Whenever one’s worst fears have come to pass, and one’s highest expectations have come to nought, the only intelligent judgment to make is that one is confronted with a tragic moment. There are several ways to confront a tragedy.
One is to give in and give up. Accept the defeat and be overwhelmed by it. This is the lot of the terminally ill, the irreparably old, the suddenly-accidented, and the newly born, beings whom the will has deserted or who cannot find it.
Another is to seek refuge in the imaginative world of experience, to recover whatever examples human societies have devised to cope with tragedies, big and small, especially the big, seemingly insurmountable ones. Because you may find that there is nothing beyond experience, nothing that the eyes have never seen, nothing coming from the skies that the earth cannot absorb. And when the cosmic rafters crumble, no one on solid earth will be spared.
Yet another is to refuse to retreat or take refuge, but to take action and resolve to drive this tragedy away. Overpower it, fight it like a bad enemy, and do all that is possible, even seemingly impossible, to snap out of the nightmare.
The election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States is a tragic moment, for his country and for the rest of the world. Considering the profile Trump established before and during the campaign as a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, verbally-abusing public figure, he should never even have secured the nomination of the Republican Party. This man conducted himself in the most reprehensible manner at every stage of the electioneering process. He verbally abused his co-aspirants in the Republican Party primaries.
Yet he won that nomination partly because, as many commentators have pointed out, he tapped into the reservoir of hatred which the Party has spent the past eight years fostering in the imagination of its average American. He did more than his fair share of fostering it, too. He won also because he possessed some of what many secretly yearned for: wealth and the ability to act and speak improperly while managing not to be held to account.
Considering the opposition Trump faced in the elections—the candidacy of Hillary Clinton—he should not have won. She was the better candidate by far. She had everything one could ask for in a president—experience, intelligence, resource, personal conviction—and she was running against Trump. Long before he declared to run for the nomination, Trump started, and kept going for years, what the media described as “the birther movement,” the false claim that President Barack Obama was not born in the US. Barely two months before the elections, he ended that disgraceful, unnecessary campaign of calumny with a tepid “Obama was born in the United States, period.” Even without using the polls as a primary gauge, I personally thought that Trump would not win, and I knew that that thinking came partly out of political optimism. My steady mode throughout was Brechtian, after the German author’s inimitable statement in Mother Courage that “corruption is our only hope.” The impulse was to see even in the most negative situations cautious signs of hope. Although as early as this February—after reading the transcripts of the debate in North Carolina—I had begun to entertain the prospects of a Trump presidency, I was still disappointed at the results.
There will be no end to the speculations as to why Trump won and Clinton lost. If only those email revelations had not dogged her moves all summer. If only her campaign had not alienated the supporters of Bernie Sanders through the gamesmanship of the Democratic Party primaries. If only the campaign had genuinely tried to repair that second damage by not handing everything about the elections to consultants, but instead reach out to the sections of the society which felt excluded…
The elections are gone. They cannot be reversed right now. In a winner-takes-all contest, you cut your losses and walk away. The reality sinks in.
In the past half-week, in my estimation, the responses to the tragedy of Trump have been limited to the two extremes of either succumbing to defeat, the forte of those sapped of willpower, or digging in and settling down to a tough fight.
Clear thirty-six hours after the elections, I ran into a colleague, a fine thinker, a likeable person with whom I have served on dissertation and other committees. Visibly disturbed, sharply earnest, she said, “I think I want to move to Nigeria right now!” A former graduate student from East Africa, now on the faculty of a university in New England, is reportedly contemplating moving to Kazakhstan with her African family. Another colleague who had worried that Trump might win cannot wait for his upcoming yearlong leave, to be spent in an agreeable part of Europe, most likely Germany.
These are not isolated stories; even as I write, another colleague with ties to England is considering moving to Brixton, or…Brexiton?
I responded to the first colleague’s declaration by joking that I wouldn’t want to move to Nigeria, but I recognised in the helplessness of that retort something of the psychic quandary in which most British citizens found themselves after the Brexit vote—most eloquently demonstrated in the petition to reject the decision numbering a million signatories after only a few days. If you’ve ever been in a vehicle heading inevitably for a crash, you cannot fail to understand the panicky desire to be delivered anyhow from a catastrophe.
On the other hand, powerful progressive institutions like The Nation magazine and the anti-discrimination Southern Poverty and Law Center have adjusted to the reality that Trump and whatever he represents have to be fought. The magazine’s social media campaigns have, since the declaration of the results, been preoccupied with this political resolve. Others more centrist strike a similar pose of positive bellicosity. Note that nearly all journals of public opinion which usually divided their endorsements between Republican and Democratic presidential candidates supported Clinton. Then their money went in the direction of their mouth. Beyond supporting her, most of these institutions also spoke against Trump’s candidacy. One could, thus, see this post-election stance as very much in line with the positions taken long before the elections: the rude shock of Trump’s victory has simply awakened the vigilant spirit which haunted his presence on the hustings.
