Thoughts from the other side of the pond
I. On Heretical Reflections and Discomfort
My observations about the United States have always been grounded in criticism. However, the longer that I look in from the outside, the longer I am physically distanced from the egregore that envelopes the US and the direct influence that it has on one’s psyche, the more such observations have shifted and have hardened. And I have come to realize as of late that what were once frequent but tempered critical musings on my part have evolved in what could be considered outright heresies if ever spoken aloud.
But I woke up today feeling the need to voice them, and so here they are. The heresies flow upwards, and the higher they go, the more uncomfortable they are. The one that hovers at the lower levels is that the dual crisis that is the pandemic and the Trump presidency are both a direct result of “American values” and were only to be expected. Both were inevitable, a direct consequence of the combination of the ideological foundations that the United States was built on, a stark and willful ignorance towards history, and the rose-colored glasses that far too many US Americans wear with regard to what the United States “really stands for”. Neither the Trump presidency nor the pandemic could have really been prevented without a harsh interruption to the system, an interruption that would have never been accepted by the status quo. Both illustrate the truth of the Biblical maxim that we reap what we sow.
Both are also a direct consequence of the specifics of the structure of the American government. The disaster that is the inability to control the pandemic is rooted in the ‘freedom’ granted by the principles of federalism and ‘states’ rights’, combined with a deep polarization, and a deep lack of scientific literacy and critical skills as it concerns much of the population (which has everything to do with the power of federalism as it affects each state’s ability to craft its own educational standards). Meanwhile, Trump’s ability to dismantle and destroy the American government as we once knew it to the degree that he has so far is rooted in a ‘checks and balances’ system that assumes good faith and was never designed to restrain a deliberately bad actor.That same checks and balances system is also not designed to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, it assumes it as a given, which is why Trump has *absolutely no* intention of leaving the White House and already has several sets of potential scenarios plotted out as to how to remain after January 20th regardless of the election results.
Out of the *many* mistakes that US American liberals have made over the past four years, one of the biggest and most consistent has been the assumption that Trump is an “idiot”, is “foolish”, etc. While he’s not book-smart, he’s not ‘intelligent’ as most conceive of that concept, he’s a brilliant con-man and manipulator and has been successfully using those skills to his advantage for over four decades now. I’ve been saying from the very beginning not to underestimate him, and I’ve pretty much been talking to a wall. Now the chickens come home to roost.
Skipping ahead, the heretical thoughts at the top of the list, the ones that I feel simultaneously the strongest about in terms of their truth but admittedly the ones that make me the most uncomfortable, go something like this:
Perhaps the United States truly cannot be saved. Perhaps, even with the best of efforts, even in the best of circumstances, it is too dysfunctional to *ever* live up to its theoretical promises. Perhaps when it comes to everyone, as opposed to only cis white men, the “American Dream” is simply that, a dream, never to be fulfilled, never to actually come true. Perhaps the combination of its size, its composition, the way in that it was settled, the utter lack of cohesiveness across regional borders, and hundreds of years’ worth of ideological poison have resulted in an experiment that’s best left abandoned as it stands. Perhaps the only feasible option is to start anew, this time rooted from an acknowledgment that the entire project exists on stolen land and that the descendants of the original inhabitants need to be centered first and foremost in any rebuilding effort.
Perhaps the United States needs to fail.
And perhaps, just perhaps, it never should have existed in the first place.
Consider that maybe this failed experiment in ‘free-market capitalism’, in ‘liberal democracy’, simply wasn’t worth the price. Perhaps a colonial-settler empire that served as the escape route for those suffering from the collateral damage of the effects of the European transition into capitalism, later the refuge for those suffering from the collateral damage of a worldwide campaign of Western imperialism, wasn’t worth the lives of approximately 100 million indigenous people, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the continued oppression of the descendants of the aforementioned, not to mention the worldwide debris field of carnage that has been left in the wake of the American Empire, most which was ironically wrought in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Consider that to think any differently, that the internal discomfort that one might have towards this suggestion, is in itself a manifestation of Eurocentric superiority and is in itself an aspect of the American egregore that guarantees the continuation of such horrors unless and until we concede and accept that the ends did not and never have justified the means.
