A strange fact about the United States of America is that its name is not very specific. When I was an editor at a magazine on Latin American politics, I was under strict instructions to use “U.S.” instead of “America” to refer to the republic whose capital is in Washington, D.C. This is because many Latin Americans object to the use of the name of two continents, North and South America, to refer to a single country.
Washington Irving thought the country should be called “the United States of Alleghania” to fix this problem. José Martí wrote of “our America,” the opposite of the Yankee one. When Leo XIV was elected pope earlier this year, he was hailed in U.S. newspapers as the first American pope, drawing protests both from Peruvians, who pointed to his Peruvian citizenship and long residence there, and from Argentinians, who argued their countryman Francis was the real first “American” pope.
But “United States” isn’t specific enough either. Mexico’s full, official name is the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), and since it’s located in North America, it is also a set of united states that is located in America. Several other countries in the New World, including Colombia and Brazil, have been called “United States” for periods of their histories. In global comparison, only the Central African Republic seems to join the U.S. in having a name that could apply just as well to other countries.
In Yale historian Greg Grandin’s ambitious new history, America, América, this long-running semantic dispute between Latin America and the U.S. over the meaning of “America” becomes a synecdoche for a broader, hemisphere-wide debate over social, political and moral ideals, stretching from first contact to the present. The way this particular “American” conversation has generally played out—Latin Americans arguing for a broadening of recognition, U.S. Americans mostly ignoring or rejecting the challenges—is in line with the general pattern Grandin discerns in the hemispheric exchange.
Latin America, he argues, has historically mounted an “immanent critique” of the United States, scrutinizing its words and deeds from the shared premise that America was a “redeemer continent” charged with the historical duty of promoting human equality. For the U.S., Latin America was “its own magpie, an irrepressible critic.” My first instinct was to wonder if Grandin meant to write gadfly here, a word that means something closer to “irrepressible critic” than “magpie,” which describes a person who constantly chatters without effect. But given the contrast Grandin draws between the great volume of Latin American critique and the tragically little attention paid to it in the North, the word seems well chosen.
When U.S. scholars and writers consider the relationship between their country and Latin America, a frequent conclusion, especially on the left, is that the U.S. is the villain, the conscious evildoer. In the words of Vincent Bevins, a journalist who often writes about U.S. interference in Latin America during the Cold War, “America has become barbaric, through what we have done around the world.” In turn, Latin America is cast as the righteous loser, a similar historic role to the one that the U.S. left often likes to give itself.
Grandin’s account makes modest revisions to this portrayal, giving Latin America some victories, especially in shaping international law. As for the U.S., though his history provides much evidence of its wrongdoing in Latin America, he finds the country to be not so much concertedly wicked as narcissistic, casually hypocritical with its values, indifferent to Latin America’s magpie critique. This is in tune with perspectives on the U.S. I have heard from many Latin Americans I know. The sense of the U.S. as synonymous with yanqui imperialism is out there, especially within the region’s still-robust activist and university left, and there remains good reason for that. But more common, in my experience, is the impression that the republican and liberal ideals of the U.S. are worthy ones that the country nonetheless constantly betrays, both within its borders and in its dealings abroad.
“If you don’t like our freedom, fine,” left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro tweeted at Trump in January during a brief dispute over Petro’s refusal of U.S. deportation flights. “I don’t extend my hand to white slavers. I extend it to the white freedom-lovers, heirs of Lincoln, and to the black and white fieldworkers of the USA … they are the USA and before them I bow.” (Shortly afterward, Petro backed down and allowed the flights to resume.)
The charge of hypocrisy is one that U.S. political discourse is almost always willing to consider when it comes from within the nation’s borders. But such complaints rarely draw attention when they come from the south. Instead, they are often dismissed with references to Latin America’s own social and political struggles.
