Given our current torment, what do the French have to say? États-Unis: Anatomie d’une Démocratie deploys text, sidebars, graphics, and plentiful white space to dissect what makes America the society it is. Love the place or leave it, our nation has some pretty big elements that are hard to miss. But this slim, snazzy-looking guide for the French everyman manages to do so. The pioneers don’t get much of a look, and the Gettysburg Address comes and goes in the foreword’s first sentence, staying long enough to leave its famous quote (“par le people at pour le people”) and then disappear. The Declaration of Independence turns up nowhere. It’s nothing earth-shattering to say the Declaration was when America stated its mission (to be a people’s nation) and Gettysburg was when we reaffirmed and broadened the mission (to include the enslaved population). But if you want to explain America, you have to say it. Whether the mission’s been carried out or not, the sense of being on it is crucial to being American.
The book does get in other themes, which it parks atop chapters with a famous-person quotes to keep them company. These themes aren’t always flattering: “La Peur de la Démocratie” (John Adams), “Une Guerre Civile Culturelle” (Richard Nixon), and so on. But the authors, a pair of professors named Thomas Snégaroff and Romain Huret, leave untouched America-the-toxically-capitalist and America-the-culturally-backward. They focus on “le paradoxe fondateur,” meaning a dubiousness about democracy. Discourse about America often mentions “original sin,” shorthand for the slavery and racism that came along with our new country. The paradoxe fondateur appears to be original sin plus the Founders’ preference for having a republic and not a democracy. The second component, republican forms, has been useful to the first, but the book doesn’t mention that. It just bundles the two things together, which is a pairing of big dog and little dog: racism is still a force swaying American society, small-r republicanism is more of a boutique point of view. Sticking with original sin would’ve made more sense, and the killing off of the Indians could’ve been mentioned.
The book does find a useful angle when it hits the 21st century. The two foreign authors use their vantage point to highlight a grand, unwelcome thought: American democracy’s looking fragile. Since the turn of the century, they say, our society has become more military-minded, with civilians thinking of the United States as a nation at war either at home or abroad. They suggest that American life became more brutal when the veterans came home from Iraq and Afghanistan. No evidence is given except that school shootings went up during the same period, which isn’t proof. Also, a certain brutality had already entered American life, culminating in the pointless war on Iraq; this brutality was the work of the very civilian Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and Paul Wolfowitz, not to mention George W. Bush, a celebrated noncombatant. But maybe the returning soldiers accelerated the process. We don’t really hear; the subject gets two paragraphs.
The authors also point to this century’s string of elections with an asterisk on them. In 2000 and 2016, the winner had fewer votes than the loser. In 2008 and 2012, the winner had more votes but was smeared as illegitimate. In 2020, the winner had more votes and was smeared as a cheat. The authors don’t mention that three of the five asterisks were manufactured and installed by the American right, which pretended that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and that Joe Biden hadn’t outpolled Donald Trump. The other two represent cases where an outdated republican form, namely the electoral college, helped the whiter of the two parties to victory. The winner in the first case, George W. Bush, then launched war on Iraq. The winner in the second case, Donald Trump, had spread the rumors about Obama’s birth and went on to spread the rumors about Biden’s victory. He’s now stationing troops in American streets, which certainly advances the militarization of the nation. In short, a great deal of our troubles seem to have been kicked up by the right.
The professors are too demure to connect those dots. But they do find a good name for our nation’s current state. It’s the title for chapter five, which discusses the returned vets and school shootings, and which precedes the concluding chapter, a discussion of Jan. 6 (with a diagram of the Capitol grounds and a map for the route of march). Chapter five’s called “La Démocratie Brutalisée” and I think the Frogs have got a point.