And please understand that this absolutely does not mean that those living in the United States deserve what is happening and/or what is about to come on an individual level.
The tendency to default to that train of thought in response to what I have said is a socialized response to the toxic doctrine of individualism that is at the core of the US American egregore. So many who are suffering, so many who are about to suffer, did not individually bring this upon themselves. They do not “deserve” it. They are and/or will be the next in line of a never-ending stream of collateral damage that only further illustrates the point I’m trying to make in the first place. The inevitability of their experience only further demonstrates that again, the ends do not justify the means.This is far from an original musing, mind you, I need to be clear that those who have been on the losing end of the ‘American experiment’ have been thinking and saying similar sentiments for much longer than I have, and those renderings were often much more eloquent and to-the-point. But as someone theoretically born into the ‘winning’ end of this experiment, who has spent their entire adult life rooting out the socialized ideology that comes with the privilege I was born into, I feel that the average US American who was also born into the winning end really needs to hear this from one of their own.
II. The Stumbles and The Fall
As I’ve written before, while many seem to think that liberal democracy and fascism are in opposition to each other, in reality they are and have always been two sides of the same coin, a coin that is usually flipped over once capitalism is threatened in any meaningful way.
History demonstrates very clearly that those with means, those with anything tangible to lose, whether it be the ruling class billionaires, the petty bourgeoisie, or your average middle-class family, will generally choose a warped version of the status quo that is enforced through authoritarian means rather than risk having to surrender what they perceive to be theirs, that which they tell themselves they have ‘earned’. Throughout the 20th century, fascist regimes that came to power in Italy, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and Greece among others stand as examples as to how the perceived threat of ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’ resulted in an alliance between authoritarians and a significant portion of the masses throughout Europe.
Recent history also demonstrates very clearly how we ended up where we are right now.
Following the trajectory of the modern West, from the point that the United States established its position of dominance after WWII to the present day, there have been a few global ‘hiccups’ in which the system was perceived to be under threat, from both a financial and social perspective that did not necessarily rise at the same time but over time coalesced into a significant enough obstacle that the transmission of the vehicle that is the global order needed to be rebuilt in order to keep running, so to speak.
The first instance of this unfolded from the mid-60s to the early 70s, where the combination of the social unrest that came out of the Civil Rights Era in the US, the Vietnam War, and the global uprisings of 1968 combined with the petrol crisis of 1973 resulted in a severe shift in strategy on the global scale. Such a shift was realized on several levels, from the abandonment of Keynesian economics in favor of neoliberalism to a heightening of repressive tactics against those who pushed for social change which was epitomized in the US through the mechanisms of COINTELPRO.
The ‘success’ of these shifts, at least as far as the ruling class was concerned, guided us towards the economics and politics that would come to define the ‘80s and ‘90s, where despite a plethora of warnings from those who saw the forest for the trees, it would take a few decades for the lower classes to understand *exactly* how badly they had been screwed. And in the meantime there was a widespread sentiment amongst the upper-middle classes that prosperity, peace, and stability were here to stay.
But that screwing was eventually realized, which leads us right into the second hiccup, the period from 9/11 to the global financial crisis of 2008, where once again several rounds of first-aid were necessary on the part of those at the top in order to sustain the machine, at least temporarily. In keeping with the ideological backbone of the remedy for the previous hiccup, the remedy the second time around was reflective of and guided by neoliberal ideology, with most of the relief going towards those at the top while far too many of those at the bottom lost their homes, their jobs, their way of life as they knew it.
(Stepping back into my metaphor for a minute: personally, as a former car-owner, I learned the hard way that once you rebuild a transmission the second time, the vehicle is usually no longer reliable. Lengthy road trips are not recommended, further investment in the machine reveals itself to be foolish, the only practical way forward is to accept that sooner or later, it will break down for good and one will have to start from scratch. But the thing about the ruling class is that they are never in a position where they have to repair aging vehicles in the first place, so apparently this did not occur to those in their position in the wake of the financial crisis. One would have thought that Occupy would have been a clue. It must be nice to have the privilege to operate in such a state of obliviousness. Those whose struggles have sharply intensified since 2008 did not have such a luxury.)
