250 years of the American berserk

This summer, the United States of America is celebrating the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. Or at least it’s trying. Perhaps, in other circumstances, it might have been a glorious commemoration of the ideals which drove that astonishing document. Its primary author, Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a peaceful republic of yeomen farmers: all created equal, endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, thriving in a state of unity. But the anniversary landed during the second presidency of the great divider, Donald Trump.

Yet we should be wary of the comforting notion that had it not been for Trump, all would be well with the American experiment. The United States is a wonderful, dazzling place that has contributed infinite riches to humanity. It certainly deserved a happier birthday. But Trump is not president by cosmic misfortune. The voters’ decision to give him a second term, even after the events of 6 January 2021, has simply brought to fruition – and back into the White House – a strain in American life that has been there from the start. The fact that he is presiding over the anniversary with all his signature vindictiveness just means we have to look it in the face.

In his 1997 novel American Pastoral, Philip Roth cast the vision of living in a peaceful, Jeffersonian rural idyll as at once an admirable hope, never to be sneered at, and a form of ‘utopian thinking’. Roth’s protagonist, a 1940s high school sports star, Swede Levov, is raising his bright, angry, stuttering daughter in the late 1960s in the calm of a New Jersey hamlet. But she becomes radicalised by the war in Vietnam and blows up the local post office, killing a doctor. The atrocity cracks poor Swede Levov’s utopia apart. As Roth wrote, in a passage that has resonated ever since: 

The daughter transports him out of the longed-for American pastoral and into everything that is its antithesis and its enemy, into the fury, the violence, and the desperation of the counterpastoral – into the indigenous American berserk.

The novel is an angry, anguished confrontation with the frenzy that engulfed the United States during the late 1960s and early 1970s: an era of assassination, protest, riot and panicky, lethal state brutality. Roth has Swede Levov’s factory caught up in the riots against police brutality that broke out in Newark in July 1967, provoking a militarised onslaught by the National Guard. At home, the Levovs watch the carnage in Vietnam on TV. But Roth’s beef is with the pointless destructiveness with which some on the radical left responded. This is epitomised by another real incident he folds into his fiction. On 6 March 1970, three young members of the far-left ‘Weathermen’ were building a nail bomb intended for a New Jersey military base, when it exploded, tearing the bombmakers themselves to pieces.

Roth’s adjective, ‘indigenous’, however, signals that this was not the start of the ‘American berserk’. From its bloody birth in revolutionary war, the United States has been a stunningly violent place, even as it has continued to offer millions a better life, based on the Declaration’s principles. Roth’s notion of the American berserk points to something distinctive running beneath all this: an undercurrent of overpowering, limit-shattering rage.

This framed the single greatest eruption of violence in America’s 250 years: the Civil War. On 22 May 1856, as the tensions over slavery intensified, the abolitionist Republican Senator Charles Sumner made a speech lambasting slaveholders. He cast their forcible inflicting of their malignant system on Kansas as an act of rape. The speech enraged the Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks, a relative of one of Sumner’s targets; two days later, Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner nearly to death with a walking cane. For this, he received nothing more than a fine, while his supporters claimed Sumner was faking his injuries.

In Kansas itself, the abolitionist zealot John Brown was fighting to keep the territory from entering the US as a slave state. On hearing what had happened to Sumner, Brown and his supporters abducted five of their pro-slavery opponents near Pottawatomie Creek, and hacked them to death with swords.

In 1865, after four years of slaughter, the end of the war was marked by another such eruption. When President Abraham Lincoln declared enslaved Americans were free and began to moot the idea they should be granted the vote, a pro-Confederacy actor, John Wilkes Booth, was so outraged that he shot the president dead, shouting ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ (‘Thus always to tyrants!’). This inaugurated a way other angry young American men have sought to vent their feelings ever since, not least the frustrated young radical – and violent domestic abuser – Lee Harvey Oswald.

As Roth identified, the American berserk found its modern form in the 1960s, in the years after Oswald shot President Kennedy, but the Oxford English Dictionary reports that the formulation ‘to go berserk’ took off in the previous decade: a hint, perhaps, of what was coming. By the late 1960s, both sides of politics seemed to go berserk at once. The left raged against the war in Vietnam; the right lashed back against black civil rights. Both were furious with the federal government.

In the 1990s, an angry anti-governmentalism re-emerged that bore the influence of both the anti-war activists and the revolt against Civil Rights. The militia movement was driven by a militant rejection of the state’s claims to coercive power, whether expressed through its triumphalist talk of an American-dominated New World Order, its attempts at gun control, or its botched siege of religious cultists outside Waco, Texas.