●
Stretching across five centuries, America, América is not, substantially, a social or political history: it is an intellectual and above all else a moral history, concerned with how societies in the Americas have scrutinized themselves and each other on moral grounds. A book like this is much needed, because the history of the New World since the arrival of Europeans is, perhaps more than any other part of the world, one constantly characterized by ethical extremes in word and deed. It is a region whose modern history began in unbelievable violence and chaos. World-historical depths of savagery were sounded as colonists from Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and Portugal—among other minor players—slaughtered and dispossessed natives, imported African slaves and white indentured servants and fought among themselves. These violent origins remain visible in the brutal social and racial inequalities and uniquely high murder rates of the American republics today—including the U.S.
But the New World also represents, as Grandin emphasizes, lofty moral ambition and uplift. Contact was the occasion of ethical reexamination in the Old World, from Michel de Montaigne to Bartolomé de las Casas. From Franciscans to Puritans to evangelicals (in Brazil and the U.S. alike), it was and remains a place of intense religious faith even as the rest of the developed world has secularized. It was the cradle of modern republicanism, incubator of figures like Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar who, despite their limitations and failings, sought to make good on the possibility that breaking from European rulers could allow for a more just form of government, one based on reason and equality instead of custom and traditional hierarchy. As the preamble of the 1948 charter of the Organization of American States has it, “the historic mission of America is to offer to man a land of liberty.”
Moral superiority has long been a major part of the New World’s notion of itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Puritans’ sense of themselves as representing a city on a hill. The idea, common in the age of Edith Wharton and Henry James, that the United States represented a virtuous society in opposition to decadent, corrupt Europe was an aspiration more than a reality—and often a self-serving, hypocritical one, as Wharton in particular attested. Grandin demonstrates that Latin Americans shared these impressions, conceiving of America as a “redeemer continent.” Aspiration to virtue was central to the political culture of both Americas, the first part of the modern world to adopt republican forms of government.
The moral history of the Americas is a checkered and complex one. In many ways it is a tragedy, interrupted by brief moments of radiant triumph, the New World a zone where high-minded moral reflection struggles to touch a reality that pays it no heed and follows its own, often deeply inhumane rhythms, where the state is absent or co-opted, where voices cry out in the wilderness. In the U.S., a constitution of liberty lent its imprimatur to human bondage; in Latin America, sick people go without treatment in countries whose constitutions guarantee the right to health care.
Writing such a history requires reckoning with a triple tangle of contrasts: societies far from moral perfection, cultures that demand such perfection, and politics that make a mockery of their own ideals. Grandin’s history provides plenty of examples of all three. But often he seems tempted to make morality the object rather than the subject of his history: to mete out moral judgment of the utterances and decisions of the figures he discusses, rather than showing how both their actions and their self-justifications can be understood in the context of the moral systems, and the material interests, of their time.
Grandin wants to vindicate Las Casas, not reflect at length on how his reputation as champion of the victims of Spanish colonization brought him personal fame and influence. His portrait of the Cuban nationalist hero and writer José Martí emphasizes his part in achieving a “rhetorical victory” at the Pan-American conference of 1889 rather than his more hardheaded efforts to put together an invasion of Cuba. His best portraits contain much ambivalence—the sections on Bolívar artfully juxtapose his lofty republican ideals with his sense of the oppressive weight of colonial history (a justified pessimism that sometimes shaded into racism). Moving passages describe frankly the brutal exigencies of Bolívar’s campaigns to win independence and craft government for Spanish America.
In the northern hemisphere, Grandin contrasts Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of refusing to interfere in Latin American nations’ internal politics on behalf of U.S. companies with the eagerness of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to do so. In so doing, he seems caught between pointing to differences in the political landscape that permitted the milder policy, and holding up Wilson and FDR as moral exemplars from whose standard the U.S. has degenerated—in other words, writing a progressive mirror for princes.
Especially when dealing with recent history, it can seem like Grandin wants to make Latin America into an ethics committee for the U.S., or a Cassandra. “Latin Americans tried to warn the United States” about the war on terror, he writes. “The world would be in a better place if, after 9/11, Washington had listened to Latin America.”
