Let America be America

There’s been a minor hoo-hah over at Kos about whether or not Sen. Kerry’s new slogan/theme “Let America be America Again” is any good or not. [Note on why YHB will never really be a great blogger: while I was ruminating on the subject, and attempting to form my ruminations into coherent prose, Garance Franke-Ruta wrote 1,000 words on the same topic]

John Kerry made quite a nice speech on Monday talking about the legacy of Brown v. Board, and in it, he referred to Let America Be America Again, a 1938 poem by Langston Hughes, which contains the famous passage:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

I don’t know if somebody in the Kerry campaign has been watching anti-Bush flash movies or random blogs, or if somebody remembers the poem coming up from the bizarre, aborted “The White House Symposium on Poetry and the American Voice” fiasco, or whether somebody is just hip to Langston Hughes, and saw the Brown v. Board speech as an opportunity to slip a few lines in. At any rate, it’s apt for that topic, particularly in a speech whose anaphoric burden is (as, after all, it must be) “[W]e have more to do.” The other repeated phrase from that speech is “We have not met the promise of Brown”; the point of Mr. Hughes’ poem is that we have not met the promise of America.

When John Kerry says we should let America be America, he is talking about “The land that has never been yet—and yet must be—” He is, in fact, talking about the basic progressive idea; progressives attempt to look clear-eyed at the flaws in our world, and see how the flaws can be moderated. For a progressive, the purpose of government, really, is that the land that must be has never been yet. That’s why we back Brown, and why Mr. Hughes’ dream that was almost dead in 1938 and is still almost dead is still our dream, even knowing that it will still be almost dead in 2038 and in 2104. I like that thought, and I like the poem (mostly) and I like the speech John Kerry made.

Whether the slogan has a good chance of being politically successful is something else. I say a good chance, as the slogan John Kerry tries now need not be the slogan he uses all summer; Our Only President tried out four or five slogans (Reformer with Results!) over the course of his campaign. Of course, he lost the election. There’s a point at which you can’t keep trying new stuff or you will come off as unformed, particularly if, as with John Kerry, you really are a moderate and have a reputation as a fence-straddler, so you don’t want to waste any rhetorical oxygen on a slogan that’s a clear loser.

Is it? I think that our nation has not politically recovered enough from Ronald Reagan for the clear progressive message to resonate. When It’s broken, fix it is matched against It’s great, protect it, the former looks less patriotic, less optimistic, and less, well, winning. It may be that things are now so obviously broken that the message will resonate, but it may be that people would rather close their eyes to the problems, and may be convinced that pointing out problems is somehow unpatriotic. Further, lots of people have noticed and written about the matter that people who vote to protect are far more likely to actually vote than people who vote to correct. The progressive message may well catch on with people who might skip the election entirely, which won’t necessarily help him. It might, as even if they don’t or can’t actually vote early adopters may Tip a slogan or catchphrase into the mass of people who do vote. But ultimately, I think we’re still missing the rhetorical groundwork for Mr. Hughes’ poem to help win an election.

On the other hand, the phrase itself only connotes, rather than transmits the progressive message. It’s code. People who know and like the poem will be pleased, and those who don’t know it will not necessarily even know it’s from a poem. Let America Be America. You can interpret it as a moderate, or even as a conservative. It’s clearly a call for throwing the bums out, but doesn’t clearly evoke long-haired Saddam-loving America-haters. It can’t (reasonably) be called unpatriotic, nor is there anything to scare the complacency of the centrist who just wants things to be the way they were when he was a boy. In fact, it hints at the conservative view that may appeal to that nostalgia, while pointing out that it is Our Only President that endangers America, not only in military affairs and protection against terrorist enemies, but in our economic, social and moral sense of America.

And yet... I don’t trust a slogan that can mean anything, as it may well mean nothing. I distrust the double-tongued code, as it can be decoded, and give an appearance of dishonesty. And, after all, it doesn’t much match what I want to be the central theme of the campaign, the way in which Our Only President abandoned all of us across the country to closet himself with a cabal of greedy incompetents, to rule for their benefit, not ours. To be fought, of course, with a campaign of transparency, honesty, and inclusion. So, if I had to come up with a yes-or-no, I’d be against the slogan, although in a survey I’d be slightly, rather than strongly against it. I’ll keep in mind, though, what Garance Franke-Ruta calls the evolution of my party’s rhetoric. It’s early, yet.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.