So much has been written and is being
written about why Donald Trump won the 2016 election that I do not think I can
add anything original. Nevertheless, at times like this, there is an irrepressible
need to shout, if only to remind yourself that you are awake. I will,
therefore, shout briefly about what we in this country stand to lose, and about how we – the non-white minority – can retain some form of kinship with
those who voted for this calamity.
That it is a calamity is undeniable. It
is no use arguing that Trump’s declared agenda is just campaign rhetoric, or that he
will be mellowed by power, or restrained by conscientious colleagues, or
disciplined by the responsibilities of governance. With both houses of Congress,
the White House and the Supreme Court in Republic hands, and most of the
Republican Party cynically (and predictably) falling in line behind Trump, there will be little
meaningful restraint. It is equally pointless to suggest that Trump is actually
a moderate who was merely playing to the gallery. He is mainly empty: an
unprepared and narcissistic novice without a secure political base, who will – out of necessity –
surround himself with men whose agendas are quite real. The administrative team
that he has already appointed – men like Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and
Michael Flynn, with their undisguised virulence – has already confirmed that
the next presidency will be at least as destructive as that of George W. Bush.
Indeed, it will almost certainly be worse.
Overnight on November 8, a hundred years
of small political victories and major civilizational gains were placed before the
axes of barbarians who are, one can assume, themselves astonished at their good
fortune. On the chopping block: the gains of the Progressive era, the New Deal,
the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement. More precisely,
we stand to lose the regulatory state that has provided us with clean air and water,
ensured the safety of toys and automobiles, protected public lands from despoliation, and given meaning to the very concept of public resources,
including the idea that the state is a public resource. The incoming regime has
already promised to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and to back
out of international anti-pollution accords. Drilling in the national parks, coal-fired power plants, and all-you-can-use lead paint cannot be far behind.
On the chopping block: the welfare state that
has its origins in the great white crisis of the Depression, and that has, ever
since, provided Americans with a safety net of unemployment benefits, health
care and security in old age. That state has ensured that although there is poverty in this country, children rarely starve or freeze to death
anymore, or die on the doorsteps of the hospital. That state has also
concretized the idea that the individual is not an atomized subject who is
solely responsible for his successes and failures, but a member of overlapping
communities of citizens, with all the advantages and disadvantages that
membership involves. It has functioned as the representative of the national community
in the life of the individual, underlining the principle that ‘society’ includes
a relationship of support between the community and the individual. Now, to
borrow a line from Margaret Thatcher, we stand at the threshold of a state
premised on the notion that there is no such thing as society.
On the chopping block: the painfully won
edifice of civil rights, the central moral narrative of twentieth-century America.
White supremacy is the basic platform on which Trump was elected. His slogan ‘Make
America Great Again’ is a direct offshoot of the Tea Party’s narrative of ‘taking our country back,’ i.e., the reclamation of the White House from a black man. When
was America last ‘great’? It was, of course, in the time of Ward Cleaver, cars
with tail fins, and a distinctly white-southern form of Americana: uniformly
white faces at the drive-in theater and the chrome-plated diner. What is it
about the 1950s that so much of American nostalgia revolves around this decade
of corn-syrup well-being? Some of it has to do with prosperity and unionized
manufacturing jobs, no doubt. But it is also the moment before the Civil Rights
Act and federally protected voting rights, before Cesar Chavez and Chicano activism, before Muhammad Ali, before
women bosses, before the Stonewall riots, before Third World immigrants, and before the Bates motel became a Patel motel. Those who think the 1950s were ‘great’ exhibit not just
an economic nostalgia, but nostalgia for a racial order.
For the ‘white working class’ – which is
not so much an economic status as a cultural identity – that supported Trump, ‘feeling’
economically insecure was inseparable from the intolerable insecurity of what we loosely call diversity. Voters who had no
intention of picking oranges or washing dishes for a living supported a
candidate who insisted we need a wall to keep Mexicans out, and to deport them en masse. Anti-immigration politics is almost
always a racial posture, not an economic one.
Trump’s loudly articulated threats
against Muslims reflect the same racial posture. Here, however, it is necessary
that we separate the red herrings from the rotten fish. The aspect of the new ‘Muslim
policy’ that has got the most publicity is a vague plan to subject Muslims to
registration. Accompanied by explicit references to Japanese internment and the
possibility that Muslims might be required to carry documents identifying them
by religion, it has naturally raised the specter of families being herded into
camps, and the Nuremberg laws. Those particular dangers are, I think, not
especially acute. The rhetoric of dramatic new forms of registration and detention
is for the most part a ritual of victory and a tactic of racial intimidation: a celebratory
experience of hate speech without repercussions. The history of first-wave
fascism is unlikely to repeat itself so exactly, and Japanese internment is not
the most relevant model for what awaits Muslims in this country. The more reliable
models are Guantanamo and the ‘black sites’ that spread like an American fungus
after 2001. It is easy for liberals to forget that registration of Muslims – in
the form of secret ‘no fly lists,’ police surveillance and FBI watch-lists
– already exists. In the age of electronic data collection, these can be more
subtle than garish yellow stars of David, and we can reasonably expect that they
will be expanded.
When we see the Trump phenomenon as a dramatic
departure from existing political norms, we sometimes miss the powerful
currents of continuity that link it to the ‘War on Terror.’ It is, for
instance, shot through with the same vision of racialized enemies who must be
confronted both abroad and at home, and that was normalized not only through
the news, but through television shows like 24
and Homeland. It exhibits the same
indifference towards legal and constitutional niceties. Trump may want to bring
back the use of torture, but torture never fully went away. It was merely
suspended, by a sort of gentleman’s agreement within the US government that has
now been jettisoned by people who are uninterested in being gentlemen. When
Barack Obama declined to prosecute CIA employees and members of the Bush
administration for torture, he left the door open for future governments to resort
to waterboarding and worse, unobstructed by legal judgments or the fear of punishment.
America – in the sense of a racialized national-security state – invested in
Trump well before the election. He did not come out of the blue. He came,
rather, from the cracks that have been deliberately maintained within American liberalism,
and that have produced different strains of fascism at different times. It is
worth remembering that fascism is not the polar opposite of democracy,
especially after 1945. It is a tendency within democracy, based on the same
valorization of the majority.
In these circumstances, we – minorities –
can expect difficulties that are only partly unprecedented. We can expect intensified
police violence, more harassment by government bureaucracies, confrontations in
the streets and schoolyards with racists engaged in taking their country back, and
the infringement of voting rights. Usually, the frequency and seriousness of
these problems will depend upon who we are, where we are, who we are with, and how
much money we have. Sometimes those things will make no difference. Some of us
will have to live with an intensified fear of deportation or imprisonment. Some
will lose their jobs. Some will be ‘registered,’ blacklisted
or tortured. Some of these problems we will share with our white friends and
colleagues; others will be ours alone. Dealing with these realities will
require resilience and extraordinary political intelligence. I do not think
anybody knows how it can be done. We have only begun to dread and to steel
ourselves.
I will, accordingly, say nothing about how
to resist, or how to ‘take our country back.’ I will instead say a few words
about survival and sanity, and about community. There has been some talk – mainly
from the stunned governing establishment – about ‘unity’ and ‘coming together
as a country.’ This election, however, has forced us to look at our white
neighbors a little differently, or at least, warily. I do not mean neighbors
who scream racist epithets at black passers-by or attack hijab-wearing women on
public transportation. Few of us have any desire to ‘unite’ with a
lynch mob, although readers of Günter Grass and Hanif Kureishi know
that the line between an assailant and a defender in a racist society is not always a sharp one. I
mean the nice ones, who greet us by name when we walk into their pizzerias and take
care of our children when we drop them off at school. Are they, or are they
not, a part of the mob? We are quite aware that more than a few of them
voted for Trump. They are, in fact, aware that we are aware; they do not want
us to think of them as racist, and fall silent – out of courtesy! – when we
walk in on their celebrations. For those of us who live outside the blue
enclaves of the major cities, especially, they are woven into our communities,
as much as we are woven into theirs.
