The long-standing fault lines that define a divided America

The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict With Itself *****
Nick Bryant
Bloomsbury 

In his eye-opening 2020 non-fiction work When America Stopped Being Great, Nick Bryant didn’t just dissect six decades of American history to show how a once-great nation was now flailing and had lost its standing in the world. He shattered the common view that the Trump presidency was an aberration, arguing instead that it was “historically inescapable”. In his new book, The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself, the much-acclaimed former BBC foreign correspondent, author and historian goes further. A searing analysis of 250 years of US history, The Forever War deftly maps out the deep rifts that define American society and politics today, and locates the origins of those divisions — along with the origins of Trump presidency — in the founding of the republic. For as Bryant himself says: “I saw this book as a prequel and a sequel to the last book, which finished on January 6.”

The Forever War opens with Bryant’s personal account of Biden’s inauguration two weeks later, along with the tense, sleepless hours Bryant himself spent in Washington in the lead-up to covering that event for the BBC in a city replete with concrete barricades and a military mobilisation akin to that of Baghdad. For Bryant, who’s had a front-row seat reporting on many of the most extraordinary moments in America’s modern history — the Reagan revolution, the Bush interregnum, the Clinton years and the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the victory of Barack Obama, and the defeat of Hillary Clinton — that inauguration day, he writes, “felt not like a new beginning, but rather a continuation of a tragic storyline”.

After filing his report, Bryant took the first train out of Washington to New York, deciding on the train, he recounts, “that this is a good time to bring my BBC career to an end”. He and his Australian wife always intended to come back to Australia with their children, he recalls, and “this seemed like fitting moment to do it”. It was also the moment he conceived of The Forever War, driven partly, he says, “by my own quest for understanding”. Bryant’s enduring fascination with America took hold in his teenage years, and though he went on to study history at Cambridge and gained his doctorate in US politics from Oxford, he says, “I wanted to study it in much more depth. My early work was busting the myth of Kennedy, and this book really tries to bust the myths of America as a whole.”

He succeeds in doing that and much else besides in The Forever War, parlaying meticulous historical research and on-the-ground reportage into a gripping narrative that reads like a political thriller, albeit a deeply disturbing one. Already an Amazon best-seller in the US, it maps out a tragic 250-year continuum in the fault lines of American history, as well as a pronounced historical amnesia. Along the way, he presents an avalanche of evidence to prove his theory that America is buckling under the weight of historical problems that have never been resolved. “It’s not America’s deep state that is the problem,” he writes, “but rather its deep history”.

Many Americans, he argues, “are unwilling to accept that the grand narrative of their history, which is one of advancement and progress, is not necessarily true”. He says, “They still believe in American exceptionalism — the idea that America is this beacon at a time when a lot of the rest of the world looks at America right now and thinks about how they can protect themselves from going in the same direction. We used to speak of the land of Martin Luther King jnr, MLK, and now we speak of the land of a fellow Georgian, Marjorie Taylor Greene, MTG — which speaks of its democratic decline.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, known as MTG, is an American far-right politician and conspiracy theorist who has been the US representative for Georgia’s congressional district since 2021. Among other conspiracy theories, she is known to spout and promote antisemitic and white supremacist views including the white genocide conspiracy theory, QAnon, and Pizzagate.

If anything contradicts the idea of American history being all about progress and advancement, it was the election of Trump in the wake of Obama’s presidency, says Bryant. “Trump was literally a form of negating the idea that there had been a legitimate black president in the first place. What better way to show that America rejected the black presidency of Obama than to support a racist white nationalist? You kind of thought ‘America’s had an African-American president, so presumably it will now have a female president.’ And what we got instead was a racist misogynist. It was a throwback. Total regression, and that is the story of American history.”

In a particularly confronting chapter — aptly titled “America’s constant curse” — Bryant elucidates the “zig and zag”, which Obama dubbed the painful one-step-forward, two-steps-back terrain of arguably America’s oldest unresolved issue — the racial divide. From the outset, he writes, “the architecture of US democracy was heavily shaped by the subjugation of blacks and the codification of white supremacy”. Immediately after legislation was passed in the mid-1960s that finally gave African Americans in the South the right to vote unhindered, he reminds me, “there was pushback that spoke to this forever war”. He adds, “One of the most worrying aspects is that this attack on democracy has been endorsed and validated by the Supreme Court, which basically gutted the Voting Rights Act with the 2013 Shelby ruling. Even now, at the state level,” he adds, “Republican-controlled legislative bodies are passing new voter rights laws to make it harder for minorities to vote.”

