To my family and friends in Europe and beyond: Understanding Americans
Thank you for the calls and texts expressing your dismay over what has transpired in the US. I share your apprehensions. I don’t know what will become of our democracy or yours. I, too, am watching in real time the dismantling, demolishing of our democratic republic. Will our rule of law be eliminated, our light of freedom be extinguished? Will we become, effectively, a Russian satellite, a totalitarian state? Will we spiral into chaos? If Trump’s actions continue to match his rhetoric, the answer is yes to all of that and more. The course we have chosen presents a grave peril to all of us. So, what were Americans thinking?
In a word, they rebelled, not against threats to national and international security, or the diminishment of human rights, or the elimination of civil rights, or even to the disassembling of democracy. They angrily repudiated progressivism. In spite of, or worse because of Trump’s rhetoric, they revolted. They rejected governmental policies aimed at the promotion of a cultural agenda which they deemed reprehensible. Some of their fears were legitimate, i.e. based in fact, but many more were fantastical, fanatical and conspiratorial. Regardless, those anxieties and aversions became the nexus of their manipulated reality and subsequent choice of nationalism, and authoritarian populism. Tragically the fuel propelling that engine was and is “retribution.”
Will this prove to be a pyrrhic victory for the MAGA loyalists, spelling disaster for you and us? Probably. Do Americans not realize that Trump is a flawed man? Yes, they do. But they calculated that he was worth the risk. In their desire to restrain the encroachment of liberalism (and immigrants) and obtain freedom from leftist policies, they suspended their concerns about his character deficits, reasoning that there is no relationship between dissoluteness and governance; potentially a catastrophic misjudgment. Better, they concluded, to be governed by miscreants than modernists. Will we consequently devolve into violence and vulgarity, cruelty and criminality, debauchery and depravity? That has already begun.
We’ll do the best we can here to speak up for human rights and justice. We will try to protect the vulnerable and endangered. We will appeal for decency and democracy. But, for the foreseeable future at least, I don’t think you will be able to depend on us to help you resist the global rise of totalitarianism, or to be the nation that once said, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” That door is now closed. And, I am afraid, so are our hearts.
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