The movement also drew on a deep-rooted nativism, stretching back through the 1930s to the 19th century, which had long nursed conspiracist nightmares about the true nature of American power. It found a more mainstream ally in the livid fulminations against Democrats and ‘big government’ by the likes of the talk radio ranter Rush Limbaugh and the Republican insurgent Newt Gingrich. Alongside all this ran an apocalyptically-minded, deeply religiose anti-abortion movement, which spied the Devil in its enemies, and occasionally pursued its ‘pro-life’ cause by killing doctors.

This resurgence of the American berserk set the stage for Trump’s mix of rhetorical appeals to disempowered workers and nativist resentments – and for his startling aggression. This was visible from the beginning, as at Las Vegas on 23 February 2016. When his rally was interrupted by an allegedly violent protestor, he remarked: ‘I’d like to punch him in the face.’ Meanwhile, America has seen a quadrupling in road rage gun violence between 2014 and 2023, more and more mass shootings, and increased attacks on politicians, including multiple attempts to kill Trump himself.

And yet the United States remains rich and powerful, friendly and exhilarating, and founded on ideals that have long made it a beacon to the world. So why has it so often had this current of rage running through it?

One possible answer lies in the Declaration of Independence itself. Amid the turmoil over Vietnam and Civil Rights, various US scholars took a closer look at the text and its gestation, beyond its revered opening. Swirling around inside they found two nightmares: of slave rebellion and British tyranny. In 1974, a literary critic called Ernest Gittleman drew attention to a paragraph cut from Jefferson’s draft at a late stage, which addressed the question of slavery. Jefferson – himself a slaveowner – blamed George III, rather unconvincingly, for imposing this ‘assemblage of horrors’ on the colonies. Then he accused the king of trying to stir the slaves into rebellion.

This was based on a germ of truth – Lord Dunmore’s 1775 offer of liberty to enslaved people who joined with the British. It was also, as Gittleman wrote, an ‘apocalyptic vision’ of ‘the nightmarish end’ the colonists feared they might suffer at the hands of vengeful liberated slaves.

Even without that incendiary passage, the notion of enslavement still haunted the Declaration, in the form of a complementary fear: that London planned to enslave the colonists themselves. As the historian Bernard Bailyn noted in 1967, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, slavery was a ‘central concept in eighteenth-century political discourse’. The plight of enslaved African-Americans was just ‘a more dramatic, more bizarre variation of the condition of all who had lost the power of self-determination’. The First Continental Congress’ ‘Address to the People of Great Britain’ on 5 September 1774 duly warned of the ‘ministerial plan for enslaving us’. That same year, George Washington worried that the British had ‘a regular Systematick Plan’ to make the colonists ‘tame, & abject Slaves, as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.’ The Declaration itself alleged that the various grievances with which it charged King George were really all signs of a single dastardly plot to impose ‘absolute Tyranny’ on America. This idea had deep roots in Britain’s own political nightmares, but by 1776 it became vital in justifying the revolt against British rule.

Both of these nightmares – of slave rebellion and of being enslaved – express the same basic dread. That is, the forced loss of status and power, in a country that was trying to invent itself, in the midst of crisis, by sheer force of will. This fear appears to have been encoded into America’s national identity, laying the ground for repeated eruptions of the American berserk. It is legible, among other causes, in the waves of genocidal violence inflicted upon Native Americans throughout the 19th century, and in white America’s long record of extreme physical cruelty towards black people.

Consider the insane ferocity visited on the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in August 1955, for supposedly interacting inappropriately with a white woman in a grocery store. The men who abducted, tortured and murdered the teenager were rapidly acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury; the following year, protected by the double jeopardy rule, they sought to justify their crime. One of them, JW Milam, offered a number of excuses, including this: ‘As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*****s are gonna stay in their place. N*****s ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government.’

At the same time, the folk memory of the revolt against George III has long stoked a tendency in some Americans to espy invisible tyranny, and to cast themselves as rebels against it. At the worst extreme, there was Timothy McVeigh, who was convinced by conspiracy theories that the federal government was the enemy of the American people. On 19 April 1995 – the anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War – he blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 American people. He planted his truck bomb wearing a T-shirt bearing a line from Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ Then there was the 1776 flag visible during the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. On a wider scale, witness the fearful fury provoked by such supposed omens of despotism as gun control or socialised healthcare.

If the folk memory of revolution offers an ever-available spur to the berserk, it has also provided a ready means to act on it, through the right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment since 1791. The Oxford political scientist Desmond King has argued that the United States is unlike most Western countries, in that the federal government does not claim a monopoly of violence. As King observed in a 2023 lecture, under the Constitution and its subsequent judicial interpretations, ‘violence is a legitimate part of American democracy’, from the armed posse hunting down an enslaved person who managed to escape, to the legal principle of ‘justified homicide’ today. Over the course of its history, there have been many opportunities for enraged white men to go berserk against supposed threats to their status.

