What Jane Austen Would Say About the 2024 U.S. Election
How might Jane make sense of Trump 2.0?
Dear Modern Heroines,
It’s been a long time since I’ve published an advice letter or guide, but I’ve had many societal engagements occupying my attention. I’m finally beginning to respond to a heroine’s letter about the point of romantic love in the few spare moments I have to myself in the morning, & I hope to share my advice with you soon. But I felt I had to put that letter aside to seek Jane’s advice on how we, as Modern Heroines, can make sense of the U.S. election.
As a U.S. citizen who has removed herself from her homeland to be an outsider elsewhere, I’ve heard from Europeans for months that they assumed Trump would win. I resigned myself to this reality but tried to have hope since friends & family in the U.S. would tell me a different story: the polls were leaning slightly in Harris’s favor, women were turning out in large numbers to vote, & Trump was so unhinged that he was scaring voters away. I hoped for a different outcome, but I was not surprised by the return of Trump. For me, it is the final confirmation that America is no better than other countries that have voted for authoritarian leaders, despite what we tell ourselves. This moment should be humbling & sobering, because this is who we are.
Still, I’m not convinced that the U.S. will start to tell a different story about itself.—One that is unflinchingly clear-eyed about its past & this present moment. The day after the election, a good friend asked me what Jane would say about the result. I didn’t reply right away. I needed to find a thoughtful & witty answer, as Jane would have done.
A few hours later, I messaged my friend that Jane Austen probably would have thought that “y’all should’ve just stayed part of the empire.” It was a joke but, honestly, it might not be far from what Austen would have thought. She definitely had opinions about revolutionary America, having grown up during the American War for Independence. Our system of government certainly would have seemed strange to her, as it did to King George III in Hamilton: “Are they going to keep on replacing whoever’s in charge? If so, who’s next?” For most of Jane’s life—except for a brief respite from 1802 to 1803—Britain was at war, “a time of clashing armies & warring ideas,” as Helena Kelly puts it, a time when “European empire building was changing the world.”1 Still, the concept of democracy & a democratic republic like the U.S. would have been unimaginable or, dare I say, unpalatable to Jane.
Jane & her family were Torys who believed in a state Church & limited democracy,2 which isn’t something we Modern Heroines love to hear. I often forget how religious Jane Austen was, not only as the daughter of a clergyman, but as a citizen of the British Empire where separation of Church & State sounded sacrilegious & even traitorous.—After all, they believed the Monarch was destined to rule by God. Patricia Ard, in her article about Jane Austen’s view of America, reminds us that Jane looked down on the colonies’ rejection of an established religion. While she seldom mentions America directly in her writing, Jane makes her feelings about America’s rejection of religion in their Constitution plain in an 1814 letter to her friend Martha Lloyd:
“[Henry] is in very comfortable health;—he has not been so well, he says, for a twelvemonth.—His veiw, & the veiw of those he mixes with, of Politics, is not chearful—with regard to an American war I mean;—they consider it as certain, & as what it is to ruin us. The [?Americans] cannot be conquered, & we shall only be teaching them the skill in war which they now want. We are to make them good Sailors & Soldiers, & [?gain] nothing ourselves.— If we are to be ruined, it cannot be helped—but I place my hope of better things on a claim to the protection of Heaven, as a Religious Nation, a Nation in spite of much Evil improving in Religion, which I cannot believe the Americans to possess.” 3
At the time of writing this letter, Britain had been engulfed in what was considered a second revolutionary war declared by Americans on 17 June 1812. The Austens had more knowledge than most because several of the Austen brothers—like Henry—served in the militia and Royal Navy. As Jane writes, the British had decided to give up the fight & negotiate peace, seeing nothing to gain but making American forces stronger. The Empire had been humiliated again;—America was truly no longer under its control. For all the evils perpetrated by Britain, Jane had faith that they maintained the protection of Heaven for being a religious nation, which America was not. Of course anyone living in the United States today knows that we are a profoundly Religious nation, have never fully severed the ties between Church & State (“one nation under God”), & worship at the altar of Capitalism.