In such moments, Grandin sinks from the realm of moral history into that of merely moralizing or moralistic history. He spends relatively little time demonstrating the head-spinning ways in which moral argument can be bent to serve interested action, and how harsh American realities and human weakness so reliably turn moralists into hypocrites or dictators. How, for instance, did Hugo Chávez—to name a figure who goes unmentioned in America, América—manage to be both Bolivarian vindicator of his people and author of national tragedy in Venezuela (with much assistance from his successor and, of course, from U.S. policy)? Nor does Grandin account for the way the intensely moralized politics of the New World conditioned its inhabitants, in both the south and the north, to employ high-flown moral language even when they were obviously operating in naked self-interest. U.S. planters’ invocation of Aristotle’s notion of the natural slave to defend their morally indefensible institution as a “positive good” is an obvious example. But rather than stopping at identifying their moral hypocrisy, we might wonder at the political and cultural environment that inspired public defenders of the institution to appeal to Greek philosophy or the Bible (as opposed to simple economic utility) in the first place.
To attend to these complexities would not necessarily be to engage in moral obfuscation, both-sides-ism or euphemism. Rather, such a history would serve a still greater moral accomplishment: showing how ethical argument historically represents the attempt of Americans of both continents to find meaning in a brutal social reality, and how rare it is in the history of the hemisphere that such argument can find adequate material mechanisms to modify that reality in a lasting and meaningful way.
These moments do happen: abolition, in the U.S. and Brazil; social reform, in many countries; and plenty of other moments adduced in Grandin’s history. But in order to properly comprehend how they happen, historians cannot merely point out from a contemporary vantage who is saved and who is damned. They must descend to historical figures’ level and struggle with them, so to speak, all while mapping the intellectual and material coordinate plane on which they operated.
Latin America, Grandin almost says, produces raw material—critique of the U.S.—and it’s up to us to refine it into a finished product in the form of a more enlightened politics at home. But instead of engaging in such moral extractivism, perhaps we would be better off nationalizing our homegrown moral resources. In domestic politics, democratic ideals and democratic elections allow for moral critique to attach to real social demands and become a material force in politics, obtaining changes in policy—as, for example, in the protests over the Vietnam War, which drew on a sense of the war’s injustice, an internationalism that looked solidaristically toward the Third World, and the desire of young Americans not to fight and die in a foreign country.
●
International law is one mechanism that, in theory, obliges countries to take heed of perspectives from without, and a major theme of Grandin’s history emphasizes that Latin America’s contributions to international law should be more broadly recognized. From early foundations by Francisco de Vitoria and Las Casas to the opposition to conquest and Carlos Calvo’s doctrines on international investment, the region has clearly furnished more than its fair share. But international law, too, in practice has offered little more than meager consolation for the powerless on the world stage, and sometimes not even that. Grandin looks with disgust on the U.S.’s long-standing habit of disregarding international legal authority when it contradicts national policy. But its ability to do so with impunity teaches us far more about international law and its potential than he allows.
And the U.S. listening to Latin America often looks different in practice from emulating the social-humanist tendencies that Grandin rightly praises. Today, the salience of Latin American politics in the U.S. has reached perhaps unparalleled heights, but not in the way Grandin recommends. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is admired by the U.S. left, and for good reason, but much more consequentially, Trump has allies and ideological comrades in Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, whose crackdown on gangs has been hailed by the U.S. right and whose mega-prison accepts deportees from the U.S.
When Grandin discusses these figures in America, América’s epilogue, he sounds like the melodramatic opening crawl of a Star Wars movie: “Latin America teeters between the dark and the light.” His frequent equation of self-evident moral purity with progressive politics seems impossibly utopian when contrasted with a political landscape across the Americas where the right has made moral appeals of a different sort—the need to shield children from sexual material, or punish criminals, for example—into powerful sources of support. None of the powerful political figures mentioned above has ascended by accident: each responds to real social, cultural and political forces that the left has been unable to harness or adequately address.
A history that attends more closely to the way that moral ideals function politically could be a very useful one for us today, not simply by telling us who is right and who is wrong, but by giving us a sense of how to sift through the moralized language in which politics is so often conducted, in this country as in Latin America. That is a difficult task, but it would yield a truer kind of “moral clarity”—one less encumbered by the moralism and didacticism that has often gone by that appealing name.
