with a U.S. state—the reason has very little to do with framers, founders, the embrace, but it instead has to do with the fact that in the mid-twentieth century, there was this sense that the United States was a profoundly dynamic country. It was a country whose culture, whose definition of peoplehood, whose economic system, whose political system was open to potential remaking. It’s why folks in the independence movements globally felt like they could make contact with the American story, as Adom was suggesting. It’s why folks from Debs all the way to Huey Newton invoked revolutionary politics, because of this idea of a kind of open unfolding of American possibility.

I would argue that had a lot to do with very particular structural dynamics between the ’30s and the ’60s. It had a lot to do with the power of the labor movement, with the context of global decolonization and the Cold War, with how the interactions of the international and the domestic created all sorts of pressures on elites to be responsive, to mobilize bases as a condition for altering the terms of American life. It’s why you had transformations in migration policy, so that you had policies from the ’60s that opened the country to immigration from Asia and Africa. This is precisely what I think many folks valorize when they’re thinking about the revolutionary tradition, even if they’re not saying it explicitly.

To talk about the United States today is calcified. Not to say that it doesn’t seem like there’s a potential for change, but it seems instead that right now, in the United States, that the capacity for change is really connected to the ability of specific economic and political elites to take advantage of a broken political system to essentially break some of the achievements of the twentieth century and impose their own interests. It’s expressive in the idea that Trump essentially can ensure that he and his friends are free from any kinds of constraints or consequences for their own legality while using the legal and political system to impose violence on those that are deemed enemies, or to use the security state to attack folks in Black and brown communities. There is still this vibrant memory of a country that has this kind of dynamism, and yet the reality of institutions and elites that are able to exercise power in ways that subverts the ability of ordinary folks to actually produce something like a multiracial democracy, and to use calcified institutions that feel like they are, rather than representative of something like a constituent power or We the People, are instead representative of just the will of a few.

In a way, I think the thing that’s interesting about this moment is it’s truly the best of times and the worst of times. Because on the one hand, I think what you can say is that social democratic forces are more intellectually present and politically vibrant in some ways than they’ve been maybe since the 1930s and ’40s. It’s not a coincidence that just as Trump is president, the mayor of the unofficial capital of the United States is Mamdani, who’s very much a product of like Third World ideas of democratic possibility. So you have a vibrant left, you also have a growing, I think, grassroots popular front that we can see through things like No Kings, that says that a response to Trump has to be a fundamental accounting with the degree of impunity that those in power have enjoyed.

But at the same time, I think there’s real issues about the extent to which U.S. institutions as they’re currently organized can be a basis for expressing this insurgent popular sensibility. It produces, I think, a real tension in the moment, where just because the U.S. has all of this global power, it is absolutely essential for Americans domestically to have a sustained conversation about what the country is going to be going forward and to take account for the forms of violence that it has been responsible for from Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza all the way to the border. But at the same time, it also is a real question about what are the actual pathways? To what extent can the typical pathways of representative government, electoral and legal means, be adequately used as a way of having this kind of an accounting? And that’s essentially, I think, the real question for the present, which is the emergence of a sensibility that I think reflects the very best of the revolutionary tradition in a context in which the institutional casing for its typical expression is incredibly brittle, and how to work through that tension.


Singh:That’s a very rich and provocative question, I think, and maybe David or Adom, you might want to take a stab at it? I mean, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t really have anything else to ask specifically, because I think what this conversation has done is outlined a certain kind of impasse that we find ourselves in.

Part of the way that I think about it, and I think part of the paradox is that progressive story that I started with, that we started discussing, tells us about the layering of emancipatory milestones where we reach the end of history, was in its own way quite oppressive, and it took all the oxygen out of the room and told us there was nothing left to do, even though we knew we were on this ship heading towards an iceberg after 2008. And of course, the ship hit the iceberg and sprung a leak and Donald Trump has been looting what he can ever since to try and find the safe harbor for the smallest number of people. I think that most people in this period have felt pretty shipwrecked and politically homeless. I think that also, in some ways, does apply to many people who obviously have ended up voting for the right in the recent period. But then as we get this apprehension of the United States as a place that no longer really has any ideas worth upholding, or that certainly can’t or doesn’t uphold those ideals, or upholds them only in the most bellicose and kind of crude ways where they’re trumpeted in our face, we exhaust this more productive dynamic that Adom has described between the tension of practices that don’t live up to ideals, how do we think of the project of renewal?

