Daily Times

“If the persona of the world is Donald Trump, do we really want to be like that”, David Harvey inquires. “Is that the kind of human being we want to be” – if so, “as species being, we are transformed into something ugly”. Does Donald Trump personify a sickness or a mere symptom of a sickness afflicting the people who in their adaptability refuse to recognize the pathology? Every productive system produces people suitable to its designs. The people scorched by capitalism have insane sanity. They endorse the unthinkable for thinking can hamper their adaptability to the faithless faith they have in the system. In their alienation, people accept the unacceptable.

Even after creating minds suitable for jobs, capitalism does not stop there. It meticulously selects the choices it offers to the people in the name of empowerment. The choice between black and white, Adorno warns, is no choice, but ironically not the people but the American ruling class understood his warning unambiguously, it provides a singular choice between a white liberal and a white conservative. If it stitches someone colored or black with it, it doubly assures that he/she only wears a black mask over white skin. Lest one forgets, white is not merely a color, it is an ideology, a belief in manifest destiny.

Alluding to the white liberals as the worst enemies of America and the black people, Malcolm X once used the analogy of “growling wolf” and “smiling fox” for white conservatives and white liberals, respectively. However, once Obama assumed the American presidency, the analogy became somewhat irrelevant – the class overtly superseded the color, albeit the objective remained the same. Regardless of their color, they were anti-people.
As Biden replaces Trump, will there be any difference in the plight of ordinary people? No, the American president, a growling wolf or a smiling fox, is a class individual and cannot dare to counter the interests of the Wall Street and the military-industrial complex. Even if he wishes to, he has to be on the wrong side of the divide.

Trump, the eclipsing star of decadence, of a system failing to develop the working class and the common people of the US, provides an opportunity to the critics to reflect upon the least mentioned American history. Despite being the offshoot of Britain, America was no Europe. The people of New England parted from their native country by fighting a war against it, a war of liberation, which despite being a successful uprising was not a revolution, but the restoration for it changed nothing. Despite being fought on a national scale, it was an intra-class war that culminated in 1783 as the Paris peace treaty and ended up transferring power from the capitalists of Britain to the native bourgeoisie.

It was no co-incidence that the American bourgeoisie was far more regressive than its counterpart in Europe. When in 1789, the people of France were overthrowing the domination of feudalism and the church, the American founding fathers were adopting a constitution based on Protestantism and manifest destiny, a precursor of Hitler’s Paganism and Lebensraum. Manifest destiny was an American imperialist cultural belief, a concept that the American Anglo-Saxon race “was predominantly a separate and innately superior race, destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the American continent and the world” (Reginald Horsman).
The cultural belief became the cornerstone of the American ruling class. It justified its intervention in other states and provided a reason to annihilate the native Indian population and enslavement of blacks within the US and the humanity living outside it. The American expansionism started immediately after the independence, Louisiana was purchased from Bonaparte in 1803 that doubled the size of the US. The non-native population of Louisiana was 60000; half the people were black that became American slaves, the territory and cheap labor both were appropriated.
From the beginning, the inevitable intra-class struggle within the American bourgeoisie was rife. For the large population of slaves, the agrarian South commanded a majority over the North in the Congress that threatened the interests of the capitalist North. To restore the balance, the 3/5th compromise was reached, five slaves were counted as three men. Despite the hypocritical and inhuman headcount, the southern states had third more seats in the Congress.
After the annexation of Texas – once the land of three major indigenous cultures – and war with Mexico forcing it to concede California and New Mexico to the US and the acquisition of Alaska in 1867, the internal chapter of manifest destiny was complete. After consolidation, the US elite looked to external domination especially in its backyard by making frequent alterations in the Monaro doctrine. Once the European domination in Latin America was over, the US imposed its hegemony in the Latin American countries through violent coups and direct interventions – the process continues unabated even today.
How far the founding fathers respected liberty and freedom was evident from the belligerent attitude they adopted towards Haiti in 1804. After the withdrawal of Napoleon, Haiti declared its independence. Fearing the slave uprising at home, Jefferson and congress not only refused to recognize Haiti’s freedom but imposed an embargo and encouraged Napoleon to recapture the newly liberated state. The ‘Trail of Tears’, the tragic saga of displacement and genocide of the indigenous population, beginning in the US was also extended to the Haitian people.
Akin to the Herrenvolks of Nazis, the American colonizers considered themselves the chosen people, with a divine mission to rule the world with their kind of democracy, liberalism and Protestantism. The American Protestantism differed from its British version; unlike the British the Americans derived the legitimacy of their expansionism from their faith. The union of faith with science made America a forerunner of Nazi ideology. Instead of using science and technology for the benefit of humanity, both used it to subjugate the other nations. From means to an end, progress and productivity became ends for both.
“The American ideology” for Samir Amin is based on “an unmitigated economic liberalism, masked by a para-religious discourse and packaged with insipid rhetoric about democracy”. Finding parallels with the Nazis, he finds a similarity between the incidents of 9/11 and the “burning of the Reichstag”. The latter allowed “the junta to grant its police force powers similar to those of the Gestapo. Americans have their own Mein Kampf – the National Security Strategy, their own mass associations – the patriot organizations – and their own preachers”.
The absence of a class-conscious proletariat, a workers’ party, surveillance of the left by a militarized police enmeshed with biblical theology, and the controversial Electoral College, capital has completely paralyzed the possibility of workers’ uprising. Even people like Bernie Sanders, the fake ‘pinks’, are not tolerated. In the complete repressive unification of society, the enemy has to be found outside, however the economic compulsions have unfolded the truth. Trump found the enemy inside: for him, it was the big capital, the media, and the so-called socialists shearing the roots of the US.
Trump has done his job and will go to the place where he belongs, to the dustbin of history, but he has called the king nude. History is waiting for the workers to convulse all the other forces of society and to prepare them for the definitive tug called revolution. Are they conscious enough to do it?
The writer has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com