The Divided States: Trump’s inauguration and how democracy has failed | Pankaj Mishra

Though opposed in principle to slavery, many Enlightenment thinkers and their adepts simply assumed that democratic principles liberty, equality, toleration, natural rights and human dignity applied only to civilised white men. Colonised, enslaved and indigenous peoples did not seem capable of reason the unique characteristic apparently of the human subject liberated from religion and tradition. If David Hume was apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites, Montesquieu had little doubt that they were barbarians. Voltaire, who like John Locke held stocks in a company profiting from the slave trade, thought that blacks had only a few more ideas than animals. Obama claimed in his speech that African Americans protesting against racial discrimination are demanding the equal treatment that our founders promised. In fact, Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, believed that blacks were inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind and that his white American compatriots had no choice but to exterminate Native Americans, ignorant savages and beasts.

Such obsessive dehumanising might seem to negate the humanist ideals that became institutionalised in the American revolution. But, as the Swedish writer Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in his classic study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), people placed lower in the biological order than the white man and nearer to the animals could then be kept outside the white mans social and moral order. Not surprisingly, the pseudo-science of phrenology, which posited biological differences between races, was nowhere more popular than in the US, where white men used it to make the fiction of racial superiority appear a self-evident truth.

How is it, Samuel Johnson caustically remarked in 1776, that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes? However, American anti-colonists, devotees of Locke, linked liberty to property rights rather than egalitarian democracy (McVeigh was prone to invoke, not entirely inaptly, both Locke and Jefferson). The slaves conspicuous lack of liberty did trouble the conscience of Jefferson and his colleagues, but their ambiguous response was to promote racial separation. A new book by the historian Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, argues that separate but equal the notorious reasoning by the US supreme court in 1896 that enshrined Jim Crow segregation in law is a founding principle of the United States. Guyatt, building on the pioneering work of the historian Edmund Morgan, demonstrates that Americas founders were obsessed with the mental and political compromise of racial separation long before the American south institutionalised segregation in the wake of the civil war. In fact, American leaders kept toying with the abhorrent (and unworkable) prospect of mass deportations to Africa right up until the civil war.

The more inclusive and equal order for white Americans promoted by Andrew Jackson and the Jacksonians in the first half of the 19th century managed to degrade Hispanics, Native Americans, slaves, free black people and women. More such paradoxes came to define an increasingly vibrant American democracy after the emancipation of slaves and the end of the civil war. It was then that racial separation and exclusion came to unmistakably demarcate the community deserving of freedom and equality in the US. Segregated schools, railroad cars and lunch counters across the American south would for decades bolster the fiction that the races are separate but equal, while the lynching and disfranchisement of black people underscored which of the races was on top.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusionary Act, which prohibited the entry of Chinese labourers. The xenophobic legislation, which inspired antisemitic demagogues as far as Vienna, made no sense: Chinese immigrants constituted a mere 0.002% of the US population in 1880. But this was also the time when a country previously abundant in jobs and land was discovering the trauma of unemployment amid economic crisis and social conflict; and many citizens came to cherish their citizenship as an exclusive privilege that should not be made available to all and sundry, especially their racial underlings.

Racial degradation of non-whites became a form of democratic solidarity in the US in the turbulent late 19th century. For both rightwing and leftwing populists, it was a way to unite white wage slaves against Asian immigrants and African Americans, and heal the wounds to their dignity. Fresh immigrants from Ireland could also achieve honorary whiteness by persecuting African Americans the colour line was negotiable for some people at least. If antisemitism in Europe was the socialism of fools, racism in late 19th-century America was the democracy of the aggrieved left-behinds and pushy newcomers.

Many progressives, as Du Bois saw clearly, were complicit in it. The trust-busting American president Theodore Roosevelt swore by political equality, economic security and social opportunity for all Americans. But his inclusive order pitilessly rejected non-whites. Wishing to tighten, in Henry Jamess mordant assessment, the screws of the national consciousness as they have never been tightened before, Roosevelt hoped that war and conquest abroad would forge racial unity and democracy at home. The original liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson was hardly atypical in his reverence for what he called the great Ku Klux Klan, which had emerged after the end of slavery to protect whites from the votes of ignorant Negroes.

A widespread faith in eugenics, the much revered pseudo-science of the early 20th century, went on to shape the 1924 Immigration Act and its system of quotas, which favoured newcomers from north-western Europe over racially suspect (often Jewish) south-eastern Europeans and excluded descendants of slave immigrants as well as Asian immigrants. More than 100,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated as the US fought the second world war, ostensibly for freedom, with a segregated army. The civil rights revolution of the 1960s finally ended the terrors of Jim Crow. But increased political clout by African Americans, the unmeltable ethnics, in the infamous phrase of the conservative writer Michael Novak, provoked a backlash whose political reverberations can be felt to this day.

