The Scene
“Children will be taught to love America. Children will be taught to be patriots,” Stephen Miller said on Thursday. “We’re gonna make sure these funds are not being used to promote communist ideology.”
He said that right after I’d talked to Greg Grandin, the Pulitzer-winning historian and author of America, América, a massive new book that covers the creation of the United States and its neighbors as one big story. Alternative histories of our country have had a rough ride, recently, epitomized by that Miller quote. “The 1619 Project,” in which the true founding was the arrival of slaves in North America, was adopted by blue state classrooms, then drummed out of red state classrooms.
Grandin doesn’t expect the same fate for his book, which is full of revelations, even for people with a solid understanding of the United States. The Trump administration’s talk about annexing Canada, which helped Prime Minister Mark Carney win this week’s election, gets covered as a wild departure from norms. So does the new right’s affinity for El Salvador and the deportation of illegal immigrants here to a mega-prison there.
This book, the best piece of nonfiction so far this year, corrects some of the lazy thinking about what America (the country) does and doesn’t do, and clarifies what, exactly, is new about its Trump-led strategy of domination.
“During WWII, Latin Americans, and much of the world, thought they were not only fighting against Nazism but for social democracy, for social rights and social citizens. Latin Americans today, fending off the forces of darkness, still think so, still believe that if democracy is to be something more than a heraldic device, it must confront entrenched power.”
This is an edited transcript of my talk with Grandin.
The View From Greg Grandin
David Weigel: How were the British colonization and the Spanish colonization of the Americas intertwined, ideologically?
Greg Grandin: When I look at the Spanish conquest, I look at the moral critique that emerges out of it. The key figures are Bartolomé de las Casas, Francisco de Vitoria, and they create a formidable critique, a moral judgment against what Spain is doing. Of course, it doesn’t stop the Spanish conquest in any way. But it certainly is a crisis within Catholicism that produces this debate, giving rise to the principle of human equality, questioning the right of conquest.
So the Virginia Company is sitting around in 1609 in London, wondering if they should issue some proclamation to justify colonization of what will become Jamestown and then eventually Plymouth. They’ve read Vitoria, they’ve read de las Casas. They say, well, the Spaniards have been arguing about this for a century, and they can’t find a coherent justification for conquest, much less slavery. Maybe it’s better that we don’t say anything at all. Eventually, after the Powhatan attack on Jamestown in 1622, they do claim justification — saying that they were fighting a “just war.” But for the most part, moral evasion was the hallmark of English settlement, while, for Spanish Catholics, the dispossession of Native Americans was an ongoing moral problem.
Once they’re being settled, why do they head in such different directions?
It’s rooted in the social structures of the Spanish empire, and the ideological justifications for Spanish colonialism. The Spanish built an empire that was assumed to be universal. Catholicism was the bearer of universal history and universal wisdom. In the Americas, even as they build an empire they claimed was universal, they did so by creating an administrative system that recognized differences, and created legal redress, for different ethnic racial groups. Even as those racial groups were divided and subdivided, and new categories were created.
Centuries later, independence leaders understood their break with Spain as a chance to right the wrongs of the conquest and colonialism. Now, the gap between reality and practice was something else, and we can talk about that. But that gap matters, right? It creates the conditions of what’s possible. In contrast to Spanish republicans, the leaders of US independence didn’t feel like they were atoning for the settlement of Plymouth. They didn’t feel like they had any grievances with British colonialism, except for the grievances with King George III that they put into the Declaration of Independence.
Spanish republicanism was much more capacious in its emancipationist vision. It understood enslavement not just as chattel slavery of African Americans, but of the servitude of Native Americans. In some countries, slavery persisted. In other countries, it was abolished immediately. But the idea of emancipation was built into the revolution. Simón Bolívar admired the United States, but he didn’t think that the social basis of US republicanism — of restraining the state to free individual ambition — would lead to a virtuous society.
So is there some historical basis for what’s going on now with the United States and El Salvador — of saying, you get to take our prisoners and we’ll pay for it?
No, I think it’s unprecedented. We could talk about different plans to export Native Americans beyond the frontier to Oklahoma and elsewhere. We could talk about Liberia. We could talk about Guantanamo, a place that can deal with the excess of people that don’t fit within the legal regime or social structure of the country. But to actually make a deal with somebody who, by all accounts, is a dictator, is something else entirely. Bukele created social peace by cutting a deal with the upper echelon of the gangs. He allowed them to make money if they decreased their killings, and he said, we’re going to throw your rank and file in prison. There is no precedent for working with that. The meeting with Bukele in the White House — I had never seen anything like it. The glee, the laughing, the impunity that was on display. When we interned the Japanese, we built camps and put the people in them on US soil, right? We didn’t send them to Peru. Although we did get Peru to intern their own Japanese immigrants. In fact, Peru wound up sending many of their Japanese citizens to the US to be interned.
Right now, you see an Alberta independence movement in Canada; you have Trump talking about annexing Canada or Greenland, and re-taking the Panama canal. That’s often covered as a break from American tradition: This isn’t who we are. But how much of this expansionism is rooted in our histories?
I do think Trump is unique. What he’s doing is a reassertion of the doctrine of conquest. He’s not going to get Canada. I don’t know what he’s going to do with Greenland. But he’s signaling very clearly that he rejects the premise of the rules-based order, of cooperation and shared interests. And that premise, to a large degree, comes out of Latin America. It joins the world order as a league of nations. It’s not one republic against Great Britain. It’s seven republics against Spain, and they have to learn how to live with each other. They have to learn how to deal with each other.
What would have stopped Argentina from looking at the United States and saying: You know what? We want the Pacific, too. Well: Chile was there. So, the weakening of the doctrine of conquest begins in Latin America, along with this sense that the international order should be organized around cooperation, not competition, and should be geared towards solving common problems. Trump is clearly saying that is no longer the premise. Maybe James K. Polk and Andrew Jackson believed some of that, but even Theodore Roosevelt was very willing to work with the international law movement to figure out a way to organize the nations of the world.
We’ve seen the Trump administration take more control of museums and historical associations, and talk about the sort of patriotic curricula they want in schools. Do you see anything in your book that might cross with them, and get it banned?
You know, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can say and write whatever you want about Latin America. It’s not Israel. I mean, how did I become the C. Vann Woodward professor of history at Yale University? If there was some effort to get it banned, I think that would be great. It would mean some attention is finally being paid to Latin America.