I can't overstate my admiration for this outstanding history. It illuminates the tension, indeed the fight for the true meaning of "freedom" between the poles of ensuring and supporting the freedom of every person and the freedom claimed and asserted by individuals to essentially do what they choose even as and if it deprives the rights of others. As Cowie writes, "By. recognizing discrimination, white supremacy, economic power, and the capacity for violence as dimensions pf what 'freedom' has always meant, we gain a fresh perspective on central problems of American ideology and practice. A core dimension of freedom is an expression of power".
Cowie develops this timeless history while never failing to engage the reader with fluent and often inspiring prose and individual stories capturing broadly applicable themes thorough the lens one area of the country--southeastern Alabaman, Barbour County over the course of two centuries. He frames the history in the context of America's being born at "a unique confluence of two streams of global history: settler colonialism and chattel slavery". He describes our experience as being even more unique because our nation was founded "on a premise so deeply wedded to the combined ancient republican values of freedom and democratic governance".
Cowie shows how the oppression of individual rights, beginning with the Creek Indians, to African Americans has been waged at the local level and contested and thwarted only by Federal Action which has all too often proved insufficient and temporary and indeed used by its opponents as a further reason to demand a locally imposed definition of "freedom" which entitles the denial of "freedom" to others. Again, Cowie writes: "we learn that federal power has proven itself, quite consistently, by design and practice, to be inadequate to the basic claims of citizenship by the people" Cowie goes on to lament that "one of the great ironies of American history is that federal power has a far better record of breeding anti-statists than it does disciplining them.
This commitment to "anti-statism" has too often been a cover for discrimination against blacks, immigrants and other minorities. It has been turned into "anti-elites" as well by politicians from Governor George Wallace to Nixon to Trump.
It is striking to read how Wallace's platform and very words mirror those followed by Trump. It fed off "victimization" at the hands of the Federal government and intellectual elites and indulged in outlandish untruths and the aura employed by "strongmen" through all time.
As Cowie cogently writes, "Freedom has always been a contested, messy, and ill defined concept..but it is crucial to recognize that the anti-statist, white power version of it is not an aberration but a virulent part of the American idiom".
He concludes, "To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative. We ought not embrace the cruelty of the past, but neither should we continue the malignant idea that this story of oppression was never the 'real' American story. The solution is to commit to a bright, sharp, militant defense of the one single, unambiguous thing that the federal government should do defend. the civil and political rights on the local level for all people--cries of freedom to the contrary be damned".
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Insightful (and painful) exploration of freedom, the Feds, and resentment politics.
Professor Cowie’s clean, potent, and precise prose hooks you from the very first page. Speaking to a shivering crowd on a cold Alabama winter afternoon, the “man who would become the firebrand of the modern conservative movement seemed to breath history and exhale ghosts.” Sustaining a smooth and rhythmic beat throughout the book, Cowie traces the battle between the “freedom” to dominate others and the federal government’s uneven but crucial commitment to enabling all Americans to secure something resembling the “full blessing of American life.” Get this guy a Pulitzer.
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