The Dissonance of American Politics

You cannot champion inhuman policies while demanding decorum and expect people not to grow frustrated.

American politics is a nuanced clusterfuck. The last three years of the Trump Presidency have ushered in some of the most despicable, surreal, and outright unbelievable news chyrons, breaking headlines, and scandals in recent memory. Trump has “forced” a great many of the politically ignorant to stand awake, pay attention, and get involved in things that matter. Great idea, right?

In typical leftist, academic brow-beating fashion, I’m going to tell you: no, it’s actually not great. There are thousands of think pieces, just like this one, that detail the fatal weaknesses of Trumpian ideology and the movement of our politics towards the far-right, so I’m going to keep it brief: America was always like this.

America was built on the bones of Native Americans and painted gold with the blood of a million slaves. For all of our talk of equality and brotherhood, for all of our bluster on liberty and independence, America has always been a white man’s playground. And it will continue to be his playground, regardless of whoever inhabits that gilded office, unless real, meaningful reform is enacted in this country.

With a charge like that, I’m sure you’re looking for evidence. Look around you. Inequality is rooted deep into the foundations of our institutions and our social norms, whether it stem from racial hierarchies or socioeconomic circumstance. I can already tell that people might be rolling their eyes now. Why is it always race with you people?

Because, simperialist, it’s always been about race. In order to explain the nitty-gritty of it all you’d have to take several history classes and attend a slew of lectures on the sociology of race and ethnicity, but I’ll try to be as succinct as possible: whiteness is the standard of excellence in this country, and for the most part, around the world.

A prime example lays in the myth of the model minority: Asian-Pacific Islander (API) folks (who have light complexions). API folks are commonly praised for being industrious and hardworking and are pitted against other minorities with the language usually being: if Asian immigrants can come to America and succeed, why can’t blacks and Hispanics and X do the same? This logic, however, completely fails to account for the historical and cultural contexts that haunt black Americans and those of darker skin tones: it fails to account for the generational racism that has been taught and passed down from the slave era until now, it fails to account for the “white common sense”—ideas and myths surrounding race and class that have become so prevalent and widespread that they are taken as “common sense;” examples include “if you don’t resist nothing will happen to you,” and “if you just pull up your bootstraps and work hard you’ll succeed.”—and other systemic/institutional barriers that stymy upward mobility.

The centrality of these racist arguments are rooted in anti-blackness and white supremacy: API folks stereotypically possess certain qualities that whites deem to be “good,” and therefore gain status as “honorary whites,” or as “one of the good ones.” Hence, one of the core tenets of American inequality: the racial caste system that we have made for ourselves and have continually enforced, well beyond the era of Jim Crow and into the new millennium.

So what does any of this have to do with Trump and the #Resistance? My point is this: liberals (as in the political school of thought, not the American slang for Democrats) are only protesting how politics are being conducted, rather the politics themselves. The last three year’s worth of backlash have only exposed one thing to the American public: our policies have always been cruel, and Trump is the pure distillation of those policies, all without any fluff or pretext.

A “return to normalcy” is nothing more than state sanctioned Islamophobia without the overt racism.* “Getting America back on track” is leaving the poor and uninsured to die on the streets like dogs while offering them meaningless platitudes. The migrant caravan crisis seen last summer was a direct consequence to a US backed 2009 coup in Honduras. Hell, Joe Biden’s healthcare plan leaves 3 million Americans uninsured, and he’s claiming that as a victory.

At its core, the movement against President Trump is informed by a desire, conscious or not, for Americans to feel less guilty about the mistakes its government makes and the pain it inflicts on other people. And that’s a problem. Genuine political change cannot be brought about by placing decorum before policy consequences.

Again, I realize full well that my language here is incendiary and that these examples may seem “extreme.” But that’s the point. These are instances are part of the everyday absurdity that we now find ourselves in. We are at the breaking point of a tightrope act we’ve been walking for decades now, in which terrible American policy is neatly wrapped up in disarming language and thinly veiled attempts to cover our hypocrisy. Among my favorite examples include the US backed coup in Iran and Ambassador Albright stating on live TV that 500,000 dead Iraqi children was “worth it” if it meant Saddam was removed from power. Bear in mind, for the second point, that the US imposed sanctions on Iraq because of its “horrifying” use of chemical weapons, among other reasons, completely ignoring the fact that we sold Saddam those weapons and allowed him to use them against Iran in their 1980s war.

So what is to be done?

*In regard to the Patriot Act, please allow me to link a few articles on its expansion of powers to the executive branch and introduce you to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, otherwise known as the AUMF: the executive’s blank check to murder any foreign national or American suspected of being a terrorist. The language here is purposefully broad so as to cover as many bases as possible, should the executive deem a strike necessary.