Don Watson - Enemy within : American politics in the time of Trump

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Every four years the people of the United States of America choose the person they think most likely to keep them free and safe; and best placed to decide what their countrys interests are and how they should be pursued. Among those interests are the interests of national security, which means they are in effect choosing the person who will decide who should be spied upon, selectively bombed or invaded, and who left alone; who should live and who should die; if life on the planet should continue or pretty much cease. Well, if they dont do it, who will? Actual voting is for American citizens only: while recognised as people by the US Supreme Court, corporations wholly or partly owned by foreigners cannot vote, but may contribute as much money as they like to the candidate of their choice. On election day, across the country about 130 million of the 230 million who are eligible turn out to vote, some of them with marvellous knowledge of affairs, and some in bottomless ignorance of everything; some with the tiny part of the brain that enables them to reason and judge, and some with the evolutionary accumulations of instinct and fear that lurk in the other 98 per cent of it.

We have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states, Barack Obama told the crowd in Chicago the night he was elected in 2008. The words were just the thing for the occasion, of course, but every day since has given the lie to them. Obama was doing in this speech what all the best American speeches do: laying the stress on the egalitarian and the communitarian, as if the qualities recommended by the Reverend John Winthrop for his Christian colony of Massachusetts 400 years ago remain the qualities that set the United States apart. But, of course, if any country is a collection of individuals it is the United States. Otherwise all that talk about rugged individualism and the American Dream and doing it my way would be so much hogwash. It has to be a collection of individuals or advertising wouldnt work.

Americans are divided on party lines as never before. The lines between red and blue states, counties and communities have never been so clearly drawn. Of course, there are purple states as well as red and blue ones: battleground states, meaning states where the contest is tight, where the ducks are; the ducks being the ones hunted by the candidates, the relative handful of people who decide those questions that a presidential election decides for the world. In purple states the differences that divide one state from another divide the state itself. Check the electoral map of Pennsylvania: in 2012 Obama won in just 12 of that states 67 counties, but he took the state and its 20 electoral votes because he took Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Since 2008, the whole country has come to resemble a battleground, albeit one, like the Somme for long periods, in stalemate. And 2008 was another age: back then there was only one red party and one blue party. Now there are two of each.

The United States is a miracle of an ever-evolving pluralist democracy and, in the absence of any other candidates for the role, still the last great hope of humankind. It is a wonderland of invention, a marvel of freedom and tolerance, and by most measures the greatest country on earth. We are, and always will be, the United States of America, Obama said. He surfed on the cheering, and in that moment some of us almost joined in. God bless them, we almost said.

But to think of the United States as a place, or even as a state, is probably the first mistake. While their political leaders will forever say there is more to unite than divide them, in fact the citizenry is divided by cultural, historical, racial, ethnic and ideological differences that every day every minute in the media make the platitudes laughable. Democrats say there is more to unite them as they divide them with identity politics. Republicans chide the Democrats for their identity politics while they dog-whistle to bigotry and preach nostrums they learned at the feet of Ayn Rand.

Some of these tears are visible and categorical: in the suburbs and the cities, for instance, where the dividing lines are so abrupt you can find yourself in a different world in the space of a few absent-minded steps. Some are invisible or subterranean: on the highways you cross them, like songlines, without knowing. There are fractures going back to the Civil War and beyond, forces for good and ill generated in now forgotten times that nevertheless impose themselves, even as the politicians declare their boundless confidence in Americas promise and implore the people to think of tomorrow. The state has been so deeply fractured for so long that only national crises, real or imagined, and their associated eruptions of fear and loathing of an external enemy can bring it together. We talk of Americans wrapping themselves in the flag: they bandage themselves in it. The yard signs of the election season are polite disguises for the underlying truth: the United States is a concatenation of sulky tribes, provincial, ignorant and seething with ambition, frustration and resentment.

The first days of June were great days for Hillary Clinton. She had just won the California and New Jersey primaries. In a prerecorded video released by the Democratic Party, Barack Obama had endorsed her as the most qualified candidate for president ever. Elizabeth Warren was busy endorsing her all over the place, including on Twitter. And at last shed driven off the old wolf who had appeared on the landscape out of nowhere and dogged her wagons every day for months. True, Bernie Sanders was holding out, and Hillarys supporters were unbecomingly narky and impatient with him. But Sanders was thinking of his own supporters: how to keep them believing and wanting to vote, and, before her election platform was agreed, how to bargain as much radical Bernie into routine Hillary as he could. Bernies crew were going to take some convincing. Hillary is a bad aunt, an eighteen-year-old girl told me. Whats Bernie? I asked. A cool uncle, she said. She was