Daily Times

There are a number of myths about the United States, with its current President Donald Trump only adding to the confusion. I will come to Trump later in the piece but, first, it is the myths’ part that needs some clarification. The first and the foremost myth has been that America is the land of the free where those fleeing persecution will find refuge and welcome. It doesn’t square with its history.

The USA was built on the destruction and, some would even say, the genocide of its original people, now known as Native Americans. They were systematically deprived of their lands, their lives and whatever else was there, to create this new land of the free people. And those who survived all the violence and destruction are still marginalized living, in so many ways, as strangers in, what was once, their own land.

The second myth is that the US owes its prosperity to the ingenuity and hard work of its people. Not quite true. That prosperity was built on the oppression and cruelty meted out to its slaves (now called Afro Americans) who were traded like cattle and made to work like them. In this land of the free, these slaves had no rights.

Even when, under President Lincoln, slavery was abolished it came back in a new garb with states passing enabling laws to get around it. Indeed, white supremacist, Ku Klan groups, continued random killings of Afro Americans until late into the 20th century.

Even after the 1960s civil rights movement to remove racial discrimination and segregation, the states, even to this day, continue to find ways and means of restricting voting rights for Afro Americans, for instance, by introducing photo IDs, residential checks and other restrictions. And the random killings of Afro Americans by overzealous police are still going on, and most of the time those responsible escape punishment.

Which brings us to the present times. Despite all these feel good myths/legends, many white Americans increasingly feel that they are under siege from demographic changes in the US where, in the not-too-distant future, they might become a minority; though they will still remain the biggest population group and largely control the governing institutions.

It is and has been a self-serving argument to entrench and expand the US’s imperial reach, starting from America’s overseas expansion from 1898, when it acquired sovereignty over Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. With the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, US warned off other countries from interfering in its backyard.

Alongside this, the globalization process, which had worked to America’s economic and political advantage, is no longer under their tight control. Which has cost them many jobs to China, in particular, with its low production costs; as well as running large trade surpluses with the US.

Many Americans, nearly 40 percent of Trump’s base, find in him the new messiah who will reassert the country’s white supremacy and right all the wrongs, internally and externally.

And he is pandering to it all the time, even more so because his own insecurity (from all the enquiries into his affairs) gels so well with the insecurity of country’s white supremacists.

In this narrative, America is the purest of pure surrounded by all sorts of people, internally and externally, that mean to harm the US now and have done so in the past. And in this narrative, he doesn’t spare his predecessors who have allegedly contributed to this state of affairs. And here comes Trumps to rejuvenate the United States to make ‘America great again’.

To amplify this supposed weakening of the United States and the threat to it, Trump is now locked into a political battle with the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, focusing on funding for the border wall with Mexico to stop people fleeing from hunger, gangs’ violence, political persecution and what not. He sees in them rapists, criminals and, even, terrorists.

It is time to ask: what was the United States doing into its so-called backyard for more than a century that these countries are impoverished, ruled at different times by US-installed dictators, who did its bidding? Trump, though, continues to pander to his base by articulating their fears and promising to go back to the future by reviving the past.

Coming back to the US myths/contradictions, two more are worth mentioning. One is of American ‘exceptionalism’. Which is that the US is unique, unlike the European colonial expansion based on acquiring and ruling overseas territories. According to this narrative, because of America’s exceptionalism, it is and has been a force for good.

And, more recently, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was declared a freedom operation for remaking the Middle East. One can go on.

Another myth is that the United States is ‘the indispensable nation’: indispensable for what?

There is need for the US to re-examine its self-image because this is and has created all sorts of problems for the world.  But with Trump as President, his erratic and impulsive policies, pronounced/proclaimed by Twitter, only compounds the problem.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia

Published in Daily Times, February 18^th 2019.