A strange fact about the United States of America is that its name is not very specific. When I was an editor at a magazine on Latin American politics, I was under strict instructions to use “U.S.” instead of “America” to refer to the republic whose capital is in Washington, D.C. This is because many Latin Americans object to the use of the name of two continents, North and South America, to refer to a single country.
Washington Irving thought the country should be called “the United States of Alleghania” to fix this problem. José Martí wrote of “our America,” the opposite of the Yankee one. When Leo XIV was elected pope earlier this year, he was hailed in U.S. newspapers as the first American pope, drawing protests both from Peruvians, who pointed to his Peruvian citizenship and long residence there, and from Argentinians, who argued their countryman Francis was the real first “American” pope.
But “United States” isn’t specific enough either. Mexico’s full, official name is the United Mexican States (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), and since it’s located in North America, it is also a set of united states that is located in America. Several other countries in the New World, including Colombia and Brazil, have been called “United States” for periods of their histories. In global comparison, only the Central African Republic seems to join the U.S. in having a name that could apply just as well to other countries.
In Yale historian Greg Grandin’s ambitious new history, America, América, this long-running semantic dispute between Latin America and the U.S. over the meaning of “America” becomes a synecdoche for a broader, hemisphere-wide debate over social, political and moral ideals, stretching from first contact to the present. The way this particular “American” conversation has generally played out—Latin Americans arguing for a broadening of recognition, U.S. Americans mostly ignoring or rejecting the challenges—is in line with the general pattern Grandin discerns in the hemispheric exchange.
Latin America, he argues, has historically mounted an “immanent critique” of the United States, scrutinizing its words and deeds from the shared premise that America was a “redeemer continent” charged with the historical duty of promoting human equality. For the U.S., Latin America was “its own magpie, an irrepressible critic.” My first instinct was to wonder if Grandin meant to write gadfly here, a word that means something closer to “irrepressible critic” than “magpie,” which describes a person who constantly chatters without effect. But given the contrast Grandin draws between the great volume of Latin American critique and the tragically little attention paid to it in the North, the word seems well chosen.
When U.S. scholars and writers consider the relationship between their country and Latin America, a frequent conclusion, especially on the left, is that the U.S. is the villain, the conscious evildoer. In the words of Vincent Bevins, a journalist who often writes about U.S. interference in Latin America during the Cold War, “America has become barbaric, through what we have done around the world.” In turn, Latin America is cast as the righteous loser, a similar historic role to the one that the U.S. left often likes to give itself.
Grandin’s account makes modest revisions to this portrayal, giving Latin America some victories, especially in shaping international law. As for the U.S., though his history provides much evidence of its wrongdoing in Latin America, he finds the country to be not so much concertedly wicked as narcissistic, casually hypocritical with its values, indifferent to Latin America’s magpie critique. This is in tune with perspectives on the U.S. I have heard from many Latin Americans I know. The sense of the U.S. as synonymous with yanqui imperialism is out there, especially within the region’s still-robust activist and university left, and there remains good reason for that. But more common, in my experience, is the impression that the republican and liberal ideals of the U.S. are worthy ones that the country nonetheless constantly betrays, both within its borders and in its dealings abroad.
“If you don’t like our freedom, fine,” left-wing Colombian President Gustavo Petro tweeted at Trump in January during a brief dispute over Petro’s refusal of U.S. deportation flights. “I don’t extend my hand to white slavers. I extend it to the white freedom-lovers, heirs of Lincoln, and to the black and white fieldworkers of the USA … they are the USA and before them I bow.” (Shortly afterward, Petro backed down and allowed the flights to resume.)
The charge of hypocrisy is one that U.S. political discourse is almost always willing to consider when it comes from within the nation’s borders. But such complaints rarely draw attention when they come from the south. Instead, they are often dismissed with references to Latin America’s own social and political struggles.
