4/16/2019 Opinion | The Myth of the Border Wall - The New York Times

The Myth of the Border Wall

Where the American frontier once symbolized perennial rebirth, President Trumpʼs
signature project now looms like a national tombstone.

By Greg Grandin
Mr. Grandin is a professor of history.

Feb. 20, 2019

All nations have borders, but only the United States has had a frontier — or at least a frontier that
served as a symbol for freedom, synonymous with the possibilities and promises of modern life
and held out as a model for the rest of the world to emulate.

For over a century, the American frontier represented the universalism of the nation’s ideals. It
suggested not only that the country was moving forward, but also that the brutality involved in
moving forward would be transformed into something noble. Extend the sphere of America’s
influence, as James Madison believed, and you would ensure peace, protect individual liberty and
dilute factionalism. As our boundaries widened, all of humanity would become our country. There
was no problem caused by expansion that couldn’t be solved by more expansion.

But today the frontier is closed. The country has lived past the end of that myth. After centuries of
pushing forward across the frontier — first, the landed frontier, then the frontiers of expanding
economic markets and sweeping military dominance — all the things that expansion was
supposed to preserve have been destroyed, and all the things it was meant to destroy have been
preserved. Instead of peace, there is endless war. Instead of prosperity we have intractable
inequality. Instead of a critical, resilient and open-minded citizenry, a conspiratorial nihilism,
rejecting reason and dreading change, has taken hold.

Where the frontier once symbolized perennial rebirth, Donald Trump’s border wall — even if it
remains mostly phantasmagorical, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White
House — now looms like a tombstone.

A fortunate few, of course, still have access to something that looks like a frontier. Post-Cold-War
globalization has afforded corporations their own endless horizons. And the fantasies of the
superrich, no less than their capital, are given free range: They imagine themselves as living in
floating villages beyond government control, or they fund research meant to help them escape
death, upload their consciousness into the cloud or fly off to Mars.

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But for most everyone else in America, the boundaries of freedom have contracted. A whole
generation may never recover from the Great Recession that followed the financial crisis of 2008.
Social mobility is stagnant. And there is a growing sense — as vast stretches of the American
West burn, as millions of trees die, as the acidifying oceans fill up with plastic and as species
disappear — that the world stands on the precipice of catastrophe.

It might be tempting to think that President Trump’s border wall represents a more accurate,
hard-bitten assessment of how the world works. The frontier was, after all, a mirage, an
ideological relic of a naïve or dishonest universalism. There were, in fact, limits and costs to
America’s seemingly unstoppable growth. The border wall, in contrast, is a monument to
disenchantment, to a brutal geopolitical realism: Racism was never transcended; there’s not
enough wealth to go around; not everyone in the global economy can have a seat at the table.

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In a nation like ours, founded on a cult of exceptionalism — a belief that the country was
somehow exempt from the burdens of history — the realization that life isn’t limitless was bound
to be traumatic. It was also bound to produce, in the symbol of a wall, its own governing illusion.

To talk about the frontier was a way of talking about American-style capitalism, about its power
and possibility and its promise of boundlessness. Mr. Trump figured out that to talk about the
border, and to promise a wall, was a way of acknowledging capitalism’s limits, its costs, without
having to challenge the status quo. He won the presidency by running against the entire postwar
order: interventionism, austerity and unfettered corporate power. But unable to offer an
alternative other than driving the existing agenda forward at breakneck speed, he pledged
instead to build a wall.

Whether or not the wall gets built, it is America’s new symbol. It stands for a nation that still
thinks “freedom” means freedom from restraint but no longer pretends that everyone can be free,
and it enforces that reality through cruelty, domination and racism. Even as President Trump, the
wall’s builder, insists that the world now has limits, he himself cultivates a petulant hedonism, an
unchecked freedom to hate, an enraged refusal of constraint.

The power of frontier Americanism had been its ability to take social conflict, be it settler-style
racism or the demand for more equitable wealth distribution, and resolve it through a vibrant,
forward-moving political centrism that could credibly claim to be an expression of liberal
universalism. Maybe after President Trump is gone, that center can be re-established. But it
seems doubtful.

Politics appears to be moving in two opposite directions. One way, nativism beckons; Mr. Trump,
for now, is its standard-bearer. The other way, some kind of social democracy calls, especially to
younger voters. Coming generations will face a stark choice, one long deferred by the allure of

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frontier universalism but set forth in vivid relief by recent events: the choice between barbarism
and socialism.

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Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and the author of the forthcoming “The End of the Myth:
From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” from which this essay is adapted.

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A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 21, 2019, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Insidious Myth Of the
Border Wall

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