[This authors apparent attempt to save the MAGA ideology from the
far right, says reviewer Washington, "is in the end a dangerous
nationalist concoction, based on an ideology that takes losers as a
must and broadens existing divisions." ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE AMERICAN MYTHS OF BIGGER AND BETTER  
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John Washington
February 6, 2021
Yes!
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_ This author's apparent attempt to save the MAGA ideology from the
far right, says reviewer Washington, "is in the end a dangerous
nationalist concoction, based on an ideology that takes losers as a
must and broadens existing divisions." _

,

 

_One Billion Americans
The Case for Thinking Bigger_
Matthew Yglesias
Portfolio
ISBN 9780593190210

There are great things about the United States, sure—stomping the
British in the Revolutionary War, inventing the airplane, jazz, the
NBA. But an endless insistence on our “greatness” is definitely
not one of them. American exceptionalism is not just untrue, it’s a
sign of ruthless competitiveness that prioritizes a dubious ideal over
human decency, human rights, and human life. 

Much of the Left’s criticism of Trump’s MAGA sloganizing has
hinged on the last “A”: What did he mean by again—was he
referencing some supposed heyday before #MeToo, before the Civil
Rights Act, or before the 19th Amendment? But you could drop the final
A off the MAGA hat and still have plenty to quibble with: What does
“great” even mean—great for whom, great in what guise?

None of these questions are raised in Matthew Yglesias’s new book,
_One Billion Americans,_ which is basically a policy recipe for
American Greatness. The title, in his view, is both the goal and the
means. According to Yglesias, through pro-natalist and selectively
pro-immigration policies, the American population can quickly grow to
about three times its current size, hit the one-billion mark, and thus
be both big and great. Why America must be great, Yglesias addresses
only in the most jingoistic of ways: to beat China, to be “greater
than ever,” or to “stay number one forever.” 

A founder and former staff writer at the online media outlet Vox,
Yglesias recently left his job to return to blogging. One of his first
articles at his new blog Slow Boring was “Make Blue America Great
Again.” After four years of dangerous and sometimes deadly indecency
under Trump, it’s dumbfounding to see an alleged left-leaning media
personality openly embrace the Trumpian slogan.

But despite the schoolyard insistence on “winning,” the details of
his argument may be an example of the means justifying the ends.
Bigger can also imply, in Yglesias’s telling, extending support to
parents and welcome to immigrants. Instead of insisting on
superlatives amidst spiking inequalities and insurgent fascism, we
should be striving toward policies that are socially responsible and
work to establish decent baselines.

Dipping into family assistance policy, housing and immigration reform,
and even touching on traffic control, Yglesias loosely sketches out a
basic road map of how the country might squeeze in one billion people.
He also assuages unsubstantiated fears of overcrowding. But
Yglesias’s platter, composed of mostly healthy ingredients, is in
the end a dangerous nationalist concoction, based on an ideology that
takes losers as a must and broadens existing divisions. He sells the
policies not as sound and responsible in and of themselves, but as
means to greatness. 

In his first chapter, “A Very Short History of American Power,”
Yglesias only seeks to measure national power, not question it. Much
of his obsession is with China, and whether or not China is already
richer or bigger, or can throw farther than the United States.
Clocking the race between the two countries, he hopes for “Chinese
blunders” even as he recognizes they could spell catastrophe:
“While from a standpoint of international competition [China’s
blundering] might be nice to see, from a humanitarian perspective it
would be a disaster.” What, this reader wonders, does Yglesias count
as a “blunder”? To compartmentalize, say, the re-education camps
in which China has forced as many as one million Uighurs, while
gloating that at least the United States is “winning,” is a
heartless, divisive, and dangerous project. He doesn’t recognize
that it is competition itself that sparks such disastrous blunders.

This is the problem with a writer gaveling their conclusions instead
of arguing toward them. “A bigger country will be a richer country,
and that will be good for everyone,” Yglesias writes. Oh really?
Each U.S. expansion over the last 200 years was basically a heedless
stampede over the bodies of Black and Indigenous people. “Obviously,
this is all a gross simplification” writes Yglesias in a weak-tea
defense of his “bigger is greater” premise—but gross
simplification happens to be the opposite of what a book should do.

Bigger, in nationalist terms, is not inherently better. Better is not
even necessarily better. As inequalities abound, the celebrated
achievements of so-called progress, innovation, or disruption are too
often coupled with exploitation and the further entrenchment of
racism. Obliviousness to history’s victims is abundant in this book.
On the very first page, Yglesias is already celebrating that America
sought to “settle the West, beat the Nazis, win the Cold War.”
Beating the Nazis was grand, but “settling the West” included
genocide, and “winning” the misnomered Cold War meant hotly—and
murderously—waging it in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central
America. Take the Korean War, one of the Cold War’s so-called
“proxy wars,” for example: The U.S. dropped more bombs on Korea
than it dropped on the entire Pacific theater during World War II, and
firehosed much of the countryside with napalm. In that war, an
estimated 2–3 million civilians were killed.

How else can an innocent call for a bigger America be dangerous?
Yglesias’ exultant prescription follows the same pattern we have
seen for more than 150 years: growth as crutch, growth as safety
valve. Greg Grandin explains the legacy of U.S. growth dependency in
his illuminating 2019 book, _The End of the Myth_. The concept of the
frontier, the drive ever outward, ever greatward, “served as both
diagnosis (to explain the power and wealth of the United States) and
prescription (to recommend what policy makers should do to maintain
and extend that power and wealth).” When the U.S. ran out of
continental frontier at the Pacific Ocean, and when actively
colonizing other states was no longer acceptable, the concept of the
frontier was “applied to other arenas of expansion, to markets, war,
culture, technology, science, the psyche, and politics.” It was
growth, Grandin writes, that “allowed the United States to avoid a
true reckoning with its social problems, such as economic inequality,
racism, crime and punishment, and violence.” Yglesias falls into
that familiar trap.

What might be worth saving in Yglesias’s project is his work to
mitigate the nativist fear of the other. Welcoming foreigners would be
a boon for the country that we could manage with policies for better
funding of public transportation, education, and childcare, taxing
“bad things” like carbon emissions, and reducing funding for
military intervention. Even welcoming a lot of foreigners, quickly,
would be a net positive, and shouldn’t provoke worry about a run on
resources. “America turns out to have 8,800 cubic meters of fresh
water per person,” Yglesias notes. “If our population tripled, we
would have 2,900—quite a bit less. Yet Spain gets by with 2,400; the
UK has 2,200; Germany has 1,300; and the Netherlands has 650.” The
penchant for such stats is where Yglesias excels. These ideas might be
better formatted into a few charts or infographics than in a book,
though his vision of what a more populated but more sustainable
America would look like illustrates that we really do have room to
spare: “So when you picture a land of one billion Americans, don’t
imagine an endless sea of gleaming skyscrapers or a vast horrendous
slum. Imagine France.”  

If only Yglesias similarly tempered America’s claims to
exceptionalism.

John Washington is the author of _The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum
at the U.S.-Mexican Border and Beyond_. He is a regular contributor
to _The Nation_ and _The Intercept_, and an award-winning
translator. A long-term volunteer with No More Deaths, he has been
working with activist organizations in Mexico, California, Arizona,
and New York for more than a decade.

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