By José Steinsleger on January 20, 2021
The Lincoln Memorial, Photo: Bill Hackwell
Unique and anomalous, the country that never had a name, and which from its birth excluded the word “democracy” in the little more than 9,000 words that make up its Declaration of Independence (1776) and Constitution (1787), along with the 10 amendments (or Bill of Rights of 1791), and the 27 it added up until 1992.
The first of these: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion as an officer of the State”. This is a contradiction in terms, as all its presidents were sworn in with their hand on a Bible. And the second states that “the right of the people to possess and bear arms shall not be violated”. As a result, in sideboards, walls and garages all over the country, the number of firearms exceed the total population.
A country designed to justify hatred and unconditional love, and to which no one has remained indifferent. I remember my old man, for example, when he said that he had sent 20 dollars to National Geographic, and the magazine gave him back a check for 20 cents because the subscription cost 19.80 dollars… “The stamp alone cost 35 cents,” said Dad with admiration. “A serious country,” he added.
However, that “serious country” had built its greatness by exterminating the “bad” Indians first, followed by the blood of millions of slaves and immigrants, not to mention the exploitation and destruction of entire peoples in the four corners of the globe. And that at the end of the 19th century, it added the expression “of America” to “the United States” in order to establish, from pole to pole, its “area of its national security”.
A beautiful phrase (populist?) by Abraham Lincoln: “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (Gettysburg Prayer, 1863). But the entity called “The United States of America”, was always governed by its enemies. And France, equally inclined to universalize political ideals, included it in the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic (Art. 2, 1958).
In any case, it seems ill-advised (and convenient) to add apples and pears to unravel the American crisis. Thus, associating the electoral defeat of Trumpism (or Biden’s victory) with the fall of the German Weimar Republic (1918-33) may disconcert the urgent reader with simple, not simplistic, explanations.
In this sense, the films New York Gangs (Martin Scorcese, 2002) and Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012) allow a truthful approach to the “Trump phenomenon”, and the essence of capitalism that Americans and the world call “democracy”, its antonym.
The first takes place in 1862, when the problems of the time revolved around Irish immigration and the ongoing Civil War, and tells the story of the confrontation between two rival gangs: the “Natives” led by Bill Cutter, The Butcher, and the “Dead Rabbits”, a group of newly arrived immigrants.
While the second revolves around Lincoln’s intrigues and intricacies, for the passage of the amendment abolishing slavery.
Both films make it clear that the notion of “brotherhood”, as Antoni Domenech (1952-2017) noted, was “a central value in European enlightenment […], but it never took hold in the United States. The fact is that the American revolutionaries (like the Europeans and South Americans) hyperbolized the republican freedom of the ancient world, reserving Athenian democracy for the left and the Roman Republic for the right.”
Domenech argues that “democracy is not innate to liberalism”. He adds: “There has been no idea in the contemporary world more revolutionary than that of democracy, because democracy means government by the poor […]. No Founding Father in the United States called himself a democrat, and they have said terrible things against democracy”.
The great political crises (individual or social, no matter what) are the result of unique and non-transferable processes. And the temptation to use the example of Weimar is understandable in principle. But the analogy is misleading, and it remains doubtful whether, until Trump’s arrival, the Washington gangs were debating their problems in a sort of US-made social democracy.
In this context, Donald Trump was, in fact, the quintessence of the most perverted democracy in contemporary politics. Nevertheless, dialectically, we must thank him for unmasking the system that has been offered as a paradigm of “freedom” since 1776. Unless (and there is never a lack of) those on the left imagine that from today on Joe Biden will return to his ideals.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau