gracchusdixit

From the day Donald Trump “won” the presidential election nearly four years ago, we have been admonished against normalizing either the man or his governing agenda.  To do so, we are told, would run the risk of numbing us to Trump’s boundless misdeeds, pave the way for him to exercise his authoritarian instincts, and blind us to the “better angels” of the American character.  Trump, it has been said time and again, is a monstrous exception to those better angels, does not represent the national character, and should be rejected for the anomaly that he supposedly is.

Foremost among those who have recited this refrain is the former President of the United States, Barack Obama.  During a recent “virtual commencement address” to the graduating class of 2020, delivered remotely because of COVID-19, he said the following:

It’s not always pretty, this democracy of ours—trust me, I know. It can be loud and messy and sometimes depressing. But because citizens took seriously the mandate that this is a government of and by and for the people, bit by bit, generation by generation, we’ve made progress—from cleaning up our air and water, to creating programs that lifted millions of seniors out of poverty, to winning the right to vote and to marry who you love.  None of these changes happened overnight, or without sustained effort. But they did happen, usually because young people marched, and organized, and voted, and formed alliances, and just led good lives, and looked out for their families and their communities and their neighborhoods and slowly changed hearts and minds.

Barack Obama’s intentions are beyond question as good as they can be, since he is a thoroughly decent man.  The sentiments expressed in this case, however, are anodyne and naive.  Not only that, they paint such a selective picture of our history that they border on falsehood or fantasy. 

Far from being an aberration, Donald Trump is the very epitome of a true American type.  From P. T. Barnum to Bernie Madoff, from Billy Sunday to Billy Graham, our history is rife with con men and charlatans, who grew rich by deluding the greedy and the gullible, often with the eager connivance of those they deceived.   That is because greed and gullibility have been intrinsic to the American character from the very beginning.  For all that we idolize the freedom-seeking Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock, many of the earliest immigrants to these shores were debt-ridden grifters, who came here to avoid prison or the hangman’s noose.  Like most of their ilk, they also came here to get rich quick, and they didn’t much care how they went about it.  The nation we like to call “the greatest in the world” is the product of four centuries of theft, slavery, and genocide.

Moreover, the proposition that our history has been a steady forward march of social and economic progress is manifestly absurd.  For each of the forward steps Barack Obama mentioned in his virtual commencement address, there have been steps back; for all the tremendous gains, there have been terrible losses.

A mere 12 years after the Civil War came to an end, in the course of which 600,000 lives were sacrificed to end the obscenity of slavery, the seditious southern states that started the war were allowed to impose “Jim Crow,” a de facto form of slavery that succeeded in oppressing black Americans for another hundred years.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to end that oppression—until the right-wing majority that now dominates the Supreme Court gutted its most important provisions.  Within days of that decision, the unrepentant states of the old Confederacy rushed to suppress voting rights again, redrawing their electoral maps to further entrench white supremacy.

In 1954, a very different Supreme Court barred racial segregation in public schools in the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education.  And yet, 75 years later, most public schools remain segregated, in fact, if not in law.  An implicit system of prejudice—in which banks deny mortgages to people of color, realtors steer their customers to the “right” neighborhoods, and local schools are funded by a tax regime that favors affluent (a.k.a., “white”) residents—has all but neutered the court’s decision.  There is no longer any need for out-and-out white racists like George Wallace to bar the doors of public education to people of color.  The subtleties of the “free market” have done the job far more effectively.

Four decades after the Supreme Court affirmed, for the first time in our history, the right of women to make their own reproductive decisions, right-wing conservatives on the court are hell-bent on overturning that decision.  It is not yet clear whether they will abolish Roe v. Wade outright—Chief Justice John Roberts is not conspicuously courageous—or will settle for a more politically expedient slow death by a thousand cuts.   What is clear is that, one way or another, they are determined to have their way.

In sum, the “better angels” narrative perpetuated by well-intentioned people like Barack Obama is an inexcusable distraction from the ugly reality that Donald Trump’s monstrosity isn’t at all abnormal or exceptional.  On the contrary, it is all too normal, all too typical, all too characteristic of who we are and who we have been.  

Just as the United States military was once called upon to suppress or exterminate the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Arapaho, and the Pawnee, it is now being called upon to suppress the voices of protest on American streets.  Just as local police once used billy clubs to bully black Americans into submission, they are now using bullets to silence them altogether.  

To pretend that these are the acts of “a few bad apples” and that the rest of us are free of complicity or blame is a colossal lie.  As long as we refuse to confront the deep-seated wrongs that shaped our history and still poison our society, we all, each and every one of us, will be guilty of normalizing evil.