American Culture: Where do we go from here?
Baku, Azerbaijan, July 22nd, 2017.
Salaroche


The rift we see today, the 22nd of July 2017, between the 30-some percent of core Trump supporters and the rest of the nation can only grow wider. Both camps seem to be living in parallel universes. There is not much in common between them, particularly when it comes to defining “reality”, which now we need to put in quotations, as the meaning of that word has come to depend on what side of the present surreal American political dichotomy we stand. 

We could easily blame our domestic political travails on the President of the United States and his administration, but that would be an easy, lazy, cheap shot at the situation, as Donald Trump is only the most salient among a host of shameful symptoms characterizing the deep social malady afflicting the nation.

The question today is not whether the country is divided along party lines, but how deep that fissure is. Actually, not even the latter would be the appropriate question, as both major political parties seem to be undergoing a deep transformation. Pretentions of embracing a universal Americanism have gradually been stripped from the thin, false veneer the two parties had thus far donned on their façades and the bare ugliness at the core of American Culture is now coming to the fore.

Democrats have brought to light their hypocrisy as “the people’s party”. By now we all know the Democratic Party lacks a real identity of its own. Actually, the best way to define the Democrats would be as “Republican Light”, and in some cases the second qualifier should be “medium light”, as a good number of them often show a dominant hue of conservatism in their convictions and actions.

But it is the Republican Party who is spearheading the present political turmoil. Republicans are no longer slowly chipping away at their hypocritical conservative veneer. Their leaders have already openly embraced the extreme ideological tendencies that up to now they had only harbored in their minds and had only voiced in their most intimate closed-doors gatherings.

The cat is out of the hat and there is no glimpse on the horizon as to any way to put it back inside again. Donald Trump is the dark messiah many Republicans had been praying for over the past few decades and now that he has finally arrived they don’t intend to let go off him too easily, regardless of whatever farfetched, deranged, inappropriate, unamerican behavior he might display.

No more masks. The EPA is now in the hands of someone bent on getting rid of it, the Department of Education is under the leadership of people who don’t have a clear plan for the educational future of the country, the State Department has been entrusted to someone with no initiative and no clear global mission in mind, Health Care reform is just a ruse to hand billions of dollars to the top 1% of the population while stripping millions of Americans of basic health insurance, and the President of the United States keeps showering praise on dictators and despots while making strategic military concessions that give rival nuclear powers the upper hand in armed conflicts in the Middle East.

Where do we go from here? What is the real idea of America that the Republican Leadership presently has in mind? What befell the Democratic Party that it lost its appeal on the majority of voters as the Party of the People? (Remember the Civil Rights Movement?) Do the majority of Americans still share a common vision for the future of the country?

For some people, the present deep fissure in the American social fabric started to appear in the late-nineties, during Bill Clinton’s Impeachment process. Those years also saw the advent of Fox News and the likes of Rush Limbaugh to the American airwaves, events that started widening the deep social polarization so evident these days.

Fox News and its ilk were trailblazers on the road to the state of “personalized reality” presently afflicting American society, but they were not the sole ominous instigators of such pervasive social malady, there were other factors and agents contributing to that effect as well.

9/11 marked a serious milestone on the road to the present state of affairs. That event was a severe blow to the heart of American self-confidence. The feeling of invincibility that even military defeat in the Vietnam War was unable to erase from American mythology finally came crumbling down to the ground along with the Twin Towers.

Who are we? Are we really what we think we are? And other similar existential questions were the thought of the day in American minds and along with self-doubt eventually came the fear and hatred of the “other”, the non-WASP foreigner in general and the Muslim in particular.

The WMD massive deception that Dick Cheney masterminded over the American people in the wake of 9/11 further weakened the people’s trust in government and the media, which during the Bush years turned into an instrument of government propaganda.

The ensuing popular mistrust in governmental and mainstream media institutions created a vacuum that could only be filled by news outlets that reinforced the personalized views of the dominant trends of thought signified mostly by the major political parties, one of which, the Republican Party, kept growing in stridency on its way to more extreme stances.