Another possible influence on America’s propensity for overwhelming rage is the idea of the frontier. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that it was the process of shedding urban frippery and going up against the wilderness that had transformed effete Europeans into hardy Americans, ‘keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression’ of the Revolutionary era.

The stirring vision of the lone homesteader – armed, free and righteous – has long since been interrogated. In 1999, in A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, the historian Garry Wills set out to debunk the myths that were driving 1990s anti-governmentalism. He argued it was generally the US Army that fought Native Americans for control of the West, not plucky loners, and that frontiersmen were often not as isolated as the myth suggests, particularly by the late-19th century. He also suggested that it was not armed individuals that overcame the British, but Washington’s Continental Army, and that it was the West that pioneered US gun laws.

Nonetheless, that image of the isolated individual with only his gun and his courage to keep his loved ones safe remains potent. Guns, as the sociologist Jennifer Carlson notes, remain ‘symbols of self-reliance’. As Carlson sets out in her 2015 book Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, this often has nothing to do with going berserk, even when it’s bound up with a loss of economic status. Many of those empowered by US law to play an ad hoc role in maintaining order by carrying a gun do so out of sense of communal responsibility, not aggressive vigilantism. As men’s status as economic providers has eroded, it has been replaced for some by a new self-image: as armed protectors.

Even so, the gun also remains a symbol of the angry right-wing backlash that gathered pace in the 1990s. This, too, can intersect with economic decline, laying the ground for more explosions of the American berserk. The journalist George Packer writes in his 2021 book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal that over time, ‘for the sinking working class, freedom lost whatever economic meaning it once had’. Instead, it fuelled a sense of embattled personal dignity, leading some Americans ‘to see trespassers everywhere’. Liberty thus ‘became the slogan of a defiant and armed loneliness’.

There has long been an established principle in US law, evocative of that frontier image, that if an individual’s home is invaded, they have ‘no duty to retreat’. In recent years, this has expanded to give more leeway to armed men who are prone to violent over-reaction, beyond the mythic stockade of the American home. As Carlson notes, starting with Florida’s pointedly named ‘Stand Your Ground’ law in 2005, the right to open fire defensively has ‘expanded to cover any public space that an individual is legally occupying’. This has only provided more openings for outbursts of the berserk. 

The final part of Roth’s American Pastoral is entitled ‘Paradise Lost’, and perhaps the deepest driver of the American berserk lies there: in the intensity of the founding idealism that makes the United States unique – and the fear that the dream of a better life is being snatched away. The image of the lone frontiersman fighting for his life and family is hard to understand, for instance, without the sense that they were pursuing an ideal: freedom. Frederick Jackson Turner wrote of how, as each stage of the frontier was settled, each new wave of westward expansion was driven by the feeling that paradise was always just out of reach: that ‘the real Eldorado is still farther on’.

Sometimes, that fear of a threatened or violated ideal is present on both sides, creating escalating mutual provocation. Roth saw the ruinous American berserk in the young radicals’ pointless, destructive use of bombs – but they saw the very same thing in what the US government was inflicting in south-east Asia. What was the Vietnam War if not a violation of the founders’ ideals? Indeed, when the Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh proclaimed his own country’s Declaration of Independence in Hanoi on 2 September 1945, he invoked the Jeffersonian original. When one of the leaders of the direct action Yippie movement, Jerry Rubin, appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in October 1968, he came dressed as an 18th-century revolutionary, declaring his political descent from Jefferson. The broader hippie movement often seemed to want little more than to recover its own kind of American pastoral of small communities, independent from government, living in touch with the land.

So perhaps one aspect of the intense feeling that drives the American berserk is a war between would-be utopias, in which each side sees the other as threatening to destroy the ideals of the revolution. When the Confederate states seceded from the Union, they thought of themselves as copying Washington, and defending their white paradise from destruction under the iron heel of the tyrant Lincoln – just as the Union’s soldiers thought they were saving the last, best hope for human liberty from the depredations of the Slave Power. Today, MAGA thinks it’s making America great again, saving liberty from destruction at the hands of ‘radical left lunatics’ – just as Trump’s opponents see him as the very thing the founders were determined to prevent: a monarch imposing tyranny.

Maybe, in the end, the American berserk is just the unavoidable flipside of the American pastoral: the side-effect of founding a nation on the basis of ideals. But today, looking across the ocean from the land of George III, it does look as though the American experiment is under real threat from its berserk new king. The question now is whether those ideals can ever be restored.