As eloquent off the page, Bryant will also cite chapter and verse on the flaws and vagaries of the American constitution, or on the proliferation of guns and right-wing militia groups along with the politics of guns and abortion. He sheets home the political polarisation of today — as he did in When America Stopped Being Great — to the end of the Cold War, which eroded the bipartisanship that had prevailed on Capitol Hill for most of the postwar era. “You’ve had these continual waves of radicalisation of the Republican Party — it really goes back to the 1960s with Barry Goldwater. Then under Reagan it became more radical, and then people like [Newt] Gingrich came forward. It’s now reached the stage of a sort of nihilism really. You’ve got a Republican party that is pretty anti-democratic. They don’t accept the results of an election, and neither do they accept the results of a criminal justice system. if you’re going to rail against the electoral system, and then rail against the judicial system,” he asks, “What have you got left?”

What is left are the two Americas he writes about so tellingly about in this disturbing, yet mesmerising book. One is a reality-based America and the other is a reality-averse realm pockmarked with rabbit holes. “You literally live a very different American life if you live in the red bits of America, as opposed to the blue bits. You’re probably not going to be as well educated, you’re not going to live as long, and you stand a greater of chance of being killed by a gun attack. There are so many things, but the one that is really worrying is the lack of shared baseline facts between the two. Politics is based on feeling rather than fact, and this is deeply problematic.” Yet for all the civil-war rhetoric that commonly features in civil discourse in the country, Bryant doesn’t see that happening. “But I also can’t see America reaching a civil peace, and that’s the problem,” he says.

NICK BRYANT ON BOOKS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED HIM

Animal Farm by George Orwell

This is my formative work of political and literary fiction. It was an eye-opener to me, and it outraged me. It politicised me. When I first read it, I was about 14 or 15, and it got my young self into politics and ideas, and geopolitics, and the great tides of history.

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

Wifedom is a corrective to Animal Farm, because Orwell got a lot of his book from his wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy. Wifedom is a good book as it elevates O’Shaughnessy's role in the world, which has been traditionally ignored. She actually wrote a poem called 1984 and was a significant figure in his literary life who has been totally overlooked. Anna Funder is one of the authors who has rescued her from undeserved obscurity. Funder is a brilliant writer, and this is an eye-opener. I love books that challenge myths, and she has challenged the myth of Orwell.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

This is a fabulous book. Nehru used to call India a bundle of contradictions wrapped up in a piece of strong but invisible string, and I think if there is a book encapsulates that idea of India in its totality, craziness and glory, this is it. It gives you the idea of the wonder of India, as well as the deep-rooted political, social and economic problems of the country.

I’m not sure there is another book that quite does that. I love this book. It’s my favourite Indian book.

It really influenced me at a time when I had just gone to South Asia as part of the hunt for Bin Laden — that was the big story then — and though I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I lived in India for three years.

It was a happy time in my life, not least because it was where I met my Australian wife, who recommended the book to me.

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

I loved living in New York, and I think Bonfire of the Vanities is probably my favourite New York novel, though it was a really tight choice between that one and another brilliant book called Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann. But in terms of the kind of obstreperousness of New York City, the kind of maelstrom of racial politics in New York, the characters that it involves, the disparities of wealth, and the fault lines of New York City that in some ways mirror the fault lines of America, I think Bonfire of the Vanities is an absolute must-read.

I love Tom Wolfe’s form of journalism — he is obviously part of that New Journalism model, which was very observational.

Every chapter I think begins with a section of reportage on the here and now before you delve into the history, and I love that colourful, slightly cheeky, slightly irreverent style of writing.

We Were Eight Years in Power: an American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a collection of essays that he wrote during the Obama years. He’s often called the modern-day James Baldwin, and there have obviously been brilliant African American writers since Baldwin, but Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in that tradition.

He’s speaking to the kind of disappointment around Obama’s presidency. When a lot of people speak of losing faith in America, it’s not just because of the rise of Donald Trump — it’s partly because of what they saw as the failure of Obama to bring the country together.

If a man of his enormous oratory skills, grace and beauty couldn’t bring the country together, then who could?

I think nobody captures the sense of hope surrounding Obama, and then the sense of disappointment around him, better than Ta-Nehisi Coates.