“I really love your movies,” said a fellow passenger coming off a long haul flight as we rushed towards customs clearance here in the home of the free and the land of the brave. “Not again,” I said to myself as I smiled politely at the stranger. I am tired of explaining that I am not Forest Whitaker, though of course I would love to have his bank balance and an Oscar on my desk.
With a few weeks ahead of their elections, I do not recognise the country that gave me some of the best years of my life as a postgraduate student who returned often on one or other fellowship. My children were born here, so there is a special attachment. But the place is no longer the same.
Everybody is warning about the coming violence if Donald Trump (again) loses the election. It’s going to be chaos like on January 6 2021 when the man lost the elections then duly summonsed the faithful to violently attack the Capitol Building where legislators were trying to certify the election results that declared Joe Biden the winner. Third World stuff, said one. Another whispered that Nigeria is sending election observers on November 5. The myths that Americans keep telling themselves — “the world’s greatest democracy” — has fallen apart in front of their very eyes. Our GNU makes us look like recently canonised saints of the democratic world order.
Now you know why so many white conservative South Africans love Donald Trump.
How did the city on a hill become a nightmare in a ditch that threatens the collapse not only of America but of the Western alliance? There are countless theories. Here is mine.
At root this revolt is about the browning of America and the final challenge to white supremacy. It is a backlash against the Obama years much like happened whenever blacks made progress such as in the years after Reconstruction and the abolition of slavery in the 1860s to the passage of Civil Rights in the 1960s. Here once again reactionary whites see the loss of jobs, the transformation of cultural norms (abortion, same-sex marriage) and the felt changes in racial demographics (by the 2040s, white Americans will be a minority) as nothing less than an existential threat to their status and privilege.
In comes Trump and for all his idiocy and cruelty, he is a master at stoking those fears and what better target than those brown people coming over the border “by their millions”. Rapists and murderers, he regularly calls them. They eat your domestic cats and dogs, he said of legal Haitian immigrants in a town called Springfield, Ohio. All dangerous nonsense of course, but his base does not care, for there is a political economy of lies that speaks to those existential fears.
By the way, now you know why so many white conservative South Africans love Donald Trump. He says what they cannot and dare not say in a black majority country without immediate repercussions. Make no mistake, there is among some of our white compatriots a longing for a way of life that no longer is, a privilege of skin no longer guaranteed, here nor there.
The social, cultural and economic divide in America is real and the threat of a black woman president drives the MAGA crowd nuts. As expected, Trump’s reaction was to question her race (“she’s Indian”) much like he demanded to see Obama’s birth certificate (“he’s not American”). The man has no shame, but it does not matter to his cultish followers for he knows that race-baiting still works in America as does red-baiting (he calls her a socialist, seriously).
It will be close, but Kamala Harris will win the presidential elections in early November. Then the hard work begins. The democrats have to rebuild connections and community with the rural working classes and the poor in America or those left behind will remain cannon fodder for Trumpism. That’s right, long after Trump leaves us, the brazen and divisive racial politics that define his movement will remain. There is nothing less than a re-education of America required (which is why right-wing politicians want to ban books on slavery in states like Florida), but equally, there has to be a revitalisation of rural economies or the divide and the threat that comes with it, remains.
Let’s not get carried away. Here at home we face the same basic challenge: how to make social and economic amends in ways that benefit all South Africans including the urban and rural poor because if we do not, we face the real possibilities here at home of a black Trump emerging on our political landscape. I know; he is already here.
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