| Carl Schmidt, the Nazi political theorist, said that it was essential to liberal democracy to have an enemy to crush. After 1945 he went into the service of the leading liberal democracy, on which all the others depended, and he felt at home in it.rnrnThe dependencies of the United States have been in a condition of existential unease for four years because of the election of a rogue President in the United States. Trump got himself elected by appealing to "the deplorables", who had been consigned to the rubbish-heap by Hilary Clinton. They were deplorable because they lacked the broad, liberal vision of destruction and creation that is required for the cosmopolitan governing of the world. They were concerned only with themselves. All they could see was that their jobs were being exported wholesale and they were being reduced to white trash.rnTrump, a mere capitalist without dynastic precedents, told them he would stop the export of jobs. That irresponsible appeal to populism brought about the White Trash Presidency which for four years has been the source of existential pain for all the talented souls of the civilised world—the Free World.rnrnFour years have passed without a state being destroyed in the interest of freedom. When did that last happen during the term of an American Presidency?rnrnMidway through Trump's Presidency, BBC Books published a book by its North American Editor, Jon Sopel: If Only They Didn't Speak English: Notes From Trump's America.rnIt comes with a recommendation from Emily Maitlis, the main presenter of BBC's Newsnight: "Jon Sopel nails it. There is probably no more foreign land than America right now. An entertaining stock-take of how we got there."rnA blurb explains:rnrn"You see, if only they didn't speak English in America, then we'd treat it was a foreign country—and probably understand it a lot better."rnrnEngland has come to hate the vigorous offspring that saved it in 1918 from defeat in the war that it declared on Germany and Turkey in 1914, and in 1945 from being an offshore island of a Soviet Europe in the outcome of its second war on Germany.rnIt has been totally dependent on the USA since 1945 but Presidents before Trump have been kind to it, acknowledging a kind of hereditary debt to it. Trump is the first President who came directly out of business activity in the raw capitalism that has made the United States what it is. He appears to be entirely unaware of any sense of debt to Britain.rnrnWinston Churchill said his purpose was to ensure the continuation of the British Empire. He came to Office as the British and French Armies, which had declared war on Germany, were being defeated by the German response. He brought the remnant of his Army home from the battlefield, but refused to call off the war on terms which would have left the British Empire intact. He then set about spreading the war, and did it with such success that Britain was reduced to a minor party in it, and the Empire was brought to collapse. Then, after the War, he reconceived British affairs under the category of "the English-speaking peoples". But, forty years before that, the very influential Protestant editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead, had published The Americanisation Of The World. He saw the United States as the product of the fundamentalist Protestantism that had to escape from England in order to flourish. And, in its flourishing, it had superseded England. The essential Biblicalist England had become America.rnrnEngland did not welcome being saved, and bankrupted, by its offspring in its last two World Wars, but it was only with the shock given to its illusions by the arrival of Trump at the White House that it felt free to express its hatred. Under the Kennedy dynasty and the Clinton dynasty it could console itself that it was Athens to Americas Rome—the source of its culture and its wisdom if not of its raw power.rnIt is now looking forward to the end of the nightmare and the return of illusion with the Presidential Election.rnrnIrish Times coverage has passionately favoured the Democrats. An Editorial on 23rd June opined: " A day never passes when the worst president in US history does not again pile egregiousness upon egregiousness…†(23.6.20). While a piece on 26th October is headed, “Biden The Anti-Venom For Trump’s Poisonâ€.rnrnFor the BBC the Election has been the main news after the Virus. Licensed commercial television has gone one step further. Channel 4 has participated in the Election. It has canvassed door to door against Trump on the ground in the USA. It got a copy of the Republican Party's Canvassers' Notes for the 2016 Election. It found that the electorate had been divided into four segments: Clinton supporters, Trump supporters, a segment that was there to be won, and a segment that there was no hope of winning. Its policy for the latter section, largely made up of black voters, was to deter them from voting for Clinton. And Channel 4 reasoned to its own satisfaction that to try to dissuade electors who certainly would not vote for you from voting against you was to subvert democracy.rnIt called that tactic Voting Prevention. So it went around the streets of various cities, confronting identifiable electors with the Republican Party's assessment of them.rnThese confrontations were a big part of Channel 4 News every night for a week or more. But the results were disappointing. The canvassing notes were mostly accurate, and those who had been assessed as unwinnable by the Republican Party had difficulty in seeing anything wrong with the practice.rnrnChannel 4 also confronted Republican Party activists with the Notes, only to find that the practice was seen as normal electioneering. All the Republican spokesmen they met were black. One of them explained patiently that it was the duty of