YOU CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

To speak of the loss of America's story, then, is a fanciful but powerful way to get at this. The change is not a result of accumulation and dispassionate weighing of evidence. It proceeds from something almost a priori, the abandonment of a fundamental vision of the nation's aspirational character, of its mythos, of the wind that has lifted our wings for two and a half centuries, and replaced it with....what?

Maybe by nothing at all. Why (it may be asked) do we need a story, after all? Maybe the need for an animating story was, like the need for fairy tales, a part of our national childhood, something we have now outgrown, just as we have learned to outgrow the need for heroes and exemplars, since we now know that no one in the past has ever deserved a statue in his honor. Presumably, we'll get used to it.

Perhaps we have similarly outgrown the need for transcendence, since we have become so savvy, so clued-in to the way that human beings invent the transcendent in the image of immanent needs and desire, and then go on to exploit it as an instrument of power. So perhaps we should throw transcendence out the door too. Maybe the momentum of institutions and economics, or maybe the power of spontaneous organization, will be enough to carry us forward, and give us the staying power to raise the generations that will succeed us. Who knows? The only thing that's clear is the imperative need to resist the very idea of the national mythos.

Yet there is something interesting, if obvious, about the 1619 Project that tends to be overlooked. Although the Project's principal author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, famously declared that the national ideals were "lies" when they were stated, she made no effort to separate her Project from the truth of those ideals, let alone put forward an alternative set of ideals. It is one thing to say that the national story needs to be told in a different way--that is what the forever-revising work of historians is all about--but quite another to say that the story was a complete and utter lie that should be dispensed with tout court. The difference is enormous. 

In other words, the moral critique offered by the 1619 Project is entirely dependent upon the moral heritage carried forward by the American story. No moral heritage, no cause for outrage. What was unfortunate about the Project, and what has made it such a costly missed opportunity for America, was its stubborn and spiteful unwillingness to connect the nation's moral failings with a full account of its aspirations--the aspirations against which the gravity of those moral failings can be properly assessed.

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