Ever since the election of Donald Trump (which like many others, I didn’t see coming) I have kind of lost interest in US politics. It’s not as if I condemn all Americans as dumb-ass stupid. I have been to the States a couple of times in the distant past and know it is a very varied country. It has it’s very conservative backwards parts, and some very progressive forward looking districts. It has lots of very poorly educated people, but also many of the most brilliant minds and innovators in the world.
Since the end of World War II, the USA has gloried in the title of “Leader of the Free World”, although allying with Stalin against Hitler is a distinction without much difference. It’s subsequent alliance with every nasty dictator on the planet against “communism” didn’t do it much credit either. But my dispute is not so much with what the USA was, as with what it has become under Trump. Basically a country without hope. Without almost any major saving graces.
Sure, if you are lucky or smart, with the right racial/linguistic profile, you can still make your fortune there. But don’t get sick. Don’t “drive while black”. And it helps if you are a white supremacist racist bigot. Believing in Zionism, creationism and denying climate change also helps. In general, besides McDonald’s, Microsoft and Google, what positive contribution does the USA make to the world now? Dylan and Springsteen belong to a prior age. Hollywood hasn’t produced an original or inspirational movie in years. Since MLK, has any US political leader provided much inspiration to the world?
All crass generalisations, I accept. And I do admire the “can do” positivism and sunny optimism of so many Americans I have known. But even if the EU is a bureaucratic quagmire and Brexit a sore on the back-side of creation, what positive inspiration can one now draw from the US? The USA has always had it’s crass materialistic side. I remember being shocked when asked “How much do you make” almost as an opening conversational gambit. It seemed that some people only defined you, and themselves, by their earning power.
But with Trump that strain seems to have become almost entirely dominant. There seems to be no moral, political, environmental or social concern which isn’t Trumped by the bottom line. If “Driving while Black” almost amounts to a crime, then doing almost anything while rich is absolvable. Trump has even said he could shoot someone on Times Square and get away with it. The “Moral Majority” of “Christian Conservatives” will forgive anything if you are rich and white. The fast growing Mormon church even seems to equate material success with divine favour. Church of Mammon, more likely.
And in the meantime the world is consumed by war and deprivation often as a direct consequence of the depredations of US multinationals, military and contractors. A mass extinction event is under way as humans destroy ever more planetary resources beyond the planet’s ability to regenerate and sustain. It is not that we in Europe are blameless, but that Trumpism seems to glory in leading us all in the wrong direction. The worst aspects of global corporate rule made flesh.
Please somebody tell me I have got it wrong. That there are widespread positive trends afoot in the USA which will soon overthrow Trumpism and all it represents. That UK Brexiteers will get their noses bloodied, and then some. That the nascent fascists in Europe will get their comeuppance. That political stability will be achieved in the Middle East… But somehow I don’t see too many positive trends. Yes globalism has lifted many in Asia out of absolute and into relative poverty, but at a price the earth is unable to sustain. This has the look of an epoch that is nearing it’s end. Please tell me it isn’t true.
Well, there’s an awful lot of ground covered in your lament, so I’ll have to (randomly) pick and choose.
Presumably you meant this as a provocation, which is fine. It’s pretty hard to defend American culture at this stage of the game, as it revolves around ostentatious consumerism, sports saturation and crappy “music”. I have noticed that very few films pique my interest any longer. But this low brow culture merely continues a very long thread.
You are aware that the US is engaged in a long-running political civil war, with the defeated faction fairly strongly in support of the ideals you have laid out. That the defeated faction appears to be a (slight) majority makes the situation all the more tragic. But it is not correct to assert that Trumpism has “become almost entirely dominant”. Trump is not “popular” at all, according to the (admittedly unreliable) polls. But because of the failed US constitution and 35 year old war on democracy by the “conservative” movement, Trumpism has taken control of the federal government.
Whether it can be successfully resisted is the ongoing story. The “conservative” movement has rigged our system pretty thoroughly, as you are aware. But of course, it must be acknowledged that even sensible and functioning democratic systems (as in Europe) are registering a rise in reactionary nationalism–i.e. Trumpism or (more properly) Putinism. So our particular (deeply failed) system is not the only cause of the trouble.
