America’s own

Even in these first days of the Trump presidency, the first light of an age of reaction is impossible to miss. It has been incubated in American liberalism

found in the United States. He lamented, too, the Jews: “A few Jews add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos.” Adolf Hitler was the saviour of the Western civilisation he sought: The Führer was “undoubtedly a great man”; Fascist Germany’s excesses offset by a “sense of decency and value which in many ways is far ahead of our own [sic]”.

Trump, likewise, venerates power. In a 1990 interview to Playboy, he disparagingly contrasted Mikhail Gobachev’s “not a firm enough hand” handling of the Soviet Union with China, which he lauded for its Tiananmen Square crackdown. “They were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength,” Trump said.

“God Almighty in his most holy and wise providence,” Winthrop wrote in his journal, “hath so disposed of the condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in submission.” Leaders like him, he suggested, should strike “first upon the wicked in moderating and restraining them: so that the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor nor the poor and dispised [sic] rise up against and shake off their yoke.”

Fascinatingly, Trump used the same discursive tropes in his inauguration speech. “For too long,” he said, “a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth.” He promised only a share, though — not an assault on inequality, nor social justice.

It was not always so. One afternoon in July, 1946, J. Loy Harrison was driving African-american sharecroppers Dorothy and Roger Malcolm, and Mae-murray and George Dorsey, to his farm in Walton County, Georgia. Malcolm was accused of having stabbed a white man; he had just been released from prison. Dorsey was a World War

C R Sasikumar II veteran who had served in the Pacific, and his wife was seven months pregnant.

The car was stopped by a gang of armed, white men. “A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders”, Harrison later recalled. “He pointed to Roger Malcom and said, ‘We want that nigger’. Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger, and said, ‘We want you, too, Charlie’. I said, ‘His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George’. Someone said ‘Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party’”.

No witnesses ever came forward to the murders that followed, though their identities were reported to be widely known; the case still remains unsolved. President Harry Truman, though, was outraged. He was unable to pass anti-lyching legislation in the face of opposition from southern democrats, but the President’s Committee on Civil Rights forced the desegregation of the military and government services, opening the way for historic changes.

From the earliest days of its being, the destiny of the US has been deeply shaped by liberal individualism — freedom, liberty, equality of opportunity, tolerance. The idea is so deeply ingrained in culture as to constitute a civic religion. This dogma, though, does not guarantee a politics that is liberal and rightsprotecting: In its heart, American liberalism incubates a paranoid, violent monster.

“Precisely because Americans agree closely on the core values of political life,” Lane Crothers has written, “they lack experience in dealing with dissent, challenge, and fundamental political-cultural disagreements about the right ordering of society.”

Trump’s demagoguery is, thus, an inexorable consequence of America’s post 9/11 sense of being besieged by the world, and the crisis within — crises of race, of inequality, and of identity.

praveen.swami@expressindia.com