In past upheavals, Americans at least all shared the same news. Now there is an apartheid of the national spirit that is creating deeper divisions than ever…If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?
As Joe Biden took the oath of office overnight on Thursday (AEDT) a slew of polls confirm that something like 55 million American voters believe his election was rigged. That is, 75 percent of all who voted for Trump believe the election was stolen from them. Yet the chasm is even wider. According to a YouGov poll 45 per cent of Republicans agree with the demonstrators who used violence on January 6 to block the result. That’s a ringing endorsement of illegal political action.
As demonstrators go on trial this wedge of the electorate is going to be told every day on Fox and by Trump they are being victimised because, during the northern hemisphere summer, violence committed by Black Lives Matter went uncondemned or unpunished. Even the more softly committed Trump supporters are being drawn into a steamy underground of grievance and resentment.
Flick between Fox and CNN and witness the new bitterness in Americans’ gaping cultural divide.
One day last week CNN was interviewing Kentucky Democrat Governor Andy Beshear with footage of him being hung in effigy outside the governor’s mansion. “It is a battle for America,” he said, vowing to ban “terrorists” from the state capital. At that moment Fox was broadcasting indignant commentary about a group of Harvard staff campaigning to have the university strip degrees from graduates who had denied the validity of Biden’s election. This would include Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz.
“We’re becoming a one-point-of-view society,” one Fox commentator said.
Until recently my instincts were to resist the view that America under Trump was more divided than it had been anytime since the Civil War.
As an amateur historian, I was aware of the 1960s urban riots and the 1970 shootings at Kent State. The class war of the 1930s had violence at factory gates. The Smithsonian’s collection boasts one of the Gatling guns used by employers to threaten workers in the bitter strikes of the late 19th century. But in previous periods of intense conflict – during the Vietnam war years and Watergate – Americans reverted to common sources of information: a rich culture of newsprint with revered newspaper mastheads, TIME and Newsweek
It’s further proof of a descent into rhetorical civil war that Hillary Clinton chose to write an op-ed after the riot more brutal on white supremacy than any leading figure has been.
Opinions are now stacked in silos, news segregated as if by an apartheid of the spirit.
The people of this riven land subscribe to separate narratives in which the motives of others are wicked and debauched and a traditional America is swinging in the breeze. The ideology that fuelled the storming of the Capitol, reinforced on Fox every day, finds justification in extreme measures if required to “take the country back.”
That renders Trump voters warriors fighting for their version of America. The Senate run-offs in Georgia – the election of a Jewish and a black man to become senators – feeds the anxiety that white America is in eclipse. This fear was expressed by Donald Trump – showing his brilliance at capturing the sentiments of his base – when he said: “There’s never been a time like this where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us, from me, from you, from our country”.
Fear at what this eclipse foretells brought demonstrators to a fury in which they could chant “hang Mike Pence”. It brought eight Republican senators and 139 members of Congress to vote to block an election outcome. That they cast this vote after the violent demonstration at the Capitol is a symbol of division unprecedented in all the years since 1876.
It’s now commonplace commentary from Democrats, including the new President, that if the demonstrators in Washington had been black there would have been a harsh law-enforcement response – handcuffs and mass detentions, it’s implied, and likely tanks on the streets.
It’s further proof of a descent into rhetorical civil war that Hillary Clinton chose to write an op-ed after the riot more brutal on white supremacy than any leading figure has been, certainly more than Barack Obama allowed himself. Clinton endorsed the pessimistic race-based analysis of America’s divide. She wrote, “If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness? Wednesday reminded us of an ugly truth: There are some Americans, more than many want to admit, who would choose whiteness.”
Nothing as candid about white nationalism as a motive force in national life has been jammed in the faces of the American public from a figure of such eminence.
For his part, Trump says the movement he started is only the beginning.
This article has been republished from The Australian Financial Review 21 January 2021. To view the original article click here.
Bob Carr is a former Premier of New South Wales (1995–2005), a former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (2012–2013) and the former Director of the Australia–China Relations Institute, the University of Technology Sydney (2014–2019).
Bob Carr was the longest-serving premier of NSW and a federal Labor foreign minister.
Comments
8 responses to “America’s silo society has to face its racial demons”
Think the author could also observe the same negative US elements and influencers in Australia, when there is a direct interest with SPA Sustainable Population Australia (of which he is a patron)?
Politely suggest looking at the roots of the neo-Malthusian SPA and population (viewed through an ‘environmental’ lens) movement via ZPG US i.e. Paul Ehrlich and John Tanton who have visited Australia; both indirectly informed Trump White House immigration policy through a network or maze of think tanks.