●
Stretching across five centuries, America, América is not, substantially, a social or political history: it is an intellectual and above all else a moral history, concerned with how societies in the Americas have scrutinized themselves and each other on moral grounds. A book like this is much needed, because the history of the New World since the arrival of Europeans is, perhaps more than any other part of the world, one constantly characterized by ethical extremes in word and deed. It is a region whose modern history began in unbelievable violence and chaos. World-historical depths of savagery were sounded as colonists from Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and Portugal—among other minor players—slaughtered and dispossessed natives, imported African slaves and white indentured servants and fought among themselves. These violent origins remain visible in the brutal social and racial inequalities and uniquely high murder rates of the American republics today—including the U.S.
But the New World also represents, as Grandin emphasizes, lofty moral ambition and uplift. Contact was the occasion of ethical reexamination in the Old World, from Michel de Montaigne to Bartolomé de las Casas. From Franciscans to Puritans to evangelicals (in Brazil and the U.S. alike), it was and remains a place of intense religious faith even as the rest of the developed world has secularized. It was the cradle of modern republicanism, incubator of figures like Thomas Jefferson and Simón Bolívar who, despite their limitations and failings, sought to make good on the possibility that breaking from European rulers could allow for a more just form of government, one based on reason and equality instead of custom and traditional hierarchy. As the preamble of the 1948 charter of the Organization of American States has it, “the historic mission of America is to offer to man a land of liberty.”
Moral superiority has long been a major part of the New World’s notion of itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Puritans’ sense of themselves as representing a city on a hill. The idea, common in the age of Edith Wharton and Henry James, that the United States represented a virtuous society in opposition to decadent, corrupt Europe was an aspiration more than a reality—and often a self-serving, hypocritical one, as Wharton in particular attested. Grandin demonstrates that Latin Americans shared these impressions, conceiving of America as a “redeemer continent.” Aspiration to virtue was central to the political culture of both Americas, the first part of the modern world to adopt republican forms of government.
The moral history of the Americas is a checkered and complex one. In many ways it is a tragedy, interrupted by brief moments of radiant triumph, the New World a zone where high-minded moral reflection struggles to touch a reality that pays it no heed and follows its own, often deeply inhumane rhythms, where the state is absent or co-opted, where voices cry out in the wilderness. In the U.S., a constitution of liberty lent its imprimatur to human bondage; in Latin America, sick people go without treatment in countries whose constitutions guarantee the right to health care.
Writing such a history requires reckoning with a triple tangle of contrasts: societies far from moral perfection, cultures that demand such perfection, and politics that make a mockery of their own ideals. Grandin’s history provides plenty of examples of all three. But often he seems tempted to make morality the object rather than the subject of his history: to mete out moral judgment of the utterances and decisions of the figures he discusses, rather than showing how both their actions and their self-justifications can be understood in the context of the moral systems, and the material interests, of their time.
Grandin wants to vindicate Las Casas, not reflect at length on how his reputation as champion of the victims of Spanish colonization brought him personal fame and influence. His portrait of the Cuban nationalist hero and writer José Martí emphasizes his part in achieving a “rhetorical victory” at the Pan-American conference of 1889 rather than his more hardheaded efforts to put together an invasion of Cuba. His best portraits contain much ambivalence—the sections on Bolívar artfully juxtapose his lofty republican ideals with his sense of the oppressive weight of colonial history (a justified pessimism that sometimes shaded into racism). Moving passages describe frankly the brutal exigencies of Bolívar’s campaigns to win independence and craft government for Spanish America.
In the northern hemisphere, Grandin contrasts Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of refusing to interfere in Latin American nations’ internal politics on behalf of U.S. companies with the eagerness of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to do so. In so doing, he seems caught between pointing to differences in the political landscape that permitted the milder policy, and holding up Wilson and FDR as moral exemplars from whose standard the U.S. has degenerated—in other words, writing a progressive mirror for princes.
Especially when dealing with recent history, it can seem like Grandin wants to make Latin America into an ethics committee for the U.S., or a Cassandra. “Latin Americans tried to warn the United States” about the war on terror, he writes. “The world would be in a better place if, after 9/11, Washington had listened to Latin America.”
