One Year of Democracy Americana

A personal reflection on the chances and pitfalls of publicly engaging with the political conflict from a precarious academic position – and what the future might hold for this newsletter

I would like to interrupt the stream of lengthy reflections on the past and present contest over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America for slightly more joyful news: Exactly one year ago, on November 22, 2022, I sent out the first newsletter – and I am very grateful to all of you for taking the time to read and engage with my writing.

Let me give you some raw stats, if you’ll indulge me: As of last night, we stand at 7,325 subscribers. And I am very proud of that number, especially. Over the past twelve months, I have sent out 41 newsletters – most of which have been fairly long: I have published well over 100,000 words on here, and many of the essays have come in at over 3,000. Yet people have been reading anyway: So far, the newsletters have been viewed almost exactly 300,000 times. Considering this is an entirely independent operation – no sponsors, no famous name to leverage, no big institutions in the background to push it –, that’s not nothing.

The first year, the next year

Democracy Americana turned out differently from what I had expected in the beginning. I had a plan to send out shorter pieces, more in line with an op-ed in a newspaper, and publish them at a higher frequency. When I wrote regularly for the U.S. edition of The Guardian in 2022, my columns were all in the 1,200 words range. I still want to write those kinds of pieces more often: It would allow me to be nimbler with the newsletter, quicker to react and comment on whatever is going on. That’s not quite feasible with the longform essays I have tended to write on here. They take a lot of time and effort to produce – and sometimes, the moment, or rather: the discourse, just passes me by, and the window to write about something closes before I have found the time to put 4,000 words to virtual paper.

I do believe – and hope you agree – that these longer pieces are valuable, however. I am not going to argue that some of the newsletters couldn’t have been shorter. That’s where the lack of editorial oversight certainly has an effect. But that cuts both ways. It also means I have the space to really explore and reflect on the issues that seem important to me. I can allow myself to go as deep as I am capable of doing or think is necessary. From the perspective of a writer and academic, that’s worth a lot.

All that being said, I do want to mix it up a little bit and, going forward, add in a few more of these shorter, more agile pieces. I would also like to engage more with reader comments – something I’ve simply not had the time to do. I read them all, but that’s mostly been it so far. I know other substackers do live sessions or chats, and I’d certainly like to try those at some point. And maybe, who knows, I’ll even dare to foray into other topics occasionally. No worries, I promise I’ll stick to areas where I can reasonably claim to have something of value to offer. But to give you an example of something I’ve been thinking about: Years ago, I taught a class on Vietnam War movies, and what they can tell us about American politics, society, and culture in the 70s and 80s – historical film analysis, basically treating fictional movies as historical sources. We did The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Good Morning Vietnam. I put a lot of effort into historicizing those movies. I think it might be fun to write about this here. At some point.

Democracy Americana is free! But… why?

I would like to address one question that I am getting regularly: Why is there no option to support the newsletter with a paid subscription? First of all, please believe me that I am, at the risk of sounding cringe, humbled by the fact that people have actively approached me to say that they value my public work enough to be wanting to support it financially. That is truly not something I take for granted. As a matter of fact, as someone who has been thoroughly conditioned by the academic system to believe that we must be grateful for any opportunity to publish at all, even if we have to pay publishers ourselves to make that happen, I find myself almost in disbelief that the real world works slightly differently.

The thing is: Democracy Americana is free because I am not allowed to make money off it. As a German citizen who lives in the United States on a work visa, I am legally precluded from accepting compensation that is not coming from my employer, meaning Georgetown University. I can request special authorization for the occasional talk, public speaking engagement, etc – but it is a cumbersome process, and there are some pretty strict limits on what I can and cannot get authorized. Unless I am completely misunderstanding (and please, if you are versed in those immigration law things or have first-hand experience, let me know!), as of right now, I can’t accept any financial support for the newsletter – or almost any of my public work, really. That, at least, is an accusation I can categorically refute: Whatever is the reason for all the posting, newslettering, and podcasting, I ain’t doing it for the money.

While I am not thrilled about this situation, it’s ok for now. I am fortunate to have a good job that allows for the flexibility to write and engage publicly (albeit at the price of putting in a lot of night shifts…). However, that might change in the not-too-distant future – actually, it’s probably fair to say the situation is very likely to change rather soon. I know I must have mentioned it here or there, but I am not tenured and not on a tenure track: I have a fixed-term contract that ends in mid-2025 and, for complicated reasons that have nothing to do with me or my performance, won’t be up for extension or renewal. I have no idea yet what comes after. The academic job market is a mess. And let’s be honest: purely in terms of academic advancement, putting all this time and effort into this newsletter and my other public work is not very smart. Search committees on either side of the Atlantic don’t care about any of it; and in the German historical profession, the kind of public engagement I’ve been doing is still widely regarded unseemly and unbecoming of a real scholar (well, certainly if the engagement is coded as “leftwing.”) Over the past two years, I’ve had German colleagues tell me they consider me “an activist now, not a scholar anymore” – and at my last visit to my former university in Freiburg, in the southwest of Germany, I was told that I had “committed professional suicide.” That was in May 2022 and mostly referred to my work as a contributing opinion writer for the Guardian. Since then, I launched a podcast and started a newsletter – Lord, have mercy!