Then came Barack Obama, who, for a short period of time was like a beacon of hope to many disenchanted Americans. But that inspirational light was not meant to last long, as Obama was not assertive enough in pursuing his progressive policies thereby projecting an irresolute image of America to the rest of the world (Remember the “Red Line” on the Syrian conflict?)

Most importantly, Obama’s eight years in the White House deeply aggravated the growing fracture between the conservative nationalistic factions taking over the Republican Party and the frail hypocritical so-called “liberal” postures of the Democratic Party, all of it coated with the heavy racial overtones that the “Birther” movement entailed.

The patriotism sown by the 9/11 events was now fully germinating in the form of a blind nationalistic fervor that revived the need to embrace again core American mythological symbols like rugged individualism and the pursuit of wealth over any principles or government intervention, all of it standing on the shoulders of the Anglo-Saxon sector of the population’s imaginary “right” to reassert itself again as the dominant American ethnic group.

Enters Donald Trump in the political scene, an individual who in many ways has shown to be the antithesis of Barack Obama. Obama is reflective and decorous, Trump is reckless and vulgar; Obama is well-read and an Ivy League alumnus, Trump is ignorant and largely uneducated; Obama was a social worker before being elected, Trump was a dubious Real Estate mogul whose reputation has often been splashed with swindling and fraudulent overtones; but, most importantly for a good number of Americans, Obama is black and Trump is white.

“At long last”, say many Republicans to each other, “an unapologetic rich white American President who dares to tell the rest of the world to go fly a kite”, and this they say regardless of whether such individual is an honest man or whether he has in mind  the best interest of the nation whenever he performs any action as President of the United States.

How did American culture come to this? Where did the trademark American rationality and pragmatism go? What happened to all those lofty ideals embedded in the American Constitution?

The answer to those questions is not an easy one, but if we were able to conceive how an intellect of the highest caliber such as Albert Speer’s fell under the spell of an uneducated corporal to the point of implementing most of the latter’s murderous policies, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to understand how any emotionally-driven, resentful, simple-minded individual from the American Midwest could fall under the spell of a seasoned con artist of Donald Trump’s caliber.

The way things stand today regarding Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, some Republican voters say that “if he had to cheat to get in, I’m OK with that”, thereby showing no morals, no principles and a total disrespect for American Democracy and the rule of law. Should this attitude be considered the new trend of thought among the Republican ranks? Maybe such irresponsible stance should be understandable under the light of the “black and white, all or nothing” mentality  that seems to pervade the Republican electorate these days.

The case of the Republican leadership is clearly a different one. Those guys are seasoned politicians and they know perfectly well what they’re doing. They know that in following Trump they are often subverting American ideals and they are sometimes even borderline in subverting the Constitution.

“Party and self-interest over country”. That seems to be the Republican leadership’s official motto. Nothing that the President may do or say justifies disavowing him. Trump can even express in public his deep disapproval of some of his cabinet member’s performance and those cabinet members won’t feel compelled to resign. Republicans don’t seem to perceive Trump as the President of the American Republic, they seem to idealize him as a tribal leader worthy of their almost-total unconditional loyalty.

Fortunately, the Fourth Estate is alive and well in the United States, which means that, as long as the American Press remains alert and vocal, implementing the nefarious intentions lurking in Republican designs is far from being a fait accompli. Trump's relentless asertion that the US Media's daily reporting on his many shenanigans equals to “fake news” may resonate in his followers’ minds, but it is not a widespread countrywide perception. Not all Americans are as blind as to go along with such asinine nonsense. A good majority are still capable of discerning between fact-based propositions and ludicrous imaginary conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump’s regime would love to transform the American Democratic Republic into an Authoritarian Darwinist Plutocracy, but such unsavory designs won’t stand a chance to come true as long as the moral compass of the nation remains firmly rooted on constitutional grounds.

Salaroche