Obviously, part of what we look to is what ordinary people do, but ordinary people are inhabiting this, as Aziz put it, these sets of institutions that don’t really work to channel expression and politics productively and constructively. They are themselves brittle, they are themselves highly subject to manipulation, memories and attention spans are short and they’re getting shorter and they’re being fractured, and sometimes we don’t even really know what’s true and what’s not true in terms of what is being presented to us. So I think there’s a lot in this conversation that makes me very hopeful, and there’s actually a lot in this current moment living in New York City that makes me very hopeful. And I guess I just want to think about how you all would think about that right now together. Where are the points of emergence, even you’ve identified some of them already? Is this the kind of conversation we should really be having? A conversation that really says, to go back to David’s point, that we are the true heirs of the American Revolutionary tradition, that there is a possibility of refounding something in this country that disinters the richness of our republican ideas of freedom from the expansionist, war-making, coercive histories to which it’s constantly being tied down to?

I do think Mamdani is an interesting example of this, not least for the reasons that all of you have pointed out, and that is really, I think, fundamentally, that he draws also from a set of non-U.S. trajectories. And yet that is in certain ways one of the hardest things to sort of insert into our discussion today, particularly as there are openings on the right to these ideas now, the ideas of reasserting constituent power. But as David points out, they’re very, very strongly tied to nativism. They’re very, very strongly tied to a resurgent notion that the “we” is something called the “heritage American,” or whatever that might be. Whereas I think sometimes on the left, we’re not as confident about laying claim in this moment to this kind of revolutionary heritage. I mean, I’ve never had this experience in my life, as someone who’s studied U.S. history and taught it for almost half a century, of having people say things to me now like, “well, we’re not going to learn U.S. history from someone with the name Singh, because you couldn’t possibly know anything about U.S. history.” It’s kind of weird—like, those are the insults I got in elementary school in New Jersey in the 1970s, people insulting me for my name. That’s now part of the American . . . I don’t know how much a part of it is, because all of this obviously manifests on social media, but it does seem to be part of the kind of right’s vernacular now. I don’t know how deep this nativist current cuts, but clearly that’s part of what will have to be defeated in this moment.

To move forward, just as one kind of example, not to mention the others, the other obstacles we face. So anyway, do you guys have parting thoughts, based upon what I’ve just kind of spit back at you?


Getachew:I mean, I’ll just say that I think I definitely agree with Aziz’s diagnosis of this impasse between institutions and the popular politics. But I do think on the left, it seems to me there’s still a lot of work to do to think about how the average person who goes to No Kings, who’s rejecting Trump and Trumpism, can be folded into a broader progressive agenda. I don’t think that’s true for most people. And I think this is what, in some ways, Mamdani, for a different set of constituencies, brought into politics a cohort of people who had been outside of politics, or formal politics of electoral politics.

In some ways, I think broadening the base of left formations, radical progressive formations, whether those are Movement for Black Lives or DSA—how to really think about coalitions for those kinds of politics that ranges beyond the expected demographics, skewing younger, skewing professional, etc.—I think that seems really important to me, and I do think the kind of mobilizations we’ve seen over the last year give us the basis for that. But thinking about what are the organizational forms—again, it could be the ones that exist, like DSA or others, but maybe there needs to be new ones or different ones as well, that engage in serious political education and are committed to moving people to the left, building the progressive left coalition with the hope that a larger coalition on the left perhaps can make greater forays, at least at the level of electoral politics, if not at institutional arenas.


Waldstreicher:It was really interesting this past week in the debate over the primary results in New York and the centrist Democrats who started to say, “This isn’t how we win. We win by converting Trump voters to go with Democrats.” And there was no mention of the fact that it isn’t about Trump voters, it’s about getting people who didn’t vote to vote: the other half of the people, or 40 percent or whatever it is in any given election. It’s really about politicization.

That’s, to me, one of the through lines since the Revolution, that it was so many kinds of people who didn’t participate in street theater or didn’t participate in street theater, that had direct political implications, doing so that made the revolution happen. It was really in many ways a young people’s revolution at a time when the demographics made that more possible. And when we think about how politicizing corruption can be, even in our cynical time, and how the difference between the cynical voices that say, “oh, it’s always been that way, and the Democrats are just as bad,” or “what about this and what about that,” versus the kind of disappointment and outrage we hear from younger people, I think that there are a lot of opportunities for. . . and that’s why protests that would have been considered not that unusual have been shut down, and why there’s such animus about what’s going on on college campuses. It’s not just that these folks who want to shut it down have forgotten how common this was in the ’60s and ’70s and beyond. It’s that they are afraid of losing control of the narrative, and then anything can happen.

