Here's what can survive another 4 years of Trump — and what won't
“To lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his play The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895.
In somewhat the same spirit, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote last week “At some point in the next two months we are going to have to decide whether we absolve the American people if they re-elect Donald Trump.” Losing one election to Trump is unlucky; losing two in a row may be saying something about the national character.
Fisk has been Middle East correspondent of various British newspapers since 1976, so he was not on familiar ground when he wrote that about the United States in The Independent last Friday. On the other hand, he was expressing a mostly unspoken but widespread attitude among all Europeans except the extreme right. Let me quote some more:
“Like all snobs, we’ve taken the view that Trump did not really represent American values—any more than the Arab dictators reflect the views of their people. We’ve hoped and prayed and fooled ourselves into believing this was only a temporary autocracy, a deviation, an old and reliable friend suffering from a serious but ultimately curable mental disease.
“Yet...I wonder how we are going to react to Americans if the Trump years become the Trump era; or if his dreadful, ambitious family transform themselves into the Trump Caliphate....if the America we felt we could always ultimately rely on—once they’ve straightened out their little Trump misadventure—turns into the nation we can never trust?”
I grew up in Canada, and Canadians, like Mexicans, while fond enough of individual Americans, are by nature mistrustful of the American state—“like sleeping with an elephant,” as Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it. If it just rolls over or wakes up cranky, you can get badly hurt.
Europeans have a different perspective.
Bob Fisk grew up in the United Kingdom, which like France remembers (most of the time) that it would have lost both world wars without American help. Even if the United States was years late to both world wars, it showed up both times in time to save the day.
And American troops stayed in Western Europe to protect it from Soviet power throughout the Cold War. Most Eastern Europeans see the United States as the instrument of their liberation from the Soviet Union, even though it did not in the end involve a hot war.
So there is still a deep well of respect and trust for the United States in Europe. Fisk is probably right that a second Trump election victory would finally poison that well, which would be a pity.
Another four years would also see him complete the destruction of the existing international order (without giving a single thought to a replacement). Trump is, as Michael Moore noted in 2016, “a wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath.”
But would two terms of Trump mean the end of American democracy? Not necessarily. Not even likely. What Trump has triggered—and somebody was bound to trigger it around now, because every political niche, like every evolutionary niche, is always filled—is a final reckoning on the ‘race problem’, about 150 years after the American Civil War
At the time of the Civil War (1861-65), black Americans accounted for around 12% of the total population, and four-fifths of them were slaves. Whites accounted for almost all the rest; only a quarter-million were Native Americans.
‘African-Americans’ still account for the same 12% share of the population today, and many of them are still victims of the same white fear, exclusion and official violence that their ancestors experienced (mainly because they were slaves) 150 years ago. But since US immigration law changed in 1965, allowing people from the entire world to immigrate, the ‘non-Hispanic white share’ of the population has dropped to only 60%.
That share will to drop to 50% by 2044, according to forecasts based on current birth rates and immigration trends. This has triggered a huge panic among working-class white Americans, who often compete for the same jobs and used to depend on their whiteness as a competitive advantage.
Trump is personally a racist, if his remarks and behavior are any guide, but he is a cynical populist and would be exploiting white fears right now even if he really loved non-white Americans. That is why the vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not white privilege, is finally being dragged out into the open.
Having been so exposed, it will probably finally be extinguished—but not necessarily in time to thwart Trump’s re-election. This is not the end of the United States, nor the advent of a new Hitler either. It is a necessary evolution of American history, for which some people living elsewhere may also pay a substantial price.
Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities. His latest book, "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats", was published in the United States by Oneworld.