an elector in a democracy to make up his own mind about voting.rnIn the first week the counter-canvassing was done by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who had usually been a studio presenter on the News. He was replaced by a high-profile journalist, Matt Frei. The following discussion was broadcast on October 22nd. The Channel 4 case about the subversion of democracy by Voting Suppression was put by Frei to Sean P. Jackson, who was described as Black Republican Caucus of Florida:rnJackson commented:rnrn"So you know what our deterrence was? Our deterrence was deterring black voters from voting for Hilary Clinton. You know why? Because Hillary Clinton was the one who went out and, out of her own mouth, called black men “super-predatorsâ€. And so we wanted to make sure that we deterred every black voter humanly possible from voting for Hillary Clinton, whether that meant coming to vote for us or it meant them them staying home. We wanted to make sure that they did not vote for Hillary Clinton… And we have made black unemployment the lowest in the history of this country. We have increased, restored, and made permanent ASPCU (?) funding.rnC4: But the vast majority of black voters in America, men and women, tend to vote democrat.rn Jackson: They do tend to vote Democrat.rnC4: So it would be in your interest to not have them vote in the greatest possible numbers.rnJacksson: No, it's in our interest to begin educating and showing and teaching them why their vote for the Democratic Party has been taken advantage of for the past 60 years.rnC4: …Those black voters who didn't show up… allowed him to win this state.rnJackson: If you want to look at it that way, that may very well be the case——rnC4: ——you agree with that.rnJackson: Well, why not? I'm going to tell you why. Donald Trump was a very unconventional candidate. And for some folks—if you start talking about very strong devout black Christians—they're not going to like some of the things that Donald Trump has said and done, and so they're not going to go along with him, there's no chance in hell. But then, at the same time, they're not going to go along with Hillery Clinton. And so at that point you have some black folks who feel that they have nobody to vote for.rnC4: Is this the greatest democracy in the world?rnJackson: 1,000%, regardless of who the President is.rnC4: So is it not odd that in the greatest democracy on earth, as you call it, you are trying to prevent people, deter them, from exercising their democratic right to vote?rnJackson: No. If we're talking about 2016, what we were trying to do is to, again, help people to understand——rnC4: ——And if the result of that understand was them not showing up at the polls at all, that's OK?rnJackson: If they so choose not to turn up at the polls at all, that's their prerogative. We can't control it. What we can do is given them the facts. And the facts are that Hillery Clinton was horrible for the black community and that Donald Trump could have been the saving grace. And he has proved to be the saving grace.rn…rnC4: So why do 8 out of 10 black Americans still think Donald Trump is a racist?rnJackson: Because the President has had some gaffes himself, some blunders, just some stupid comments himself that should never come out of his mouth that automatically make people think that he's a racist."rnrnOn October 14th the black Civil Rights leader, the Rev. Al Sharpton, was interviewed at length, on Russia Today’s ‘Going Underground’ programme, by Afshin Rattans, about a book he has just published, Rise Up: Confronting A Country At The Grassroots. The well-informed interviewing that is characteristic of that programme can be found nowhere else in the British/Irish media.rnShipton agreed that the Democratic Party took the black population for granted as a voting resource, and that complacency had set in in that relationship despite the horrific consequences for the black community of the Clinton Administration, particularly with the Crime Bill. But still the only thing to do was support the Democrats. Trump was a racist. He had mixed with Trump socially. He did not deny that there was nothing racist about Trump in social relations, but he was a racist because he had emphasised law and order in the Black Lives Matter confrontations.rnHe had been sitting alongside Harvey Weinstein at the 2016 Clinton Election Night dinner, but did not think Weinstein’s fate would have been different if Hillery had won.rnHe agreed that the Clinton foreign policy had been horrific. And, while it was true that Obama had begun the practice of caging Latin Americans who crossed the Border, that was no justification for Trump continuing the practice.rnHe agreed that Kamala Harris had a highly dubious political past, and that there were grounds for black apathy about politics. But change will come. And anyway you just can’t give up.rnHe described himself as a tree-shaker. He was an agitator who stirred things up. Shaking the tree caused the fruit to fall. It was up to others to make the jam.rnrnHe said at one point that what he aimed for was not perfection but liberation.rnWhat does liberation mean for the black population that was wrenched out of Africa and planted by Britain as a slave population in North America?rnrnSlavery was abolished a century and a half ago as a tactic in the Civil War. Lincoln intended that the Emancipated slaves be sent home—but they were no longer Africans. They had become Americans.rnrnAn element in Congress adopted the policy of establishing them in power in some of the defeated Confederate States. The Ku Klux Klan was formed to prevent that by means of white terror. The great Democratic Party President, Woodrow Wilson, forty years later, in his capacity as a historian, hailed the KKK as the saviour of the Union by preventing the establishment of black States. And later as President he premiered in the White House the film The Birth Of A Nation, which features the KKK in a heroic role.rnrnAn effective system of black subjection without legal slavery lasted for a hundred years after emancipation.rnrnPresident Lyndon Davies Johnson—"Hey, hey, LBJ/How many kids did you kill today?" [a slogan of the Vietnam War, ed.]