(image credit: Wikimedia)
Donald Trump does not represent something new in the United States. Instead, he is part of a fundamental contradiction that the United States was born from, a contradiction that has never gone away. On the one hand, the beauty of democracy, opportunity, freedom, and equality (for some). On the other hand, the brutality that made that beauty possible: colonization, genocide, enslavement, occupation, and war. Some willingly embrace the brutality, others are willing to look away from it. That is why the Democratic Party’s loss of its moral compass on Gaza and calling what Israel is doing a genocide was not simply a “single issue,” but a symptom of the rot within a party that hoped that the beauty of multiculturalism and diversity would somehow be enough to overcome the brutality.
So long as that contradiction between beauty and brutality is not resolved, it will return, and the country – and the world – will be haunted by the original sins that made this country and are still a part of this country. Too many Americans benefit from the contradiction, which has shaped the US into what it is today: a military-industrial complex that is profitable for some, and a global hegemonic power that justifies itself through the narratives of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.
Trump and Kamala Harris do not disagree about these narratives, or about the necessity, even divine inevitability, of overwhelmingly dominant American power. As part of the incumbent party in the White House, Harris could hardly be pessimistic about the current state of affairs. Instead, she sought to fine-tune the operations of American power – domestically and globally – and hence turned to the idea of joy, implying that Americans just needed to overcome any gloominess and simply reject Trump’s spectacular politics of demonization and hate. While those politics should be refuted, Democratic legitimacy was undermined by the other spectacles that the Democratic Party helped to perpetuate and had a hand in creating: the obliteration of Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon, as well as the highly visible presence of the unhoused in many American cities, the most direct reminder that the neoliberalism championed by Democrats (and Republicans) had failed too many Americans.
Read the full article HERE on Zeteo
