The State of the Union in a fractured America
While some presidents have used the State of the Union to underscore the importance of federalism, the modern ceremony’s pomp and pageantry can just as easily lend itself to centralizing tendencies. And as hyper-partisanship grows, even the ritual itself continues to splinter: many Democrats are opting out of the State of the Union altogether as a protest of President Trump.
I’m not sure if, or how much of, the State of the Union I will watch. I’m probably influenced by former Congressman Gene Taylor, whom I worked for; he mostly skipped the State of the Union. He didn’t skip out of protest, but mostly I recall him thinking it wasn’t a good use of his time. I freely admit that I’m definitely interested in seeing the U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team celebrated endlessly.
Still, revisiting State of the Union addresses from earlier, more precarious periods in American history can yield valuable insights. In his second annual message to Congress, Abraham Lincoln urged Americans to “disenthrall ourselves” so we could “save our country.” He was calling the nation to face the burden before it head-on, without any fantasy, escapism, or self-deception.
Thankfully we don’t have a civil war going on now but we do have critical problems with overspending in Washington, cultural breakdown, and a lot of broken politics. But I do think even though the State of the Union, as performance, lends itself to some centralizing tendencies, it should also remind us not to be passive observers in front of a television. A free people don’t just wait for national leaders to act; they take responsibility for their own communities and chart their own destiny. That mindset remains widespread in America, but there’s room for improvement: too many people still expect national politicians to rescue them.
I liked these lines from President Trump’s State of the Union address in 2018, which sums up a lot of the work at American Habits:
It was a small cluster of colonies caught between a great ocean and a vast wilderness. But it was home to an incredible people with a revolutionary idea: that they could rule themselves. That they could chart their own destiny. And that, together, they could light up the world.
That is what our country has always been about. That is what Americans have always stood for, always strived for, and always done.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat