FOR a people afflicted by ‘foreign hand’ pathology, Pakistanis demonstrate remarkably little interest in the affairs of the societies we love to hate.

India is the most obvious example of this curious paradox. More recently, we have devoted greater time and energy to constructing caricatures of America and the ‘West’ that transcend time and space.

As the rest of the world focuses its gaze on the upcoming US presidential election, we would do well to take a break from the usual polemic and deconstruct the monolithic ‘America’ that seems to reside eternally in our imagination.

It is easy to forget now that a wave of euphoria greeted Barack Obama’s election to the White House four years ago.

A black man acceding to the most powerful position in the world was no small matter in a country that is dominated by a small, predominantly white, oligarchy and in which the faultlines of race and class — not to mention gender — are still extremely pronounced.

In fact, there is more social inequality in the US than in any other ‘developed’ country.

Over the past two decades or so, a virtual demographic revolution has taken place in the US. More than half the population of the biggest of the 52 states, California, is now non-white, with Spanish-speaking immigrants from the central and southern American countries the most significant in number.

Over the next two or three decades it is expected that non-whites will become a majority across the US as a whole.

The debate over immigration — and the posture of the American political establishment towards this hugely significant process of social change — looms large over the current election campaign.

While polarisation between settled and immigrant populations has grown increasingly acute in almost all western societies in recent times, the American context is unique insofar as the US is, by all definitions, the original modern, immigrant society.

A large number of Pakistanis have migrated to the US over the past 40 years. Relatively affluent professionals have developed their own Pakistani-American sub culture, and today exert not insignificant political and financial clout both in the US and Pakistan.

More generally, Islam is the fastest growing religion in North America. In short, the America we love to hate is a far more complex entity than we would like to believe.

Most immigrants to the US quickly imbibe the so-called ‘American dream’ even while they grumble quietly about the imperialist posture of their adopted country vis-à-vis the rest of the world, including the countries of their origin. In other words, their purported ideals tend to be stumped by their real material aspirations. Not, it must be said, unlike many Pakistanis.

That is not to suggest that articulating a principled political position requires one to sacrifice livelihood. Pakistan’s biggest export is its people, a reflection both of the fact that rich countries want cheap labour and that our economy is not able to absorb our own active workforce. Indeed, immigration is one of the most potent symbols of the global inequality engendered by free-market capitalism.

To return to the American presidential election, the debate over immigration is important both for what is being openly discussed and the covert fears of the oligarchy in Washington vis-à-vis the rest of the Americas.

While it may just be the American right-wing making hay from the need to defend an idealised notion of ‘Americanness’, all mainstream political players in the US are wary that the influx of Latin Americans in their country signals the beginning of the end for Washington’s hegemony over its historically restive neighbours to the south.

The US presidential election is not the only one of its kind making news these days. Earlier this month, Hugo Chavez won a third six-year term to the presidency in Venezuela. Chavez is the first of a new brand of leftist leaders in Latin America that has challenged the mighty Empire to the north and flirted with what has been termed “socialism of the 21st century”.

In his wake, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa have been elected president in Bolivia and Ecuador respectively; the once trade unionist Lula was president of Brazil for eight years between 2003 and 2010. Overall Latin America is the only region in the world which has experienced a definitive turn to the left in recent times.

Time will tell whether or not Chavez and his allies will succeed in building a meaningful alternative to capitalist economics. For the time being, the developments in Latin America are significant because they indicate that even while Washington continues to resort to strong-arm tactics to force the rest of the world into submission, it is increasingly weak in its very own backyard.

Like the US, modern Latin American states have also been divided sharply along racial and class lines. Chavez and Morales hail from the native American community that was made subservient to white colonial rulers from continental Europe.

The socialist politics embodied by the new Latin American populists is distinctive because of the emphasis on indigenous pre-colonial culture. It is a cultural politics that is inextricable from political economy, patently unlike the parochial hate-based politics of the religious right in this and other Muslim countries. Indeed, the so-called Chavistas in Venezuela are not just throwing verbal stones at Washington, but also fighting an epic battle against the (predominantly white) oligarchy in their own country that has historically been propped up by Uncle Sam.

In 2002 Chavez was temporarily dislodged in a failed military putsch that represented an attempt by the deeply entrenched oligarchy to reassert its power. Not surprisingly, there was unambiguous evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported the coup.

Needless to say there is nothing in Pakistan like the anti-imperialist politics of the left currently spreading across the Americas. Our internal divisions are as acute as those in any other country of the world. A viable anti-imperialist politics in Pakistan must first and foremost acknowledge these divisions and then seek to redress them.

We need to spend less time engaging in meaningless rhetoric and more time learning both about ourselves and the ‘other’, and in particular the many Americas that exist in real life. Only then will we truly be able to distinguish friend from foe.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.