Genuine, deeply human, and characteristically American, the two responses are fated to fail if they do not recognise one fact which Trump’s victory has underscored: that the fate of the United States and that of the rest world are inextricably and forever twined. Just eight years ago, in the flush of electoral victory, Barack Obama said of the country’s relationship to the world: “our story is singular, but our destiny is shared.” Not anymore. Or, even more accurately, never more so than now.
II
The great irony of the desperation to leave the US for Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Canada or Brazil is how it throws into relief that immigrants are the earliest target of Trump’s hate-mongering (“Mexicans are rapists”). Americans freely, easily, wish to leave a country that millions of the dispossessed all over the world are dying daily, literally, to enter. The crushing inequality in this situation is easy to overlook in the heat of the moment. It only heightened one’s sense of one of the reasons that Trump got elected—the millions of Americans, shorthanded “white males”—who felt excluded in a world they no longer recognised as their own.
Just before he passed away in August 2010, the British historian Tony Judt published an eloquent book titled Ill Fares The Land, about the perplexing failures of social democracy in the West. I have had to revisit this timely book in the past several days. In their various but conflicting ways, “white males” and “Mexicans” understand what Judt was talking about, but privileged Americans eager to flee obviously don’t. And the irony of ironies, departing Americans can always hope to return, if and when they choose, whereas no such hope exists for “the Mexicans” deported from the US.
The resolve to fight Trump from now on is principled, right, just and admirable. It was the same resolve that the millions who voted for Hillary Clinton made. It just wasn’t enough—it wasn’t strong enough. Could the sense of outrage now make it stronger? Maybe. But instead of waiting to see, what if we start examining right away what it means?
Simply put, any resolve to fight in primarily American terms is fated to only dig American liberals deeper into the hole of mistaken ethnocentrism. All year, non-American commentators worked with the conceit that the US elections could no longer be the concern of only American citizens. That was obvious enough—for nearly a century the US has been the only country whose products and ideas force their way into the psyches of others, unbidden.
The premise of my claim about the linked destinies of the country and the world is different from this obvious argument. The forces which powered Trump into the White House and gave the control of the two legislative chambers and of many state legislatures to the Republicans have been with the rest of the world for as long as the US economic and military strengths have manifested themselves globally. “Chickens coming home to roost” has a ring of Schadenfreude—the malicious delight in another’s misfortune—and it is inappropriate. America’s misfortune is, should be, shared by all.
It is left for Americans who think, and especially those who correctly perceive the election of Trump as a tragedy and want to do something to legally reverse its impact, to see this. Make no mistakes about the fact that the “Mexican migrant” is still crossing the desert as I write, just as the “white male” in Omaha, Nebraska, is still hoping for his break—the reason he voted for Trump. Remember that even as he faces certain prejudice, or worse, the Muslim refugee from a shelled-out Syrian town is desperately trying to get into Germany, Sweden, and…the US!
The tragedy, frankly, is that the rest of the world has no luxury of Schadenfreude. Will the drug wars which partly account for the migrations from Central America soon come to an end? Why is the Filipino president so heedless about the drug epidemic in his country? What does the creeping rightward shift across Europe mean, but that important aspects of our collective destiny on this planet of exhaustible resources have been neglected for long? Do people care about the fate of Palestinians, of Iraqis who have lived with perpetual war since the 1980s?
The other, equally crushing tragedy is that liberal and anti-Trump opintars are not seeing this connection. They are not even ready to learn to look that way. The shock of the election barely cushioned, the modal impulse of the past week (today is November 21, 2016) is to rail against any new nominee proposed by Trump. And you wonder, but what did you expect? Didn’t Candidate Trump’s statements and actions send all the “right” signals? And is he now not following through?
Many years ago, the African American poet and activist, Amiri Baraka, wrote that World War II was fought not to defeat fascism but to determine who would be in charge of it. Laugh if you will, but one cannot but fail to see a similar scenario right now: who can do a worse job of managing the fate of the world under capitalism?
So, courageous, progressive American patriots and their allies the world over, we are all in the same boat, although we took different paths to get here. Combine your resolve to fight Trump every inch, every second of his journey through the presidency with an awareness of the clear and present danger that is the state of the world right now and a strong hold on the imagination. You will find that there is nothing beyond experience, nothing that the eyes have never seen, nothing coming from the skies that the earth cannot absorb. And when the cosmic rafters crumble, no one on solid earth will be spared.
Akin Adesokan teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.
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