But your piece ultimately morphs into a cry for the planet, and there all humanity is indicted. There are simply too many people for the standard of living now expected by every screen in the digital age. Every country will apparently sacrifice every other value for the (promised) creation of “jobs, jobs, jobs”. Certainly we in America have done so–there is no higher value. Every country apparently will turn on some group as the scapegoat for why there are not enough jobs. Marx’s famous Reserve Army of Unemployed is therefore behind every tune, and the citizenry apparently thinks that throwing themselves on the mercy of plutocrats (or economic autocrats) will solve the problem.
We have thus all sold our souls to the capitalist Satan, and it is hard to see that he is not poised to collect on the bargain, ha-ha. The level of human denial of looming environmental collapse is stunning, because the problem is so large, the needed global institutions so weak, and the sacrifice seemingly so great. “Apres moi, les deluge” is the Trumpite motto. On climate change, history (to the extent such a luxury survives!) will ultimately conclude that the US “conservative” movement doomed whatever feeble attempts were made at saving the planet and its multitude of innocent species—but all societies will have played their part.
Where in the world can one find an anti-materialist movement? In Europe? South America? Certainly not east Asia. In the US, the hippies were the last such incarnation, but they are long, long gone—hardly a memory. That was itself a youth movement, but my take today is that the kids are even more prisoners of materialism than their parents. And if it doesn’t spring from them, from where could it arise?
Democracy moved to restrict Capitalism from its multitudinous excesses and thus Capitalism had to destroy Democracy. All possible forms of governance have now been undermined and discredited, for the obscene enrichment of a few thousand global plutocrats. I guess we are reliant upon The .1% for the next chapter….
Excellent response although I would take slight exception to your assertion that “all humanity is indicted.” It is hard for me to indict a poverty stricken subsistence farmer in Africa, Asia or Latin America who’s carbon footprint is tiny or non-existent and whose poverty is partly a result of climate change induced drought or large scale deforestation by agribusiness. Even at current population levels, the earth probably has enough resources to meet everyone’s need if not their greed, and therein lies the immediate problem, even if, longer term, we have to control the population as well.
I wish I could tell you you’ve got it wrong, but I’m afraid you’ve pretty well nailed it. Eisenhower tried to warn us, but we didn’t listen. We were already caught up in that Sputnik thing.
Like most USians of my age, I thought JFK represented something new and different, better maybe. But then he went on that Man On the Moon thing. I was so proud when I heard Armstrong’s words. I thought it really was a giant leap for mankind. In hindsight, it was more giant profits for the corporations that built the hardware. And we as humans have benefited immensely from the incredible technological advances that followed, but at what cost to our planet and our future? And it goes on. JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, Dubya. Viet Nam, Iraq, how many others?
For a while I thought the European Union might help us turn to a better path. I imagined something like a United States of Europe that might become a strategic and political balance to the US and the Soviets. Alas, it seems the EU is just becoming more of the same. Please tell us there is still some hope there.
For the moment the best we can probably hope for is that the EU doesn’t get quite sucked along into the rampant militarism and consumerism of the USA. A brake, perhaps, but hardly a transformative force of global consequence. Nevertheless an example that things could be different, if perhaps not by very much.
How does the trend of the Democratic Party faring well in special and off-year elections factor into your narrative? Does that get any coverage in the international press? At this juncture, Democratic candidates have outperformed expectations (based on 2016 outcomes) and have flipped 37 state legislative seats, often in some very GOP-friendly territory. There is a positive correlation between special and off-year election performance and performance in the mid-terms. Right now, the odds are decent (though certainly not a given) that the Democratic Party will flip at least the House of Representatives in November. The Senate is another matter. That should put a brake on some of the worst excesses as we sort out how to pull our country back from the brink.