Even Jane Austen believed America called money our God. While she didn’t explicitly write much about the new nation, it was a constant topic of conversation for the British who felt betrayed. America’s wars for “political freedom,” according to Professor Ard, were seen by many British people, including Austen, as a form of betrayal “motivated not by principle but by economics.” How do we know Jane felt that America betrayed England for monetary gain? For one, she was a keen reader of Samuel Johnson who once wrote that he was “willing to love all mankind, except an American.” She also would have been exposed to pamphlets like War in Disguise; or, the Frauds of Neutral Flags, which summarized British anxieties around America’s interference with their war against France. But Ard also believes that Jane processed her feelings about America’s betrayal in her novels, which typically have plots based “on betrayal motivated by economic concerns”: Willoughby in S&S, Wickham in P&P, Mr. Elton in Emma, the Elliots in Persuasion. War was certainly on Austen’s mind when she wrote S&S, P&P, & Mansfield Park, & “provided the rhythm to which [her] novels unfold.”4 Kathryn Sutherland goes as far as to call Jane Austen one of England’s first wartime writers, because she explored the impact of war on the homefront. A close reading of her work could help us interpret her heroines’ self-reflections as England trying to understand its new role in the world if it could no longer claim superiority of the seas.
Since Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, U.S citizens who didn’t vote for him have been asking themselves the same question: Who are we? What do we stand for if we can vote for someone—whom Jane would call Godless—like Trump? For Jane, the answer would be simple: Americans vote with their wallets. And doesn’t 2024 prove her right? All of the post-election coverage points fingers at Democrats for not realizing this was an election about the economy, not saving the soul of democracy. Jane might even say that only in America would a failed, bankrupt businessman be elected to improve the economy. On the points of his racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-immigrant remarks, she might have less to say; on the point of democracy & allowing the will of the people to rule, she might say that it’s risky. We know that, don’t we America? As does Jane Austen’s own nation (the modern incarnation of it), which voted for Brexit—not that Jane could have conceived of Britain being part of a European Union!
If America were a heroine in a Jane Austen novel, the time for self-reflection might be now, but it also might be too late. This election was, literally & metaphorically, a second chance. Lizzy Bennet, Anne Elliot, even Emma Woodhouse were lucky enough to be able to reflect on their behavior, correct their mistakes, & accept the love that was deservedly offered to them. But, first, they needed to transform internally by changing the stories they told themselves & believed to be true. In 8 years, America couldn’t change it’s narrative & learn what more needed to be done to beat Trump. I’ll admit that Harris’s concession speech rang hollow for me. What is America’s promise that shines brightly? And what, pray tell, are we rolling up our sleeves to work toward? I’m unclear on what the vision is for our revolutionary nation, but we may need to accept that we’re not so exceptional after all. We may not even be the heroine of a Jane Austen novel, but Wickham in P&P after he’d gone too far & had no choice but to marry Lydia Bennet. Wickham, who continues to boast of his virtues to Lizzy & the people of Meryton, even though he knows he’s (forgive my language, Jane) full of shit & so do they.
The world sees through our moral principles—Jane Austen saw through them in our nation’s early days. Other countries don’t turn to us as a moral beacon; they turn to us because we control the purse strings, because we’re the powerful spider at the center of a complicated web. Can we really deny that our domestic & foreign policies are decided based on what’s financially convenient? And that trickles down to the people when we vote.
Jane might have laughed at our expense & tried to refrain from saying, “I told you so.” Are we a fallen empire? And when did the fall happen? Perhaps the moment we built a nation on ideals that have never been true. “It is so deliciously ripe for satire,” Jane Austen would say. Is Trump still a laughing matter, Jane? “No, of course not,” she’d say. “Satire is for recognizing truth, not laughing.” Satire could wake us up, if only America would hear the alarm.
Yours,
Modern Austen <3
See Patricia M. Ard’s article on how Jane Austen covertly talked about America in Persuasions, Vol. 33, winter 2012.
Jane’s letter to Martha Lloyd written on 2 September 1814.
See Kathryn Sutherland’s article defining Jane as a “wartime writer” for the Jane Austen House blog.