What Is America’s Next Frontier?

In his new book “The American Future,” historian and critic Simon Schama looks at how the big questions facing Obama’s America--whether to encourage immigration or to save American jobs for American workers; whether the military should be involved in nation-building; whether religion should dictate our laws, such as on abortion and gay marriage; whether the dream of American plenty is finally exhausted--have been asked over and over throughout our nation’s history, as part of the longstanding debate on the nature and direction of the great American experiment. He spoke with NEWSWEEK’s Katie Baker about where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Your book addresses four motifs in American history, four debates that keep cropping up for each new generation of Americans--war, religion, immigration and American bounty.

I do think that these four big issues are the ones that will remain, once we’re on the other side of the economic abyss. These issues--resources, are we a moral community (that popped up in [Obama’s] Notre Dame speech just the other day], immigration and war--they’re going to be with us when, with any luck, the meltdown of the Dow Jones is just a distant memory.

So are we doomed to keep repeating the arguments of our ancestors each time we struggle to define what it is to be American?

Doom is completely the wrong word. We are incredibly blessed to have these arguments … just take a look across the ocean, as I’m forced to do, at the horrendous [parliamentary] meltdown, half-comedy, half-tragedy, in Britain. That’s partly because it’s in the nature of the British Constitution that the legislature and the executive are monolithically stuck together, sort of like chewing gum under one’s heel.

Here, the great blessing is of vigorous argument and dissent, without bringing down the Constitution. And the argument between Jefferson and Hamilton, among others, was: What’s the best democratic republic we can have in the world? Should it be a strong government, should it be an invisible government? Should we go to war preemptively to protect our liberty, or should we absolutely only go to war as a matter of last resort? Would that other countries were so fortunate as to have these kinds of rows. I mean, our risk is that the rows turn to Civil War, but for 150 years, we’ve managed to avoid that.

Speaking of war, are we seeing a shift back towards the Jeffersonian conception of warriors as engineers and nation-builders, at least in Afghanistan?

It’s interesting because it’s now thought that nothing will work out well in Afghanistan unless there is--it’s not so much nation building, it’s the creation of trust between NATO’s armed forces, meaning mostly ours, and local cultures and local villages, which can’t happen without the protection of schools, and protection for farmers. The problem is that the kind of nation-building work you have to do in Afghanistan is different again from the kind of nation-building we failed to do in Iraq, but that warriors have to take that into account is probably right. But my god, there’s a terrifying distance between assenting to that and actually delivering a subtle form of its execution. That’s the problem. But certainly we have to do something, which offsets the catastrophe of collateral damage. And as the president’s already found out, you utterly don’t want the collateral damage to be schoolchildren and people at a mosque or for civilians to be hurt. On the other hand, you’re not going to promise to abandon all airstrikes. You absolutely can’t, or the war is over, you might as well leave. So that is unbelievably tough. I’m very allergic to crude and easy Vietnam analogies. Especially in this case, because unlike the Viet Cong, it’s very unclear how much the population has any sympathy for the Taliban whatsoever, but it’s the issue of actually how you tackle it and actually deliver protection is as hard as it was in Vietnam, where we committed atrocities with Napalm. So that’s really tough.

You point out that in each of these debates, there are at least two sets of voices advocating a different idea of what the American experiment is supposed to stand for. You mention the First Amendment in your section on religion, but it seems like the hidden scaffold of your book is another part of the First Amendment--the freedom of speech.

Absolutely well spotted, it certainly is. The reason I soldered it together was, I was so smitten all over again when I came face to face … with that amazing manuscript draft that Jefferson wrote, the one he didn’t get through until some years later, in the Virginia Statute of Toleration, first draft. This is so important. I love that sentence: “Truth is great”. And the wonderful Jeffersonian bit of intellectual conceit where he uses the classical symbolic imagery of Truth as naked and female--the Truth is great if left to herself. And I thought folded into this moment about toleration, which god knows, is the flag we should be running up the flagstaff right now … I felt that issues of free speech were embedded in that, and that if that view would prevail, and it would be impossible in the United States to prosecute anyone for religious beliefs, it would equally be impossible to prosecute them for other kinds of utterances as well.

In the book, you keep returning to Frederic Jackson Turner’s pronouncement, at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, that the West had been settled and that the first chapter in American history was coming to a close. You also point out that there’s a certain restlessness in the American mindset when frontiers disappear. Is there a next frontier for America?

It’s called Google. The frontier now has to be conceptual and digital … I think [when] you re-read the Founding Fathers, the three biggies anyway, the issues that they raised astonishingly anticipate all the great things that were going to be involved in our nation-building. [And for Benjamin] Franklin, there was something about Americans, which, because they were liberated from the chains of having to stay in the manor and the parish, as they would in old Europe, would sort of liberate their native ingenuity--a wonderful Enlightenment dream, really. They would be writers of humane letters, of fine poetry, but they would invent the next big thing. And what we have to do is constantly go on. We’ve ceded that somewhat to other nations. But, you know, it’s still there … there are visionaries, the [Bill] Gates’s, and the [Eric] Schmidt’s of Google. We have to rely on the nimbleness of our wits. Which is why Obama, among the other million catastrophes he has to deal with, has to really be the education president. Therein lies our future. The next frontier is conceptual, not geopolitical.

So the second chapter of American history, now coming to a close, was the geopolitical chapter?

Yes, it was Henry Luce’s American Century. It was: we can go anywhere, do anything. But it’s not [completely] over, and Obama will have to be the transition … we’ll have to be a nation that does lateral thinking, now. It’s not over in the sense that everything that made America powerful--its optimism and its ingenuity and its entrepreneurial dynamism--none of that need be over. It’s just that it can’t look like the Hummer of history any more. It just can’t. Or if it will--self-doom. It will be one of the dinosaur empires crashing into the crater.