Considering that (despite the obvious) those who promoted the bailout claimed in theory that it would help the people, one could argue that the second round of remedies and their purported claims fell under the “first as tragedy, then as farce” pattern as illustrated by Karl Marx. The first time around, while most folks with an understanding of economics made clear their wariness of the ‘trickle-down’ theory, it was technically still in the ‘theory’ stage, at the time unproven one way or the other. The second time around, however, there were three decades’ worth of evidence that made it clear that the ‘bailout’ was simply another giveaway to the ruling class. And consequently, given that a much larger portion of the masses realized this time around that they were indeed being screwed, over time their collective anger sparked economic justice movements across the Western world, from the Indignados movement in Spain to the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US (which gained a global traction), to the eventual rise of political parties such as Podemos and Syriza in Europe, as well as the progressive populist movement in the US which supported the rise of Bernie Sanders in 2015 and 2019. But all of these movements, as you are probably aware, were crushed in one way or another by the political establishment in active collaboration with the influence of corporate power and an ever increasingly militarized global police state.
Which takes us to Trump. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a decent chunk of those who supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 ended up voting for Trump. Both candidates stood in the role of the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, pointing out the obvious, the plain truths before our eyes that neither mainstream political party wanted to acknowledge. After four decades worth of neoliberal economic policies, the middle-class was disappearing, the poor was worse off than ever, the average person was living in a state of precarity that was unimaginable in the post-war boom years, and both Trump and Sanders fearlessly stressed this to those who were the most affected. But while one had spent his career fighting for the working man, fighting against the forces and systems and ideologies that resulted in such precarity, the other was a lifelong con-man, a true wolf in sheep’s clothing, who spent his life benefiting from the fleecing of the poor and who took his cues straight from the fascist playbook in his attempt to convince the masses that their plight was not the doing of those above them, but those below them. And once the Democratic Party succeeded in their sabotage of the Sanders campaign, Trump had a clear path to the finish line, a victory which seemingly shocked mainstream liberal America, but that many on the Left had long considered to be an inevitability.
From the moment he took office, Trump once again adopted strategies that proved successful for his authoritarian predecessors and proceeded to deliberately sabotage and dismantle what had remained of the American democratic system right out in the open for all to see. Nothing is hidden, nothing is obscured, which only further polarizes the masses, as mainstream liberals recoil in horror at his brashness while his base only adores him all the more for the same reason. He proudly puts the intertwined cruelties of authoritarianism and capitalism on display and revels in the spectacle of the reaction on all sides. And in the midst of the spectacle, the greatest public health crisis in over a century hits, alongside a nationwide outbreak of social unrest due to the ever-continuing state-sanctioned murders of Black Americans.
Under different leadership, perhaps these simultaneous crises would have been given the ‘hiccup’ treatment. But under Trump, they served as a tipping point that resulted in the most blatant display of the bare-bones mechanisms of capitalism and authoritarianism that any modern ‘world leader’ has ever dared to display.
As far as the pandemic goes, as opposed to the rest of the Western world, where there was at least an attempt to pretend that human lives were more important than the economy, Trump’s strategy made it clear as day that US American workers were expected to sacrifice themselves, to literally die on the job or as a result of keeping the economic machine running, for the benefit of capitalism. And in terms of quelling social unrest, Trump’s actions both in Washington, DC and Portland made clear that while property damage was not a justifiable response to state-sanctioned violence against innocent civilians, the latter was and is absolutely a justified response to the former. What so many of us on the Left have always known about capitalism has now been made clear as day for the average American: as far as the nation-state and the ruling class are concerned, both the economy as well as private property are more deserving of protection than human lives.
And with those two blows, I now see that finally, *finally*, the average American realizes that they are the lobsters boiling in the pot, that “it can’t happen here” is actually happening there, and that it is actually *their* country that is the shithole.
Unfortunately, from where I stand, these realizations are too little, too late. At this point, the United States is on the verge of truly becoming a failed state. In terms of anything that can be done, this is no longer a rescue mission, so to speak, but a salvage mission.