—took Federal action to break up some apartheid policies. It was necessary that the black population should become an active element in the state which was asserting its supremacy in the world by war.rnrnWhat is now called racial prejudice was ingrained in white America—actually, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] America. rnCatholics were half way to being blacks. Just look at the mess they had made in Latin America by cross-breeding! Careful thought was given to the Irish. One opinion was that they came just within the margin of being Aryan.rnrnWhen the Irish set about establishing themselves in public life as American, it was comparatively easy for them. They wee not physically distinguishable, and they had a homeland—like the Italians—and the United States, in its expansion across the Continent had ceased to be English colonial and had become a land of colonies. But the Blacks were a miscellaneous body of freed slaves without the influence of an identifying homeland.rnAn attempt was made to get over this by the element of the Black Power movement which proposed that the nondescript Blacks of the United States should assert themselves as a nation. But, for all the New Left intellectualism of recent decades about inventing and imagining nations and traditions—including Comerford's Imagining Ireland and Kiberd's Inventing Ireland—nations are not easy to invent.rnBut Black Nationalism contributed to the shaking of the tree. And no doubt there is still much shaking to be done. But what liberation involves is the making of the jam—which means becoming part of the power-structure of American politics and ceasing to be something apart from it, whether persecuted or patronised by it. And the active black presence in the structure of Trump's Republican Party, brought to light by Channel 4's patronising canvassing against Trump, is the best indication that that is beginning to happen.rnrnEurope admires the United States—or at least is obedient to it.rnEuropean democracy was unable to survive the effects of Britain's first World War on Germany. It was re-created by the United States out of the shambles brought about by Britain's second World War on Germany. Democracy elsewhere depends on the United States. Democracy is what the US says it is. If an elected Government somewhere is decreed by it not to be a democracy and it applies sanctions against it, Europe does likewise. There is not within the 'Free World' another Power to dispute the matter with it. Democracy, as a pragmatic fact, is its creation, and it exerts control over it.rnrnThe USA is much admired—but it is what it is because of the way it came about. It could not have become what it is without conquest, genocide, slavery, racism, and the wildest form of capitalism ever seen.rnrnIts democracy did not come about through concession to protest by a ruling class, as British democracy did. Right at the start it dismissed an attempt to establish a ruling class on the British model.rnrnIt also prevented the formation of a working class as an institutional element in political life. The plentiful existence of free land—land ethnically cleansed of natives—was the cause of this in the first instance. But it became the prevailing culture.rnrnObama was the first black President, but his blackness was merely racial. His heritage was not that of generations of freed slaves who had been trying for a century and a half to find a place as part of the state in which they had been freed. His origins were exotic, and perhaps that is why he was the first President to say clearly what was inherent in United States political culture from the start. He said that the United States was "the exceptional nation", and that it was "the only indispensable nation". rnThe meaning of that is clear enough. The United States was universally sovereign, and it could do without the rest of the human race if it was disobedient to it.rnTrump's offence was that he retreated from that position. He took the United States to be a state amongst the states and asserted its distinct national interest against the interests of the others. But unfortunately the others—except for China and Russia—had learned obedience to the USA, and Trump left them leaderless.rn*rnrnIn the final week of the Election campaign—as we go to print—Channel 4 has put two of its journalists on the ground canvassing for Biden: Lindsay Hilsum and Matt Frei.rnOn October 23rd Frei interviewed Congresswoman Donna Shalala, a Florida Democrat and a member of Clinton's Government, and put it to her urgently that their campaign against Trump needed to be revved up:rnrn"shouldn't the Democrat campaign be much more assertive, about putting out campaigns saying 'Trump is Hugo Chavez. He's the strong man. He's trying to be like a Latin American strong man.' Why not put out that kind of message?"rnrnShe wasn't impressed. Trump would be defeated by the Virus and Money: rnrn"I think that the fact that Joe Biden has so much money, and can literally overwhelm, in many parts of the state, the Trump ads, that that will make the difference."rnrnTrying to take part in the American Election with a British or European political mentality is futile. America has its own way of doing things and it is puzzled by the childishness of the British mentality, when confronted with it at close quarters.rnrnThe only real remedy would be for Britain to apply to become the 51st state of the Union!rnrnrnrnrn |