Good start is Washington Post article (27/9/2018) ‘The shadowy network shaping Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Interconnected anti-immigrant organizations have long hidden behind neutral names while pushing nativist policies…… (now deceased) Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist, is the guiding force behind nearly all of America’s major anti-immigration groups. He launched the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in 1979. He was initially motivated by an alarmed reaction to Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” which linked population growth to environmental destruction and a weakening of national security.‘
Sure various members of SPA who have met Ehrlich and Tanton could assist with enquiries to clarify the relationship?
Nah, I’m a bit over the repeated characterisation of Trump and his followers as white nationalists, to the exclusion of all else – personally, I think we deserve a more nuanced and insightful analysis from someone as prominent as Bob Carr. White nationalism is part of the anti-Democrat movement in the US, but it’s not the whole of it and it’s not the driving factor. The driving factors, as has been pointed out plenty of times including in comments on this page, are inequality (the loss of the middle class, especially the lower middle class of unskilled workers who used to be able to make a reasonable living), and the rejection by mainstream media of the identity of a large sector of the US population. That identity is not white nationalist, as Carr asserts (although I’ll grant it overlaps it), but more complex, to do with traditional values relating to family, religion, and – I suspect – a certain integrity and simplicity of outlook (I don’t mean that in a condescending way – I mean to refer to what can be seen as a positive value).
Of course, there has been a rise of racist, nationalistic fascism, world-wide. But this tends to be a matter of relatively small and not extremely competent organisations like the uncertain mob that stormed the US Capitol in Washington, or Golden Dawn in Greece. What is more concerning to me is the rise of a trans-national fascism, in which the “Us” is everyone who wins (or believes they can win) at capitalism, with the controlling cable consists of billionaire entrepeneurs, the security state, and politicians who see their path to riches; and the “Them” comprises any countries which the US designates as “undemocratic” plus the real poor in the West – those who know they will never win at capitalism – and dissidents who want a truthful society.
If you shift your focus to transnational fascism for a little while, it becomes apparent that the “homegrown rightwing fascist” meme is a) a distraction, and b) an excuse to justify a basket of initiatives that the transnational Master Race favours: gross overreaction to protest (Europe, the UK, Australia and the US); rampant censorship of social media accounts (way beyond suppressing any incitement to violence); ramping up of surveillance and control legislation by states (US, Australia, UK); the growth of ‘lawfare’ by the state and big corporations (US, UK, Australia); and new legislation specifically designed to free state agents from constraint by the rule of law. The sovereign country is becoming passé; we will all be non-citizens of the 5Eyes.
Both radical right libertarian (socio)economic ideology and white Christian nationalism are joined at the hip or are complementary; few in their right mind would vote for the former but many in ageing electorates can be spooked into voting for the latter, hence, rewarding the former.
The majority of Americans are hurting, because the culture they passionately believe in has failed them. The promises that hitherto reinforced hard work and good ideas in ordinary Americans have not been met for many years. Hurt produces hate. The world would be a much safer place if the hurt was cured and the hate extinguished, than if the hate was directed outside.
Despite the concilliatory inauguration speech of President Biden, the American society remains divided. A combination of plutocracy and racial politics is fracturing the society and will eventually damage US type democracy. Many had said that the US government belongs to the 1% of Americans whilst the gap between the rich and the poor widens. The division in the American society existed before the arrival of Trump and he made poltical mileage out of it.
Three P&I articles today on the incoming Biden administration from eminent Australians. All providing a view on what needs to be done to fix the current ills of the United States. All three missing in my view the root cause of the United States malaise.
That root cause is inequality. Inequality fuels the fires of racism, extremism, violence and rioting. It is the logical endpoint of a system that governs for the wealthy minority.
Whilst we should give the Biden administration the benefit of the doubt at this point, it does not appear that Biden will make the necessary structural changes to halt and reverse inequality. He is after all a product of the oligarchic system that has brought the US to this point.
The troubles are far from over for the US.
Very true. 50 richest Americans have more wealth than the bottom half of America. 165,000,000 of them. America, and American capitalism and imperialism won’t change. It needs to blow up first in some form. Maybe in 2024!
https://www.unilad.co.uk/news/50-richest-americans-have-more-wealth-than-poorest-165-million-combined/
Cameron, three points.
One: Federally, the Democratic Party controls the Presidency, the Senate and the Representatives.
Two: the Progressive Wing of the Democratic Party contributed significantly to those wins (look at Stacey Abrams’ efforts in Georgia, AOC’s efforts in New York and elsewhere).
Three: Biden’s massive political experience sculpts both his role and the way he will play it.
I am optimistic.