Midnight in the Garden of American Exceptionalism
Americans, from either side of the political spectrum, have on a near subconscious level the thought process that America is somehow a place where history has mostly stopped, that the tides of time have somehow locked us into a particular pattern we’ve seen for years — one party is despised, one party is ascendant; the rinse and repeat of American politics. The Democrats and the Republicans regularly switch off as they guide the enterprise of state towards whatever distant shore and things mostly go on the way they always have been going. To the average person in the street, it’s hard to state what real changes have occurred in government policy in the last twenty years with the exception of Obamacare and the Supreme Court ( a supposedly non-partisan body) ruling for Gay Marriage. We have seen more conflict in the middle east, more of the middle class evaporating, and a more open police state.
But something else is in the air. 2020 has already been seen as a very different year. The very first month where Australia was burning, and a possible war with Iran almost came to pass just in that same first month, before Covid-19 landed on our shores. Then Covid-19 hit, then the economic collapse, and then George Floyd, then the riots — 2020 is a special year where it feels like weeks where decades happen.
The United States of America is facing an un-paralleled crisis not seen since the Second World War. This year of crisis, 2020, is a sort of radical re-mix of every major crisis the US has seen in the last one hundred years barring actual war — we have a pandemic, just like in 1918, an economic collapse, like we saw in 1929, and even environmental catastrophes not seen since the mid 1930s like the dust bowl. Not to mention the upheavals in almost every major city that have not been seen since 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, ending an era of civil rights progress. Not to mention even the Watergate level of government malfeasance with Trump’s campaign actively working with the Russians that resulted in his impeachment (and acquittal from his own party).
Perhaps it was the fact that for over 75 years, the United States has had a very good run concerning stability and slow, but progressive change since the Allied victory in World War Two.
Compared to any other major power at the time, we had minimal war damage, minimal casualties, and an unprecedented economic boom that only started to slow for the working class with the ascension of Ronald Reagan and company. Perhaps our luck has finally run out, and we are about to be facing the sort of existential crises that have been inflicted on other countries around the world, either due to fate, incompetence, or even (and especially) due to our government’s malevolent hand.
But something else is in the air, and Trump is just a symptom of a right wing caused disease of division, reaction, ignorance, and encouraged violence that the GOP have been promoting ever since Richard Nixon grabbed ahold of the machinery of government and employed the “southern strategy” to maintain a GOP grip on the South for the future. The wheel of history turns slow, but it does turn, and perhaps we are seeing echoes of a Soviet or Yugoslavian end. After all, as Marx pointed out:
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
In a stunning admission by members of the American political class, it does look like there is a great chance of heading into yet another 2020 crisis, one that could potentially be more parallel with 1860 than another other crisis in living memory. And this one could indeed be some sort of mix of tragedy and farce that could end the days of the USA being a stable country continuing more or less the way it always had.
A group of top Democrats and Republicans actually played out a series of “election night” war games under the guise of the Transition Integrity Project and the results were astonishing. All of the scenarios ended with political impasse, violence, and uncertainty.
In one out of the four scenarios, it ended with the secession of the West Coast of the United States.
The stability of the country seems to be at an end, and for the superpower of the world armed with nuclear weapons and fearsome economic clout, the fallout of the country actually dissolving into some sort of conflict will be an event that will affect the lives of all of its citizens and all of the world.
To pretend that a simple get out the vote campaign to elect Biden is folly on an almost criminal scale. Should Biden be voted for? Yes. Compared to Trump, it is one of the easiest decisions to be made by any adult.
But to not plan for a Biden “non-victory” where Biden does win but Trump never leaves office, is folly. The progressive forces must be organized and brought together in order and realize that America is not that exceptional of a place, at least not anymore. In the former Soviet Union, up until 1991 it would not be conceived in the slightest that it would be a dead letter by Christmas of that year. If it can happen to the Soviets, the only other superpower on the planet, it can happen to us.
To the people of Yugoslavia in the year 1980, the year President Tito and World War Two hero died, an event that was mourned by people around the world, there was no vision of what was to come. To explain to the population that within eleven years of his passing they would burying their own loved ones in the horror of civil wars would be considered far-fetched, an impossibility. But it happened.
The “check engine” light of history is flashing, but unfortunately, we are still driving forward. Let’s remember that it can happen here. We aren’t that exceptional. Only by believing, even on a subconscious level, that America is so exceptional, special, god granted, and ultimately a force for everything good, can we continue delude ourselves to the reality that will be hitting us dead on come November.
