Trump has managed to do one thing for a lot of people: dispel the illusion that America is somehow special and immune to autocracy. Now we get a chance to get people to look clearly at American history and realize that…this is the way it has always been, except more subtle.
Most of us grew up getting our brains filled with bullshit propaganda about how America was The Greatest Country Ever because WWII and apple pie and freedom and shit. But even the surface truths that hid the lie are now in tatters.
We have our own Nazi authoritarians now, so we don’t have to go to Europe to punch anyone and if we punched a Nazi we would probably end up in a concentration camp in Gitmo or El Salvador. We can’t make apple pies because no eggs to wash the pie crust.
So we have to now assess our country with clear eyes. Objectively. And welp, it isn’t exactly great. We have left too many people behind, we have not dealt with hatreds that have been born out of racism, evangelical cultism, regionalism, xenophobia or imaginary threats to someone’s piles of gold.
We don’t even have a free market (of ideas, labor, goods or anything else). We don’t have democracy (it’s a marginally representative republic with two institutional parties that would require billions of dollars and lawyers to displace). We don’t have the best healthcare or education or opportunity.
These things can be observed objectively. The only relative advantages we had over the world up to the last century was a vast supply of natural resources (that drove industrialization), an agricultural cornucopia (that drove industrial exploitation of agricultural goods) & a relatively open society with some marginal class mobility if you managed to pass for ruling class material.
That led to the industrial might that really won World War II, and if there hadn’t been a reactionary swerve away from the path being set post Great Depression through the war years, we might have had socialized medicine and other nice things everybody else has.
But we still had racism (born from colonialism), a legacy of rural poverty, unsolved issues from the abandonment of Reconstruction, and political structures designed for when we had an agrarian economy and were ruled by landed elites. And reactionaries. So we are where we are now—totally fucked.
At least most of the world is just as fucked in some ways as we are. Other places have nice things, but they are not necessarily responding to the challenges created by global migration due to displacement by economic and physical violence.
So maybe we should start thinking about MAGFA – Make America Great For All — instead of trying to go back to something that never really existed other than as some nostalgic vibe. </rant>
Reading list:
- A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
- Working, Studs Terkel
- “Can the US resist fascism?”, The New Statesman
- More references to come.
The Packet Rat 