The civil rights movement made it impossible to appeal to racial furies as thunderously as George Wallace, the governor of Alabama whose war cry in 1963 was Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. It could not, however, prevent white politicians from dog-whistling. Richard Nixons Wallace-lite overtures to the silent majority evidently aghast at assertive blacks and multiculturalist liberals were refined by Ronald Reagan. As he attacked affirmative action and other gains of the civil rights movement under the guise of promoting such liberal-left causes as colour blindness and a level playing field, Reagan reached out to white working class voters with code words such as states rights, welfare moms, quotas and reverse racism. If the Willie Horton ad used in the George HW Bush presidential campaign in 1988 clarified the persisting power of racial dreads, the George W Bush administrations response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 suggested that segregation forever had long been more than a nasty slogan in large parts of the US. Trump eventually reaped the electoral harvest of a reflexive loathing among many Americans for Obama a guy, as Fox News Glenn Beck put it, with a deep-seated hatred for white people.

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The never fully repressed denunciation on the basis of race has exultantly returned in our own time. Trumps consigliere, Steve Bannon, responded to the recent spate of murders by police of unarmed African Americans with: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent.

Blithely attacking minorities (and recklessly baiting China), Trump and his confederates have violated even the fragile moratorium on antisemitism in place since the exposure of Nazi crimes. Their abrupt legitimation of vile stereotypes that were supposedly laid to rest ages ago has grim repercussions for the rest of the worlds hybrid and unequal societies. It is in the US that a faith in inevitable and irreversible progress a more perfect union has long bridged the abyss between the high-minded ideals of democracy and the cruel facts of structural violence and inequality. Obama again insisted this week that America has been defined by forward motion, a constant widening of our founding creed to embrace all, and not just some.

Trumps ascent reveals the longterm winners and losers of this distinctively American ideology the most powerful religion of our time. Many white American liberals are perplexed why their reverent invocation of Americas inclusive ideals and their complaints about the identity politics of minorities are met with angry calls to check your privilege. But, contrary to many hopes and claims, Americas liberal-democratic order has been largely inclusive for those who are privileged enough to be included in it. Exclusion has become steadily less crudely racial than it was during the unconscionably long era of segregation; but it is determined today by gender, property, educational and economic opportunity as well as by race.

This multidimensional inequality has grown more intolerable during a prolonged economic crisis. It has boosted the appeal of the ethno-racial nationalism that surged in Europe and America during the first phase of intensive globalisation in late 19th century, when, as Du Bois wrote, an American and European elite built up concentrated economic power and profit greater than the world had envisioned. Many among the middle and the working classes today feel excluded from both the benefits of the welfare state and the bonanzas of the rich. They aim their rage at both an aloof technocracy and people they suspect of exploiting the taxpayers generosity. As in fin de sicle America and Europe, political opportunists try to capitalise on their fears by demonising foreigners, immigrants, refugees all supposed parasites on the hard-working and cruelly neglected classes that should be weeded out.

We are discovering yet again that an atomised people repoliticises and reconstitutes itself by learning, in the bleak formulation of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, how to keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity. We are finding out that racism is not simply a product of ignorance, prejudice or arrogance; it endures, despite all our cautionary tales and resolves of never again, because its promise of social solidarity serves to assuage human fears and nurture hopes for the future. Racial exclusion, a response to the insatiable modern demand for equality, liberty and dignity, is bound up insidiously with the most virtuous ideals of liberalism and democracy.

This is especially true of the US, which, as Guyatt warns, obviously bears the scars of its segregated past but also retains an instinct for racial separation that manifests itself even among those who forswear racist beliefs. Bill Clinton surpassed Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes in condemning African Americans to mass incarceration and poverty while deregulating financial markets for the benefit of his patrons on Wall Street. The rhetoric and actions of Trumps cabinet, the wealthiest and most fanatical yet, will no doubt clarify further the inhuman practices that drive a politics and economy ostensibly devoted to human freedom.

Those who oppose them should welcome this clarity. It has taken too long for the ellipses, omissions and subterfuges in the American and now universal promise of liberty to be widely noticed. Several generations of anti-imperialist thinkers and activists, who intimately experienced the worldwide industrial slavery that Du Bois wrote about, repeatedly pointed out that those who promise equal rights universally enforce at the same time a global hierarchy in which those rights are reserved for some and forbidden to others. Certainly, Gandhi would have found very familiar the politicians who guarantee liberty, equality and dignity to people who look like them while flagrantly denying them to those who dont.

Gandhi would also have recognised, just as his American disciple Martin Luther King did, the imperative of building a civic democracy that takes into account the pluralistic nature of contemporary societies and the apparent incompatibility of competing claims and values: a democracy that acknowledges incommensurate goals and stimulates cooperation and reciprocity rather than competition and animosity between its individual members. The arduous task of creating unity in diversity, among people riven by race, class and gender, never confronted the founders of the United States. Too many complex issues such as the nature of human freedom and equality seemed self-evident to them; and too many of their successors also concealed the self-evident contradictions in the American programme by banishing from sight the enslaved, colonised and dispossessed people whose resources and labour enabled the enjoyment of life, liberty and happiness.

Today, as white supremacists prepare to occupy the house built by slaves in Washington DC, it may be hard to resist the fear that these pugnacious men, struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, as James Baldwin put it in 1967, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world that, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen. Certainly, genuine democratic equality under the Trump administration will be a more formidable challenge than ever before. But at least it wont appear veiled by the illusions of the past which may give present and future generations a better chance of bending the intractable arc of the moral universe to justice.

Age of Anger by Pankaj Mishra is published later this month by Allen Lane.