A WEEK from today, nervous tension will be spiking within and beyond the US as the results roll in from what has been hyped up as the most consequential election in American history. The choice, essentially, is between the reinforcement of a deeply unsatisfying status quo and a return to the depressingly entertaining self-immolation of a Trump presidency.
Writing in the context of Nazism and its impact on Germany, Hannah Arendt noted long ago that “those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil”. In recent decades, it has more or less become the norm for the electorate in many democracies faced with a choice between two varieties of what voters might be inclined to detest or distrust. The US easily falls into that category, notwithstanding its posturing as an exemplar or, more absurdly, an enforcer of liberal democracy, given the number of dictatorships its interventions have spawned.
Criticism of Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday has tended to focus on a warm-up comedian’s obnoxious description of Puerto Rico as a garbage dump. Even the Trump campaign has disavowed his stance — but, at the same time, distracted attention from echoes of a notorious gathering at the same venue 85 years ago arranged by the German American Bund where an image of George Washington was flanked by Nazi insignia, and the keynote speaker’s anti-Semitic, white-supremacist message was greeted with ‘sieg heils’ by the 20,000-strong multitude.
The f-word — fascism — had been flung at Trump even before a number of disenchanted colleagues from his previous White House stint endorsed it. After all, the ex-president had doubled down on his traditional pet hate — which involved denigrating all immigrants who entered via Mexico as rapists and murderers — by claiming that Haitian arrivals in Springfield, Ohio, were devouring cats and dogs. The lack of evidence for even a single instance of such behaviour did not matter to him or his acolytes.
Sooner or later, the American empire is bound to crumble.
The accompanying threat to violently deport millions of ‘illegal immigrants’ was almost a predictable corollary. It has stirred precious little alarm in the US which had in its initial stages relied on invaders and their slaves plus genocidal assaults against North America’s native inhabitants that it should still be unwelcoming to outsiders keen on rebuilding lives that have been shattered all too often because of America-first mentality in Washington.
There is more alarm over Trump’s vow to deploy the military against ‘enemies from within’, a designation that encompasses pretty much all of his domestic opponents, who are obviously being unpatriotic in disdaining his MAGA agenda, which in part reflects the white-supremacist efforts of predecessors that were interrupted by Hitler’s transgressions. Trump is hardly a pioneer, though. Richard Nixon, too, had his list of enemies – and he came a cropper within two years of winning an undeserved landslide in 1972.
American voters have picked many obnoxious presidents within living memory, and there has never been any reckoning for their international crimes — from Vietnam and Korea to Chile, El Salvador, Afghanistan and Iraq, among a far longer list. Trump, to his credit, failed to spark any new wars. The claims that he would have pre-empted both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Oct 7 alongside its genocidal aftermath in Israel, Gaza and beyond, are easy to denigrate as absurd. But these are hardly defining issues for most voters.
In the case of Israel’s genocidal impulses, they matter more on the Democratic side. Kamala Harris has failed to distance herself from the Biden administration’s demonstrably fake efforts for a ceasefire, even while its influence has been paramount in forestalling the kind of revenge Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant had in mind for Iran. Meanwhile, the Kahanist ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Palestinian territories proceeds apace. Would a reincarnated President Trump somehow halt it? Dream on. The Arab/Muslim ‘community leaders’ who latched on to him in Michigan recently are either unwise or ignorant in glossing over his efforts to bury the question of Palestine under the mendacious Abraham Accords.
Would Harris be any better? Yes, marginally, at least on domestic concerns. It matters, for instance, that she defends women’s autonomy over their bodies, and on the economic front is slightly less enthusiastic than her rival about redistributing wealth to the rich. But then, false promises are the lifeblood of US elections.
On the global front, the choice perhaps is between a rapid apocalypse or the gradual decline and fall of an empire that has for too long surreptitiously prolonged the age of imperialism. Either way, but especially with Trump, the risk is that the rest of the world will pay the price for decades to come.
Published in Dawn, October 30th, 2024
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