I am aware of some Democratic successes in GOP leaning districts in special elections etc., but unsure how much predictive value they have. Turnout is often much lower than in a general election, and (at least in Europe) it is common for such elections to become vehicles for anti-government protest votes (with government sympathisers less motivated to support the status quo). In Ireland/UK it is not unusual for the government of the day to lose every single bye-election during their term of office.
That said, I would expect Dems to recover somewhat from their current very low ebb. Whether the swing will be sufficient to take back control of a very gerrymandered House is open to debate but quite a likely outcome, I would have thought. (The Senate is another matter).
However what disappoints me is that the Dems, too, have moved steadily rightward in recent years to the point that they are often indistinguishable from Moderate Republicans. The Overton window has moved so far that it is doubtful how effective a House with a small Dem majority would be at curbing the rightward drift of Washington politics. And that is before you consider all the state level elections where the GOP seems even more entrenched.
Add to that GOP control of the Judiciary and it will be a very long time before to overall direction of Government changes and longer than that for it to reach the point of some more liberal Dem administrations of the past.
It seems to me that the fundamentals of conservative ideology – the almost divine deference to the “market”, the visceral opposition to state regulation and income redistribution, the notion that the governmental doesn’t create real jobs and can’t do anything as well as the private sector and that the USA has a God given right to interfere in the politics of other countries – are shared by many Dems and Republicans. And so even a significant Dem mid-term victory won’t necessarily change very much. And if the Dems don’t make much of a difference, why would anybody vote for them in the future?
There’s been some question about whether the argument of the Democratic Party moving to the right holds water. Admittedly I have very limited time and I may well be missing important data points, but the impression I get is that the party’s base has been moving left fairly consistently in recent years, with the legislators lagging behind although also veering more left. Reaction to Trump explains some of that. Losing probably is part of it as well – the remaining legislators are more cohesive. Over time, a party’s legislative contingent will reflect the base more and more. What I don’t see the Democratic Party’s legislators doing is going full-tilt on opposition to the extent that a lot of folks on the left would like to see. On tactics, the party is not quite ready to blow things up – something the GOP does consistently. That may or may not be a mistake. But on policy – we’re at a point where the Democratic Party appears to have bought in to advocating for universal health care (I would not be too surprised if Medicare for All became part of the 2020 platform), has become more liberal economically (and did a solid if ultimately futile job of fighting a very regressive and genuinely neoliberal tax bill late last year), and has been consistently left on immigration (although again, their tactics on that front have sucked). A pretty useful discussion on Five Thirty Eight more or less summarizes what I have encountered elsewhere on the internet tubes.
Beyond that, I am not really sure what can be expected from the Democratic Party, beyond the realization that it will not turn into the party that sells off our public goods to the highest bidder. The party will never appeal to what passes for an anticapitalist left in the US, and I doubt the party’s leaders or base have much interest in doing so. Forget the “workers of the world unite” slogans. Not happening. Then again, the anticapitalist left was and still is a non-factor, at least here. Part of that is undoubtedly structural (we could really do with a parliamentary system), but part of that strikes me as due to what the various leftist factions have offered or failed to offer in the way of solutions. I don’t see that changing any time too soon.
In the meantime, I will say this. We have been in a spot of bother for some time. Right-wing nationalism, and specifically white Christian right-wing nationalism has become the GOP ethos, and the GOP has been consistently devolving in that direction for a good couple decades. Since a decade ago, it has been obvious that the US voters face a choice every election between one party that is generally liberal and tries to make a go of government working and one party that has effectively embraced a 21st century flavor of fascism, and contrary to wishful thinking there is no evidence that the fever is breaking among the faithful and the legislators in the latter party. That’s the impending zombie apocalypse that we are staring at every time we wake up to check the morning news. That’s certainly not the US or the world I had intended my children to inherit. And yet, here we are.
Frank, you’re just flat wrong on the Democratic politicians moving right. They’ve moved left, and rather decisively of late. A national $15 minimum wage, Medicare for All, expanding Social Security – these were fringe positions 10 years ago and now they are mainstream or even dominant. This is partly because they’re following the Democratic voters, who have been moving strongly to the left, and partly because the conservative/moderate Blue Dog Dems were reduced to a rump in 2010 and have never recovered.