On the one hand, we can allow that many
white voters may have followed their ‘economic anxieties,’ or their feeling of
‘being abandoned’ by mainstream politicians (much-noted by the media after the
election), or their desire to ‘try something different,’ whatever that means. We
can accept that they did not connect the dots. We can allow that they were merely
being stupid, because there is no better word for ‘trying something different’
without knowing what that ‘something’ is, or for believing that Donald Trump, of all people, is a friend of workers who want unionized jobs and an enemy of corruption. But on the other hand, we cannot
ignore the reality that our white neighbors voted for a man who had the
endorsement of the KKK. (When was the Klan last a factor in a presidential
election? We would have to go back to the era of Woodrow Wilson.) Trump’s
racist rhetoric did not bother them; they were able to see it as unimportant.
The racial violence on display at his rallies, which he never repudiated, did
not trouble them either. The young black protesters who were manhandled and
abused by mobs confident in their strength of numbers did not matter to them.
To live alongside such neighbors is the
necessary lot of minorities in any democratic nation-state. I will therefore
make a counterintuitive suggestion: counterintuitive, because it flies in the
face of the heroic-defiant exhortations to fight in which we are now indulging,
and which are undoubtedly necessary. Let us give our neighbors the benefit of
the doubt. Let us accept that most of them were not thinking about you and me
when they voted. Let us accept that although they think Mexicans are our
misfortune, are afraid of black people, and believe Muslims have no place in
American society, they think we – their
co-worker, or son-in-law, or even their friend – are okay. They can, on occasion, almost forget
that we are not white. In other words, let us accept the ‘some of my best
friends are Jews’ argument against the charge of anti-Semitism. But first, let us think about
what that argument means.
People who think that immigration is a
problem, but are nice to you, an individual immigrant, are making an exception.
They will make that exception only as long as you do not challenge them beyond
a certain point, i.e., as long as you are tactful and grateful, and accept the
fundamental inequality that comes with being a minority in a democracy. But it
does mean that they are able to make exceptions for individuals, and thus – in moments
of forgetfulness, so to speak – to disaggregate the monolithic categories that constitute
their world.
I want to suggest that the ability of the
racist to make exceptions for neighbors and coworkers is not altogether a bad
thing. It can function, and does function, as a mode of coexistence in
majoritarianism. This is especially true when democracy has dispensed with
liberalism. Even liberalism was always a self-contradictory ideology: in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill found it
necessary to insert caveats that made it clear that in a world premised on
equality, some people must be less equal than others. Moreover, as an
ideological system, the multi-ethnic nation-state has its own inherent
conflicts: whereas the liberal state is premised on the equality of all
citizens, the idea of the nation inevitably becomes racialized and implies that
‘other’ races – i.e., other nations – have a lesser claim upon the state. This
is a predicament we call ethnocracy, or the complication of liberal democracy
by ethnic nationalism. America is not formally an ethnocracy, but in reality it
cannot avoid the idea that some ethnicities are more American than others.
‘Muslims are nasty, but not you, dear
neighbor,’ is a way of managing those contradictions. It is bad ideology, in
the sense that it is both intellectually and ethically flawed. It leaves the
door open for discrimination and deportation. But it is also deeply human,
allowing for personal affection, friendship, protectiveness, and even tolerance
– not so much their tolerance of us, as our tolerance of them.
Such flawed tolerance produces space
within which we can live on an everyday basis. It also produces space within
which we can organize and fight – not always with the brashness of militants,
but with the guile, tact and humor of minorities in any majoritarian political
order. It produces space within which we can teach – and I say this not just as
an educator, but as a liberal who believes that if you can make an exception
for me, you can learn to become
uncertain about the category itself. That is undoubtedly somewhat wistful, but
the wistful is a necessary component of any progressive politics.
Finally, such tolerance produces space within
which we – minorities – can do some introspection of our own, and become alert
to our own prejudices and hierarchies: how we treat women, homosexuals, other
minorities, the poor, and anyone who is less powerful than we are. We can, in this space,
become aware that power is not a black-or-white, constant, consistent thing
that you either have or do not have. Power fluctuates with every interaction
and change of context. It is not a bad thing to learn, ourselves, from the experience of being at the receiving end.
November 19, 2016
