The promise of economic growth for all and democracy to come is the most pernicious lie of whiteness—the affirmative defuses revolutionary energy into an always unrequited hope, justifying violence, warfare and racism through the dream of inclusion.

This dissertation examines the intimate connections between emancipatory democracy and speculative economics. It studies cultural texts that reflect and express national ideals of U.S. democracy that emereged in three periods of heightened captialist speculation the Jacksonian period of the 1830s, the 1930s Popular Front period, and the rise of liberal multiculturalism between 1980 to the present. The project engages two kinds of cultural texts. The project derives its proximate objects of the study--folklore, literature, literary criticism, stage performances, community festivals and public parks—from a range of critical and cultural texts produced by Constance Rourke, F.O. Matthiessen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Catlin, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the neighborhood of Powderhorn Park. Yet, the disseration also explores a second text that connects these seemingly disparate objects and authors. The social text that binds the chapters of this dissertaion is a broader text of U.S. culture and social practice that is conditioned and inflated by the logic of speculation. This second text reveals culture as a central link in the economic project of U.S. nationalism. Culture in this text, is a key technology by which U.S. inequality is reproduced, reiterated, and translated across contexts. I argue that the cultural logic of specualiton disables possibilities for participatory democracy and racial, gendered, and class justice and equality. This logic aligns the emancipatory aspirations of aggreived groups to the market and property interests of elites. I show that culture has been instrumental for expanding social inequality through the promises of U.S. nationalism. The speculative logic of U.S. democracy relies on the category of "not yet freedom" to hide economic and racial inequalities. It preserves the idea of democracy only by deferring actual justice to a perpetually pushed back future. The pursuit of democracy in the United States has been haunted by histories of refusal and deferral. When aggrieved groups ask for emancipation, elites often respond with promises of freedom without doing the hard work of creating justice. Refusable Pasts explores how the national culture of the United States portrays the deferral of freedom to some unspecified "not yet" time in the future as evidence of real democratic inclusion in the present. Promises of future freedom evidence the power and pervasiveness of popular aspirations for democracy. Yet because national culture offers aggrieved groups democratic promises rather than democratic practices, it also demonstrates the power of elites to suppress popular democracy and preserve their own privileges. Speculative logic and market subjectivity permeate U.S. national culture. Speculative practices originate in economic relations, but their logic structures national culture as well. Speculative logics promising future growth have connected the expressive cultures of U.S nationalism to the economic life of the nation's elites. Just as investors anticipate that economic returns in the future will reward their work in the present, citizens are encouraged to defer their desires for empowerment, autonomy, dignity and community to some perpetually promised but never quite realized time of "not yet" freedom in the future. Hope functions as a fundamental mechanism for deferring freedom to the future and refusing radical change in the present. Under these conditions, culture serves as a cover story promoting economic expansion and empire, slavery and racial subordination, plunder and perpetual warfare. The national culture of the nation works to instantiate, legitimate, and perpetuate economic inequality and social stratification. It is also one forum that elites use to manage the emancipatory aspirations of popular struggles. Culture counts because stories centered on the logic of speculation promise symbolic reconciliations as the salve to the wounds caused by the perpetuation of inequalities in society. The speculative logics that inform national culture portray inexcusable injustices in the present as mere preludes to a promised prosperity and freedom in the future. Thus, the democratic promises inscribed inside national culture actually function as powerful mechanisms for the perpetuation of decidedly undemocratic practices and policies.