Make America think again

The country needs to think again —beyond elections and their shores

The United States of America is a country divided down the middle. Travelling across both coasts before the November 5 elections was a surreal experience. The front porch of nearly every home was eerily decorated with phantoms, skulls and cobwebs for Halloween. Many of these suburban front lawns also had signs for either Harris-Waltz or Trump-Vance in a nightmarishly neck-to-neck presidential race. In a country where neighbours rarely knock on doors unannounced, their votes too seem to differ widely. Many families, too, are now politically divided.

For Democrats, this existential election is to preserve democracy. Not only are they haunted by the January 6 insurrection on Capitol by far-right Trump supporters, but also spooked by the Orwellian ‘Project 2025’. Officially, the Donald Trump campaign has distanced itself from this Heritage Foundation ‘Conservative Promise’ blueprint. The document includes a 180-day plan to deport illegal immigrants, replace civil servants with political appointees, shut down the Department of Education, ban abortions nationwide and expand Presidential authority.

Voter segments

Muslim voters, however, are in a vexing predicament. While Mr. Trump’s Muslim Ban and Islamophobic bigotry are appalling, Mr. Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and Zionist support for the genocide in Palestine have been unforgivable. More than half the bombs dropped on Gaza are made in America. Kamala Harris, apart from some initial rhetoric, has disappointingly not even promised to ensure a ceasefire. Journalist Mehdi Hassan agonises that she has neither stopped a genocide nor earned Muslim votes. However, in such a close election, abstaining from the vote or choosing a third party would also imply taking sides.

For Republicans, this is an election to ‘Make America Great Again’. Glossing over rape and sexual misconduct allegations by 26 women against Mr. Trump, theirs is largely a vote for economic policies that presumably will lower taxation, inflation and insurance premiums. Since the 19th century, the extreme right has also ridden on the politics of paranoia. But not all of these fears are unfounded. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented that since 1999, there has been an increase in the ‘deaths of despair’ by suicide, alcoholism and opioids among non-Hispanic white Americans. But, rather than deal with real issues, this election has been reduced to such a farce that billionaire Elon Musk controversially gave $15 million to Republican voters in swing States before the election.

The concerns

Across the aisles, the concerns of most voters remain predominantly domestic. The latest Pew Survey in September 2024 shows that eight of 10 American voters were worried about the economy and preserving their slice of the American Dream. For decades most Americans have also been apathetic to the wars that their governments have waged, often by proxy, on foreign shores. From Colin Powell’s preposterous claim of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in mobile vans to justify the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan; to Biden’s false claim of ‘beheaded babies’ to support Israel’s war on Gaza, ‘Manufacturing Consent’ has been relentless.

In Beverly Hills, at the heart of Hollywood controlled by largely Jewish-financed studios, we saw a haunting memorial with more than 1100 Israeli and 70 foreign flags for each of the victims of the October 7 Hamas attack. As Naomi Klein has argued, Israel has made even the memorialisation of trauma a weapon of war. But the stony silence to the deaths of more than 40,000 Palestinians, including 16,000 children, in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is deafening. This indifference lies at the heart of a country whose history has been built on violent settler colonialism and slavery.

The whitewash of pro-Israeli coverage in mainstream television channels has also reduced Palestinian deaths to dehumanised statistics. More worryingly, 98% of the candidates that the all-powerful bipartisan ‘America for Israel Political Action Committee’ (AIPAC) endorse win elections. For example, AIPAC funded $8 million for a Democratic competitor to defeat Cori Bush who bravely held up a sign to denounce Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal during his address in the US Congress.

African-American intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message draws parallels between South African apartheid, Jim Crow laws and the treatment of the Palestinians. But the racist onslaught to shoot the messenger has exposed how hard it is to speak truth to the world’s ageing superpower. The student protests across university campuses were amongst the few flickers of moral conscience and hope.

In America, the archaic Electoral College and not the popular vote will ultimately determine the final Presidential winner. In case of a close finish, the partisan Supreme Court will weigh in on selecting the winner. However, with judges nominated by successive Presidents, the founding Montesquieu principle of ‘separation of powers’ remains fraught.

In perspective

In the history of the Olympics, the U.S. has won the most medals. Since 1901, the U.S. has also nurtured 70% of Nobel Laureates. On the other hand, every aspect of the deeply narcissistic American Dream is premised on ‘racial capitalism’. Visible societal scars of homelessness and drug addiction, including among veterans, against the backdrop of soaring skyscrapers and opulence are stark reminders of this malignancy. French Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir in her travelogue ‘America Day by Day’ wondered if, ‘all these mass manufactured fates are haunted by a thousand dreams of escape’.

The most scarce American trait seems to be self-reflection. After 9/11 there was a brief period of introspection. Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria and New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof wondered ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ But this brief societal soul-searching soon culminated in the carpet bombing deaths of 200,000 Iraqis.

The barbarity in Gaza has again singed the façade of western liberalism. The daily bombing of schools, hospitals and refugee camps has scorched every fibre of humanity and humanitarian law. The planet cannot afford the oil-guzzling extravagance of Americans nor their glib indifference to wars waged abroad in their name. Americans need to think again – beyond elections and their shores.

After all, isn’t the Golden Rule of all religions, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Swati Narayan is an academic and an author

Published - November 06, 2024 12:10 pm IST