The Myth of the Border Wall
Where the American frontier once symbolized perennial rebirth, President Trump’s signature project now looms like a national tombstone.
By Greg Grandin
Mr. Grandin is a professor of history.
All nations have borders, but only the United States has had a frontier — or at least a frontier that served as a symbol for freedom, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.
For over a century, the American frontier represented the universalism of the nation’s ideals. It suggested not only that the country was moving forward, but also that the brutality involved in moving forward would be transformed into something noble. Extend the sphere of America’s influence, as James Madison believed, and you would ensure peace, protect individual liberty and dilute factionalism. As our boundaries widened, all of humanity would become our country. There was no problem caused by expansion that couldn’t be solved by more expansion.
But today the frontier is closed. The country has lived past the end of that myth. After centuries of pushing forward across the frontier — first, the landed frontier, then the frontiers of expanding economic markets and sweeping military dominance — all the things that expansion was supposed to preserve have been destroyed, and all the things it was meant to destroy have been preserved. Instead of peace, there is endless war. Instead of prosperity we have intractable inequality. Instead of a critical, resilient and open-minded citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold.
Where the frontier once symbolized perennial rebirth, Donald Trump’s border wall — even if it remains mostly phantasmagorical, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House — now looms like a tombstone.
A fortunate few, of course, still have access to something that looks like a frontier. Post-Cold-War globalization has afforded corporations their own endless horizons. And the fantasies of the superrich, no less than their capital, are given free range: They imagine themselves as living in floating villages beyond government control, or they fund research meant to help them escape death, upload their consciousness into the cloud or fly off to Mars.
But for most everyone else in America, the boundaries of freedom have contracted. A whole generation may never recover from the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008. Social mobility is stagnant. And there is a growing sense — as vast stretches of the American West burn, as millions of trees die, as the acidifying oceans fill up with plastic and as species disappear — that the world stands on the precipice of catastrophe.
It might be tempting to think that President Trump’s border wall represents a more accurate, hard-bitten assessment of how the world works. The frontier was, after all, a mirage, an ideological relic of a naïve or dishonest universalism. There were, in fact, limits and costs to America’s seemingly unstoppable growth. The border wall, in contrast, is a monument to disenchantment, to a brutal geopolitical realism: Racism was never transcended; there’s not enough wealth to go around; not everyone in the global economy can have a seat at the table.
In a nation like ours, founded on a cult of exceptionalism — a belief that the country was somehow exempt from the burdens of history — the realization that life isn’t limitless was bound to be traumatic. It was also bound to produce, in the symbol of a wall, its own governing illusion.
To talk about the frontier was a way of talking about American-style capitalism, about its power and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Mr. Trump figured out that to talk about the border, and to promise a wall, was a way of acknowledging capitalism’s limits, its costs, without having to challenge the status quo. He won the presidency by running against the entire postwar order: interventionism, austerity and unfettered corporate power. But unable to offer an alternative other than driving the existing agenda forward at breakneck speed, he pledged instead to build a wall.
Whether or not the wall gets built, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint but no longer pretends that everyone can be free, and it enforces that reality through cruelty, domination and racism. Even as President Trump, the wall’s builder, insists that the world now has limits, he himself cultivates a petulant hedonism, an unchecked freedom to hate, an enraged refusal of constraint.
The power of frontier Americanism had been its ability to take social conflict, be it settler-style racism or the demand for more equitable wealth distribution, and resolve it through a vibrant, forward-moving political centrism that could credibly claim to be an expression of liberal universalism. Maybe after President Trump is gone, that center can be re-established. But it seems doubtful.
Politics appears to be moving in two opposite directions. One way, nativism beckons; Mr. Trump, for now, is its standard-bearer. The other way, some kind of social democracy calls, especially to younger voters. Coming generations will face a stark choice, one long deferred by the allure of frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism and socialism.
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