What will it mean if Trump wins another election?
O lose one parent . . . may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,’’ wrote Oscar Wilde in his play The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
In somewhat the same spirit, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote last week, ‘‘At some point in the next two months we are going to have to decide whether we absolve the American people if they reelect Donald Trump.’’
Losing one election to Trump is unlucky; losing two in a row may be saying something about the national character.
Fisk has been Middle East correspondent of various British newspapers since 1976, so he was not on familiar ground when he wrote that about the United States in The Independent last Friday. On the other hand, he was expressing a mostly unspoken but widespread attitude among all Europeans except the extreme right. Let me quote some more:
‘‘Like all snobs, we’ve taken the view that Trump did not really represent American values — any more than the Arab dictators reflect the views of their people. We’ve hoped and prayed and fooled ourselves into believing this was only a temporary autocracy, a deviation, an old and reliable friend suffering from a serious but ultimately curable mental disease.
‘‘Yet . . . I wonder how we are going to react to Americans if the Trump years become the Trump era; or if his dreadful, ambitious family transform themselves into the Trump Caliphate
. . . if the America we felt we could always ultimately rely on — once they’ve straightened out their little Trump misadventure — turns into the nation we can never trust?’’
I grew up in Canada, and Canadians, like Mexicans, while fond enough of individual Americans, are by nature mistrustful of the American state — ‘‘like sleeping with an elephant’’, as Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it. If it just rolls over or wakes up cranky, you can get badly hurt.
Europeans have a different perspective.
Bob Fisk grew up in the United Kingdom, which like France remembers (most of the time) that it would have lost both world wars without American help. Even if the United States was years late to both world wars, it showed up both times in time to save the day.
And American troops stayed in Western Europe to protect it from Soviet power throughout the Cold War. Most Eastern Europeans see the United States as the instrument of their liberation from the Soviet Union, even though it did not in the end involve a hot war.
So there is still a deep well of respect and trust for the United States in Europe. Fisk is probably right that a second Trump election victory would finally poison that well, which would be a pity.
Another four years would also see him complete the destruction of the existing international order (without giving a single thought to a replacement). Trump is, as Michael Moore noted in 2016, ‘‘a wretched, ignorant, dangerous parttime clown and fulltime sociopath’’.
But would two terms of Trump mean the end of American democracy? Not necessarily. Not even likely. What Trump has triggered — and somebody was bound to trigger it around now, because every political niche, like every evolutionary niche, is always filled — is a final reckoning on the ‘‘race problem’’, about 150 years after the American Civil War.
At the time of the Civil War (186165), black Americans accounted for about 12% of the total population, and fourfifths of them were slaves. Whites accounted for almost all the rest; only a quartermillion were native Americans.
‘‘AfricanAmericans’’ still account for the same 12% share of the population today, and many of them are still victims of the same white fear, exclusion and official violence that their ancestors experienced (mainly because they were slaves) 150 years ago. But since US immigration law changed in 1965, allowing people from the entire world to immigrate, the ‘‘nonHispanic white share’’ of the population has dropped to only 60%.
That share will drop to 50% by 2044, according to forecasts based on current birth rates and immigration trends. This has triggered a huge panic among workingclass white Americans, who often compete for the same jobs and used to depend on their whiteness as a competitive advantage.
Trump is personally a racist, if his remarks and behaviour are any guide, but he is a cynical populist and would be exploiting white fears right now even if he really loved nonwhite Americans. That is why the vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not white privilege, is finally being dragged out into the open.
Having been so exposed, it will probably finally be extinguished — but not necessarily in time to thwart Trump’s reelection. This is not the end of the United States, nor the advent of a new Hitler either.
It is a necessary evolution of American history, for which some people living elsewhere may also pay a substantial price.
Today’s birthdays:
Samuel Ironside, New Zealand missionary
(181497); Sir Henry Miller, New Zealand politician (18301918); Sir Arthur Dudley Dobson, New Zealand surveyor/engineer/explorer (18411934); Joseph Angus Mackay, New Zealand journalist/ newspaper editor/historian (18821952); Ida Eise, New Zealand artist (18911978); Pei Te Hurinui Jones, New Zealand tribal leader/interpreter/writer (18981976); Jack Griffiths, All Black (19122001); Sir Charles Fleming, New Zealand environmentalist (191687); Sir Edward Somers, New Zealand jurist and member of the Privy Council (19282002); Graham Avery, New Zealand cyclist (19292015); Pat Booth, New Zealand journalist/author (19292018); Roy Williams, New Zealand Commonwealth Games athlete (1934); Tim Wallis, New Zealand aviation businessman (1938); Kim Casali, New Zealand cartoonist (194197); Keith Murdoch, All Black (19432018); Hugh Grant, British actor (1960); Sean Plunket, New Zealand journalist (1964); Adam Sandler, US actor/comedian (1966); Eric Stonestreet, US actor/comedian (1971); Anton Oliver, All Black (1975); Michael Buble, Canadian singer (1975); Julie Gonzalo, ArgentineAmerican actress (1981); Shaun Johnson, New Zealand rugby league player (1990).
Quote of the day:
‘‘An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person’s main task in life — becoming a better person.’’ — Leo Tolstoy, who was born on this day in 1828. He died in 1910, aged 82.
ODT