III. On the Outside, Looking In
In my observations of the world at large, when one does not trust what’s presented, they look elsewhere. And when one does not trust what is found elsewhere, they trust what’s presented to them. Both methods have their advantages and disadvantages, but the strengths or flaws of either method is not the point. The point is that this tends to be the nature of logical thinking, of curiosity, of a desire for understanding and truth-seeking. Either you’re satisfied with what’s in front of you, or you seek elsewhere. US Americans do neither. They distrust their media and government, often well beyond a wise amount of caution. And yet, they overall embrace a severely isolationist mentality, refusing to look outside their borders for pretty much any reason.
What is successful elsewhere, what is popular elsewhere, what has failed elsewhere, these are irrelevant as far as the average American citizen is concerned. What political systems or forms of government may or may not work elsewhere are irrelevant. What strategies other countries may or may not have used to contain the Covid-19 pandemic are irrelevant. And anytime it is suggested that one look elsewhere, that one consider that maybe, just maybe, other places, other governments may know something that Americans don’t, the possibility is usually quickly shut down, with a plethora of reasons given why “here is not like there”, a weak explanation as to why there’s something fundamentally different about the United States that would render such ideas or solutions null and void at the onset.
After having spent the majority of the past four years living abroad, what strikes me more than ever before is that most Americans do not realize that metaphorically speaking, they live in a bubble enclosed by a one-way mirror. When they look out, all they see is themselves. And yet, the rest of the world observes constantly, paying close attention, even when Americans are not actually looking in that mirror. The film “The Truman Show” comes to mind in that often it seems that the United States is a reality show where the actors are kept unaware of their circumstances while everyone else tunes in nightly to watch.
When I first moved to France, one thing that surprised me constantly was how much the French know about the United States. Whether it’s regarding culture, cuisine, politics, history, often their knowledge and understanding of a country that’s an ocean away is comparable to my own knowledge of the same country in which I was born and raised.
And when it comes to certain subjects, dare I say that the French know even more on average about the United States than Americans do. Not so much when it comes to pop culture or current music, but more as it concerns the history of the United States and those who have influenced it. It’s hard to find someone here in France who hasn’t heard of James Baldwin, for example, or who does not have at least a cursory knowledge of the history of the American labor movement of the early 20th century. In my experience, the average American will often draw a complete blank when questioned on either of those subjects.
When I bring this up to folks from the United States, the degree to which other countries are extremely aware of the United States while most American are quite ignorant about what goes on elsewhere, I generally receive a significant amount of pushback.
And so I challenge them: “Name me one living French politician other than the current President. Name me one contemporary French film, one contemporary French actor or actress. And by contemporary, I mean currently in the spotlight, currently popular, “Amelie” does not count. Name me one contemporary French pop star, one rock star. Name me one contemporary French television show.”Most of the time, they can’t answer *any* of those questions. And yet, the very suggestion that a culture that encourages a combination of isolationism as exceptionalism could produce a populace that is largely ignorant about the rest of the world strikes them as deeply offensive. And I have come to realize that one of the most insidious aspects of exceptionalist ideology is that, in its mechanisms, it obscures the goal, the result, from the affected subject. It seems that inherent in an exceptionalist mentality is the failure to see that one exhibits an exceptionalist mentality at all.
And much like any reality show, the goings-on and the overall plot arch of the United States-as-reality-show can drastically differ from season to season. Those seen as the principal drivers of the plot set the tone for what is perceived, for what is to come. One can often guess what is to come based on what one knows about the protagonists and the environment they are operating in.
When I first arrived in France, Barack Obama was still the President and the 2016 election was just heating up. And when any given person that I encountered in my day-to-day affairs here learned that I was an American, they would often make a comment to me about Obama, always in a positive light. It was often a bit awkward for me to find a diplomatic way to reply, as my views regarding President Obama weren’t nearly as positive, but the more I ended up in the same conversation over and over again the more I realized that there was larger aspect to what was being expressed, that it wasn’t just a matter of a seemingly uniform personal approval of the President. It wasn’t merely “I think Obama’s great, don’t you”, but there was a strong subtext that essentially came down to “this is how the world sees the United States, do you see how the world sees you?”