So, on one side of the equation, there is an academic system that is not exactly waiting to offer me a free choice of positions. On the other side, and more importantly, I have set certain red lines for myself that I am not willing to cross to keep my academic career going. For sixteen years I’ve held teaching positions – and full-time positions for the past nine years. I don’t even have an overview of how many short-term contracts and appointments I’ve cycled through: I crossed into the double digits many years ago. And that has meant a lot of anxiety, while the system, in return, asks for maximum flexibility and a lot of work with uncertain outcome. Remember, until I came to Georgetown in early 2021, I was in the German system, in which, with very few exceptions, a historian isn’t even eligible to apply for a permanent position until after the *second* book (which is expected to be tackling a completely different topic from the doctoral dissertation) has been completed. And it is never just the person pursuing the academic career that is asked to be maximally flexible and subordinate all other ambitions and life goals to this pursuit of stability. If you want to have a shot at becoming a tenured professor at a university, you have to apply for everything, anywhere, seek out whatever might be out there, and follow jobs and positions across the country – or, in my case, even across the Atlantic. At age 41, I am simply not willing to do that anymore. I am not going to ask my wife to consider her career, her professional and private aspirations as somehow secondary. I am not going to uproot my little boys several more times. My six-year-old has already moved across the Atlantic three times and lived in five different places, gone to five different schools. They deserve better.  

About four years ago, my wife and I decided that we would try to make this America adventure happen – if we both managed to find good jobs. We did. Within just a few days of each other we were offered our current positions. That was in late February, early March 2020, just as Covid hit. We were super lucky and brought everyone over, in the middle of the pandemic. Very soon, when my contract at Georgetown ends, we’ll have to decide again. My wife, who also holds a PhD in history, but left academia behind, is far more likely than me to be offered a great job. And so, the only chance to make it work for us as a family, as we are not willing to place my academic pursuit above all other aspects of life, might be for me to change course and start relying on my public-facing work, my writing, in order to contribute my share.

I realize now I have never actually spelled that out in writing before, certainly not in public. And it frightens me. Not only do I like being a professor – certainly the actual research and the teaching, not so much all the other stuff that constantly gets in the way of research and teaching. The idea that I might have to find a very different path is also a difficult prospect for me because I am not well equipped to handle uncertainty. I worry a lot. I fixate on the many reasons why things will not turn out well, and have a hard time imagining plans working out until proven otherwise. This isn’t just a function of my general social-psychological disposition, although it surely is that too. As always, there is a very concrete socio-economic, material dimension to my general skepticism. I am a first-gen academic, was the first one in my family to go to college, and didn’t have much in terms of financial support after finishing high school. I have often been in the situation where I didn’t know if I was going to be able to afford the rent of the apartment in which I lived for much longer. I have spent almost all my adult life on short-term contracts that often didn’t run longer than 6 months, always hoping that something else was going to materialize afterwards, often having to wait until the very last minute until it did – and more than once it just didn’t, not right away, and then I had to burn through what little reserves I had built (and were meant to pay back the student debt) in order to bridge the gap from one short-term thing to the next.

I have, in many ways, been very lucky and fortunate. I am well aware of that. Over the past few years here in DC, especially, we have lived an incredibly privileged life. But there was never a chance to make this permanent, and things will have to change in almost exactly 18 months.

So, fairly soon, there might come a time when I introduce paid subscriptions, because I will have to rely on enough of you to support this newsletter and my work with more than your time and attention. Until then, as long as my professional situation is what it is right now, we’ll keep this going for free. And I will hopefully keep building the trust and confidence in my readers that Democracy Americana is worth it.

What happens next?

What else? I already mentioned this in an introductory note to my previous piece: To mark the one-year anniversary, I would like to do our first-ever Q+A. I’ve already received a few interesting questions, but please keep them coming. Send me your questions and I will try to answer a few of them soon. I’d say anything is fair game – questions about American history and politics, but also whatever else might interest you. I wouldn’t mind spending at least a few minutes writing about something slightly more cheerful than the usual. You can leave your questions in the comments to this piece, or the previous piece, or feel free to send them in via social media or email.

Finally, where might we find ourselves one year from now, on November 22, 2024, in the immediate aftermath of the next presidential election? There is no realistic scenario in which all is well afterwards – whether or not Trump manages to return to power, the forces that fueled his rise will continue to radicalize against egalitarian multiracial pluralism. There is, however, a frighteningly realistic scenario in which America slides decisively into authoritarianism because of the election. In a stable, functioning democratic system, the stakes should not be that high. Yet such is the reality of American politics.