Blaming Americans for Trump would be doing what he does
About 18 months ago, a friend who had emigrated to the US came to visit. That was just about the time when Donald Trump began to emerge as the frontrunner in the US presidential race.
Our conversation turned to US politics and I said that a Trump presidency was looking like a real possibility.
“It does,” my friend said. “God help us.”
Now, a year after Trump floated to the top, the reality is turning out to be far worse than imagined. Just about everything he says is cringeworthy with thoughtless policies to match, and now he has presumed to insult Africans, Haitians and Americans of African descent. He is Archie Bunker without the benefit of the bigoted gags, such as they were.
Nothing about Trump is funny and not even the most explicit of satirical depictions provide relief. The main trouble with Trump’s expectorations is not his crude profanity or facile mentality. It is the fact that the idea of white racial supremacy is the organising principle in the US president’s policy execution.
It is tempting to ask what sort of electorate would elect such a fool as president. The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) had a ready answer: “There is a cult of ignorance in the US, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
But it would be a mistake to blame Americans for Trump. It would display precisely the prejudice that underlies Trump’s racism and any other form of bigotry. Trump is not America. If just one American is nothing like Trump, it would be a mistake to dismiss that entire nation.
But perhaps Trump has a kind of point. In the addled organ that passes for a brain, there must be a kind rationalisation of his racist convictions. It would be that Haiti was a miserable place under Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier even though the Duvaliers were not the Haitian people.
Yet, that is what is Trump means. He must wonder how SA could elect a Jacob Zuma as president. As in the Lithuanian kleptocracy, SA ranks as just another golden toilet.
It is just daft, of course. Zuma, SA’s kleptocrat in chief, is not this country. Neither does the rampaging EFF represent the black people of this country. Verwoerd did not embody Afrikaners, nor did Rhodes characterise the English in SA. Yet, in the minds of the bigoted, whole cultures and nations are held collectively responsible for the atrocities and idiocies of the criminals and the fools who have floated to the top.
Writing about Trump in The Atlantic, Adam Serwer describes how bigots respond to history: “It is a convenient trick to rob a person of all they have, even their own body, and then mock them for their poverty, and blame it on their nature.” This is apposite to the Muslim bashers of the world and for the unreconstructed racist South Africans, black and white, and of the homophobic, antisemitic, or any other reactionary prejudice manifested as convenience.
It is bigotry in any language. It is the default setting of the fearful and the ignorant. It advances no one, neither victim nor perpetrator, yet it remains the language of the perpetually hard-done-by, of eternal victimhood.
It is baffling that Trump and his ilk, from their positions of power and privilege, cast themselves as some or other victim yet do their utmost to perpetuate the idea of supremacy, the most convenient of which is racial. It is equally inexplicable that the South Africans now in power and privilege pursue the longdiscredited notions of racial supremacy yet fail to understand that their spurious claims will be met with equally spurious counterclaims.
Groups – any kind of group – are exclusive by definition. It makes nonsense of South Africans’ and humanity’s ambition of inclusive development. Trump is the profane proof that we should let it go.