To a significant extent, that’s what happened in the revolutionary era. There were these flashpoints, things that happened in Boston, for example, that made it mean a lot more than what than the travails of people on the waterfront in Boston, and so we might want to think about why Minneapolis? How was what happened in Minneapolis, how does that blow up? What were the structural conditions that led to that? And I think a lot of them can be tied directly back to the points about more recent developments that Adom and Aziz were pointing to that the conventional wisdom that would say that, “oh, that’s middle America, nothing can happen there.” But of course actually, because maybe the structures, even the police, maybe, or the relationship between the police and the town, were more fluid and more being reinvented in the wake of George Floyd, that maybe made things possible that were a lot less likely in Philadelphia or even Chicago. And of course, the presence of who’s there and who’s being impacted from it and the organization that it happened after George Floyd.

So there are structural conditions that I think can make us very optimistic, and sadly, one of them is going to be the profound disillusionments about what was probably the inevitable embrace of war as a solution to bad polls and to the difficulty of international relations that Trump has fallen into—even though he said he never would and never said he’d repeat those things that the Bushes did, he’s done it again, and he’s shown that however Fox News is spinning it. I wouldn’t want to underestimate its cultural power after two decades of it being in every gym and every bar in middle America, but nevertheless, there are facts that can’t be denied: that they’ve done another stupid war and it’s really expensive, and even if it doesn’t draft us, imagining myself as a younger person, even if it doesn’t get our children into the draft, it’s on the wrong side of history, and messing up our politics even more than it was already messed up by the Gaza war.


Rana:I think that the Trump return to power and the politics of the last year has exposed for large numbers of folks, and folks that are not even just typically within what you would think of as the social democratic space in the Democratic Party, the profound problems that exist. And this is itself, I think, a real opportunity, that there have been two, at least two, kind of constitutive flaws in American legal and political life that go back to the founding, frankly, but certainly have been there since the post-war period and have been essentially foreclosed from conversation because of the traditional narratives about American institutions as near ideal.

The first is that we again have representative institutions that are deeply undemocratic, that systematically enhance the power of a minority coalition that’s built really around the politics of the right and the demography of the right, facilitating white authoritarianism. And then the second is the fact that the United States and the U.S. security state, in particular, has enjoyed continuous impunity for acts of violence from the president all the way down to the local police officer, both abroad and at home. And both these features of American life—its institutions are deeply undemocratic, its state structure is marked by near absolute impunity—have been justified through narratives about American exceptionalism, about the uniqueness of the American project, the fact that actually the United States can be completely different than the rest of the world. I think there are more folks now that realize that both of these are huge problems that have to be addressed and that this is an opportunity to address them. And it produces, I think, a medium to long-term project and an immediate-term project.

The medium to long-term project is an invitation to engage in the kind of institutional renewal that actually generated the profound social achievements of the mid-twentieth century when it comes to labor and the civil rights movement, the intermediate meaning-making institutions that connect people to their workplaces, to electoral life, to their neighborhoods in ways that make the ideas of social change feel genuinely organically possible. I think one of the things that you can think of with the successes of DSA in New York City is that DSA itself is part of an institutional revival. And we can think of this operating across a whole range of spaces. So in electoral spaces with new party formations, in universities with new forms of workplace organizing, including things like the AAUP, with professional organizations, with the resurgence of labor as a way of thinking democratically about how to imagine the workplace more generally. All of this is a way of generating over the medium-to-long-term the capacity to engage in the kind of constituent power that could transform institutions more generally.

And then the second thing is, I think it produces a real question about what 2028 in particular is going to mean. It’s very possible, given how unpopular Trump is, the Democrats are going to be back in power, and the return of Democrats to power will either be a continuation of the same cycle that we have seen, which is disaffection with whoever the incumbent is, voting out of the incumbents, and then new eras of crisis and disappointment that just generate a resurgence of the far right, and then a return to a defeated centrism, or it could be an opportunity to think very seriously about, what does it mean to have a genuine accounting with the forms of violence that we’ve seen both during the Trump period and frankly, preceding it, with Biden’s own actions and complicity in Gaza and elsewhere, and whether or not there’s enough of a broader coalition that says that, actually, the United States has to impose meaningful legal limitations on the kinds of violence that it engages with both elsewhere and domestically.

And the hope is that maybe that kind of a conversation, alongside genuine institutional renewal, can produce the conditions to think both about what a transformative alternative might be for the long term, what a vision of actually equal and effective freedom might constitute for how we can reimagine the United States and its possibilities, and also an immediate-term project of holding to account those that have engaged in the most serious forms of violence in ways that the rest of us have found ourselves complicit in, precisely because we exist at the center of a global empire. I think we’re running up against what feels like a real moment of potential possibility, but in a context in which, on the one hand, there are all of these constraints, but on the other hand, there’s much more willingness to have these conversations than perhaps what we’ve seen in decades.

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