In such moments, Grandin sinks from the realm of moral history into that of merely moralizing or moralistic history. He spends relatively little time demonstrating the head-spinning ways in which moral argument can be bent to serve interested action, and how harsh American realities and human weakness so reliably turn moralists into hypocrites or dictators. How, for instance, did Hugo Chávez—to name a figure who goes unmentioned in America, América—manage to be both Bolivarian vindicator of his people and author of national tragedy in Venezuela (with much assistance from his successor and, of course, from U.S. policy)? Nor does Grandin account for the way the intensely moralized politics of the New World conditioned its inhabitants, in both the south and the north, to employ high-flown moral language even when they were obviously operating in naked self-interest. U.S. planters’ invocation of Aristotle’s notion of the natural slave to defend their morally indefensible institution as a “positive good” is an obvious example. But rather than stopping at identifying their moral hypocrisy, we might wonder at the political and cultural environment that inspired public defenders of the institution to appeal to Greek philosophy or the Bible (as opposed to simple economic utility) in the first place.
To attend to these complexities would not necessarily be to engage in moral obfuscation, both-sides-ism or euphemism. Rather, such a history would serve a still greater moral accomplishment: showing how ethical argument historically represents the attempt of Americans of both continents to find meaning in a brutal social reality, and how rare it is in the history of the hemisphere that such argument can find adequate material mechanisms to modify that reality in a lasting and meaningful way.
These moments do happen: abolition, in the U.S. and Brazil; social reform, in many countries; and plenty of other moments adduced in Grandin’s history. But in order to properly comprehend how they happen, historians cannot merely point out from a contemporary vantage who is saved and who is damned. They must descend to historical figures’ level and struggle with them, so to speak, all while mapping the intellectual and material coordinate plane on which they operated.
Latin America, Grandin almost says, produces raw material—critique of the U.S.—and it’s up to us to refine it into a finished product in the form of a more enlightened politics at home. But instead of engaging in such moral extractivism, perhaps we would be better off nationalizing our homegrown moral resources. In domestic politics, democratic ideals and democratic elections allow for moral critique to attach to real social demands and become a material force in politics, obtaining changes in policy—as, for example, in the protests over the Vietnam War, which drew on a sense of the war’s injustice, an internationalism that looked solidaristically toward the Third World, and the desire of young Americans not to fight and die in a foreign country.
●
International law is one mechanism that, in theory, obliges countries to take heed of perspectives from without, and a major theme of Grandin’s history emphasizes that Latin America’s contributions to international law should be more broadly recognized. From early foundations by Francisco de Vitoria and Las Casas to the opposition to conquest and Carlos Calvo’s doctrines on international investment, the region has clearly furnished more than its fair share. But international law, too, in practice has offered little more than meager consolation for the powerless on the world stage, and sometimes not even that. Grandin looks with disgust on the U.S.’s long-standing habit of disregarding international legal authority when it contradicts national policy. But its ability to do so with impunity teaches us far more about international law and its potential than he allows.
And the U.S. listening to Latin America often looks different in practice from emulating the social-humanist tendencies that Grandin rightly praises. Today, the salience of Latin American politics in the U.S. has reached perhaps unparalleled heights, but not in the way Grandin recommends. Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum is admired by the U.S. left, and for good reason, but much more consequentially, Trump has allies and ideological comrades in Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Argentina’s Javier Milei and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, whose crackdown on gangs has been hailed by the U.S. right and whose mega-prison accepts deportees from the U.S.
When Grandin discusses these figures in America, América’s epilogue, he sounds like the melodramatic opening crawl of a Star Wars movie: “Latin America teeters between the dark and the light.” His frequent equation of self-evident moral purity with progressive politics seems impossibly utopian when contrasted with a political landscape across the Americas where the right has made moral appeals of a different sort—the need to shield children from sexual material, or punish criminals, for example—into powerful sources of support. None of the powerful political figures mentioned above has ascended by accident: each responds to real social, cultural and political forces that the left has been unable to harness or adequately address.
A history that attends more closely to the way that moral ideals function politically could be a very useful one for us today, not simply by telling us who is right and who is wrong, but by giving us a sense of how to sift through the moralized language in which politics is so often conducted, in this country as in Latin America. That is a difficult task, but it would yield a truer kind of “moral clarity”—one less encumbered by the moralism and didacticism that has often gone by that appealing name.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.