The frontier has been a kind of proxy for a privilege that no other nation in history has enjoyed, and that’s the ability to use expansion, use the promise of limitless growth, in order to organize domestic politics. Well, the way to understand the significance of the wall in American history is to step back and look at that other myth of American history, that for decades kind of underwrote American exceptionalism, America’s sense of nationalism, and that’s the frontier.

Talk about the significance of the wall, both what Trump is attempting to do right now, and you look at it as a metaphor as well as a reality. Congratulations on your new job at Yale next year-ĪMY GOODMAN: -next semester, but you’re still here at NYU. Greg, thank you so much for being with us. His book Fordlandia was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s written by the acclaimed historian Greg Grandin, professor at New York University. It’s called The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. The president is threatening to veto the resolution if it comes to his desk.ĪMY GOODMAN: As the debate over the border wall continues in Washington, we turn to a new book that looks at the border wall, well, in a new light. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen held a closed-door meeting with Republican senators Tuesday in an attempt to win more support for Trump’s emergency declaration. On Sunday, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky became the fourth Senate Republican to join Democrats opposing the emergency declaration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, the Senate appears poised to pass a resolution to overturn President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border.

It’s a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.” Greg Grandin is a professor at New York University and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.ĪMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of frontier. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves its purpose. As the Senate appears poised to pass a resolution to overturn President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border, we speak with historian Greg Grandin about his new book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.” Grandin writes in his book, “The wall might or might not be built.

The End of the Myth by Greg Grandin