At the time, I didn’t. My own very mixed views regarding Obama combined with my socialization as an American truly obscured me from being able to understand and see how the United States and its citizens were perceived. I was still inside the bubble, unable to observe from the outside. And finally being able to grasp the subtext was the beginning of a long journey in breaking through that tunnel-vision and being able to better understand how the United States was and is viewed by those looking in.
But over the past few years, and more so in the past few months than ever before, when I run into the same general “are you English or American” question that I will likely never escape on account of my accented French, the reaction is *very* different when I confirm the latter. Nowadays, the response is almost universally a version of “don’t Americans see what is happening? Don’t they know what fascism looks like?”
“No,” I tell them. “They don’t. They don’t know what it looks like.” Because for far too many Americans, fascism is something that happened an ocean away. Aside from taking pride in the fact that their parents or grandparents helped to successfully defeat a would-be fascist takeover, most Americans haven’t had the need to think much about at all. The concept of fascism, I explain to them, over the years became a mere insult, a synonym for anything they didn’t like or deemed authoritarian. *Actual* fascism doesn’t really register on their radar. “But don’t they know what happened here?” they say with insistence and in disbelief.
“Not really,” I continue. “They know abstractly, but they don’t know what fascism actually *looks* like. They don’t know the mechanisms, they don’t see the signs.”But unlike when I first arrived, now that I’ve accustomed myself to be able to examine my homeland from the outside, the subtext that is being expressed in those words very quickly became crystal clear. Much of the rest of the world, especially in Europe where they have a living cultural memory of what life is like under fascist occupation, is simply aghast that the United States could allow itself to fall so far, and to continue for so long in such sustained ignorance as to what is obvious to everyone else.
Their reactions mirror my own. Not only do I understand far too well how the rest of the world sees the United States right now, I find that I am having the same reaction, despite a deep cultural understanding as to why the situation is as it is.
After all, the lobster who has never seen a kitchen before likely does not comprehend the meaning of the pot. But while lobsters in the ocean generally don’t have the means to educate themselves about kitchens, the American lack of understanding as to the mechanisms of fascism is not a matter of lack of means but willful ignorance towards something that happened far away and therefore, in their reasoning, would never concern or affect them.
Now, the pot is on the stove and the water is heating up, and the collective inability and unwillingness of the citizens of the world’s most powerful empire to pay attention or concern themselves with the historical trajectories of anything outside their borders is very much to blame for their current predicament.
Over here, with one foot in each world, lately I find myself constantly struggling with a plethora of emotions, many of them contradictory. There’s the feeling of premature survivor’s guilt, there’s a visceral anger at the collective ignorance of my fellow Americans, there’s a deep and painful worry for my friends and family and the countless folks who are stuck there who do not deserve what is happening and what is about to come.
And what is about to come? I cannot say for sure in detail, but history offers many clues. Whether it’s the long view in terms of the fate that all empires eventually face, epitomized by the crumbling of the Roman Empire, or the more recent view such as the series of events that led to Mussolini’s power grab, the fall of the Weimar Republic, or that of Revolutionary Catalonia. The historical echoes and countless red flags that are being exhibited in the United States right now are impossible to ignore and it is easy to predict what the near-future may look like.
But then it occurs to me that in the first two above instances where fascism was actively defeated, a large part of that success was due to the actions of the United States, and in the third instance, where the United States deliberately did not involve itself for the sake of capitalism, fascism reigned for four decades. And when the United States *itself* is the nation-state which is descending into fascism, we are in uncharted territory as far as the future is concerned. History illustrates and clarifies for us what is currently happening and what will likely transpire in the short-term, but what will happen in the long-term is anyone’s guess.
A continent away, I feel slightly safer but at the same time all the more helpless, and most days I can do nothing more than retreat to the back of my mind, alone with my heretical thoughts.
ALLEY VALKYRIE
Alley Valkyrie is a co-founder of Gods&Radicals Press, and lives in Rennes, Bretagne. Her latest book is Of Monsters and Miso.