The nadir for liberalism was roughly 1990-2002 and it’s been distinctly on the upswing since.
We shall see. It is easy to adopt left wing positions if that is what the base wants, and there is no chance pf any of your policies becoming law. If the Dems win the House and start passing some truly progressive legislation I will be more convinced- even if then the Senate and Trumps veto result in a stalemate, at best.
“…allying with Stalin against Hitler is a distinction without much difference.”
My family tree–I’ve been doing some genealogy recently–has a bunch of dead ends because Hitler was hell-bent on turning my ancestors into lampshades. You might want to take a look at the Yad Vashem website sometime.
“The fast growing Mormon church even seems to equate material success with divine favour. Church of Mammon, more likely.”
Equating material success with divine favour is a defining characteristic of the Calvinist tradition and evangelical Christianity. Mormons aren’t evangelicals. Hell, evangelicals in their unguarded moments will tell you that Mormons aren’t even Christians. Some of us who’ve lived in the western US have known Mormons, had Mormon neighbors and friends, for most of our lives.
I believe you’re writing from the Republic of Ireland, a land until quite recently firmly in the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, which built some mighty impressive cathedrals at the expense of European peasants, who were told that their misery on Earth would be relieved in the afterlife, and were meanwhile encouraged to kill some Jews, as according to their parish priests, Jews had not only murdered Jesus, but had been killing Christian babies for the blood to make Passover matzos.
Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?
I doubt those who died in a Siberian Gulag felt much differently to those killed in Nazi Concentration camps
and the nature and extent of the Holocaust wasn’t even know when the the USA entered WWII and was not the determining factor in that decision.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
Your highlighted passage from the NYT doesn’t really square with Snyder’s previous work. How did he formulate that equation from his work in “Bloodlands…”?
I’m not familiar with the body of Snyder’s work so can’t comment on your quote. I suspect the difference is that most of Stalin’s victims died after the end of WWII and the Nazi regime, while your quote refers to the period of WWII. Either way, both Stalin and Hitler were responsible for many millions of deaths albeit for different but overlapping reasons and time periods. Hence I feel my comment “allying with Stalin against Hitler is a distinction without much difference” is justified even if it is something of a rhetorical flourish not central to a piece about Trump.
I can see how this could be the impression from the rest of the world, but the people of the US haven’t changed much from Trump’s election. The nasties are a little bolder and the government is doing less good and more harm, but success doesn’t depend on being a white male racist bigot. It helps, unfortunately, but no more than it did before.
The big social change going on now is not the Trumpians taking over but the #MeToo movement. Tolerance for previously ubiquitous sexual harassment has dropped abruptly, and the long term effects may become as important as those of the Catholic sexual abuse revelations in Ireland. At the same time, and probably linked, there’s been a notable increase in political activity by women. I suspect after the 2018 elections the image of the US will shift again, and in a good direction this time.
The lowering of all ethical standards that Trump represents could have quite a long-term deleterious impact on political life and discourse in the USA, and awful as the abuse of women is, I don’t think addressing that problem will fix the wider societal issues of class war, rising inequality, racism and bigotry that Trump represents. It is part of the solution, certainly, but will it distract from all the other victims Trumpism creates?
The standards were already lowered. This is the country that let the Reagan administration get away with Iran-Contra 30 years ago.
It is not unlike the last years (40s BC) of the Roman Republic, when Caesarian populists broke up that decadent aristocratic machinery of limited democracy. Imagine awkwardly smart Cicero and his imperceptive conservative colleagues relying on oligarchs like Pompeius Magnus.
As well, it is not unlike the end of the Islamic Golden Age, with al-Ghazali hammering key nails on that progress.
And it is not unlike the decline of ancient Babylonian, Assyrian cities, with rural traditionalists having the last laugh by establishing religions for ages.
And now… or soon… we may obviously see a major malfunction… and powerlessness… of the progressive pulse… again…
Is our benevolence too arrogant, humanity too abstract, and knowledge of good and evil too superior? Why else would unappreciative commoners just like to troll us?