Читать книгу American Presidential Elections in a Comparative Perspective - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Many inside and outside the United States believe that the United States has a longstanding, historically rooted, and fundamental problem: racism. From the early stages of the colonial period, the institution of chattel slavery became a central basis of the southern economy, securing labor to maintain the plantation-based production. Slavery and the subsequent legal discrimination against African Americans were perceived by many outsiders as inconsistent with the United States’ discourse of freedom. Today, in the eyes of many foreign observers, African Americans and other minorities have been mistreated and denied full access to the American democratic system. Overseas observers are often aware of the fact that even after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s many forms of intolerance and discrimination persisted.

Many thinkers and writers from around the world have examined the US racial history. Alexis de Tocqueville saw slavery an uneconomic, abhorrent system “contradicted both Christian belief and tradition and the political philosophy of the rights of man.”⁶² More than a century later, Octavio Paz averred that the racial question was one of the “great contradictions that tears [the US] apart.”⁶³ The radical Egyptian writer Syyid Qutub declared that the United States “treat their colored people with despicable arrogance and distinguish barbarity.”⁶⁴ The Swedish writer and scholar Sven Delblanc wrote in 1969, after spending a year in Berkeley, that he “encountered a country with an ingrained tradition of racial oppression and racism.” He wrote, “I ask myself if the US will ever learn to live with the truth, the whole truth, about its history?” He characterized American freedom as a myth and concluded “violence and oppression were endemic in American society.”⁶⁵

The issue of race has been a major factor in shaping stereotypes about the United States since the nineteenth century. As de Chantal explains in this volume, the degeneracy thesis popularized in France in 1768 argued that in the United States, “all natural forms, whether vegetal or animal, or human, had degenerated to the point of having shrunken appearance.” These biological prejudices disappear in the early nineteenth century, but other negative perceptions emerged in France, such as the stereotype of “the crass materialism of vain and greedy Americans.” Often, stereotypes have been based on some particular event or US policy decision, and they have varied from country to country. In general terms, however, Americans are often portrayed as materialistic, uneducated, vulgar, violent, exploitative, barbaric, childish, and racist.

Intellectuals were not the only ones aware of American racial issues. As Adam Quinn has asserted, Hollywood and the media in general have popularized many images of American racial division.⁶⁶ In light of this, it is not surprising that Obama’s 2008 campaign for the presidency was followed with significant interest worldwide. In Brazil, Obama was met with a sort of racial empathy from a country with large black and mixed-race populations.⁶⁷ In England as in other countries, people wondered if “Americans would finally send an African-American to the White House?” Adam Quinn noted, “when Obama’s victory was confirmed, the British press embraced the moment with all gusto, pouring emphasis onto the racial significance of the occasion.”⁶⁸ In general, the French media saw Obama’s candidacy and his subsequent election with great sympathy, creating a sort of “Obamamania” in the country. France saw in Obama’s election something they did not have: the proper integration and representation of minorities.⁶⁹

Labels and stereotypes can lie dormant for a long time until a particular event awakens them. The United States was considered violent and racist during the Iraq War and the administration of George W. Bush, and inclusive and tolerant after Obama’s election. Today, the growing perception of the United States as an intolerant society often goes hand in hand with judgment about the United States’ hypocrisy. The United States is frequently perceived as critical of injustice in other countries but unaware of its own. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has expressed this with clarity: “Ultraconservatives in the United States demand that, the Berlin Wall having fallen, a new wall now been constructed between the United States and Mexico.”⁷⁰

The 2016 presidential election and the first year and a half of the Trump administration have made these issues central. Critical views of the United States have been reinforced by Trump’s statements during the campaign and his time in office. His claim that “a Mexican-American judge shouldn’t hear a case involving him because of the judge’s Hispanic background”; his description of life in black communities as “an unending hellscape of crime and poverty” and implication that “Muslim terrorists were potential immigrants”⁷¹; and his suggestion that in Charlottesville, Virginia, racist and neo-Nazi protesters and their opponents were on similar moral footing—have provoked severe criticism around the world.

At the beginning of 2016, former president of Peru Alan García referred to the need “to speak firmly against anti-Latin American racism of Donald Trump” (Vidarte). The center-left Mexican politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador asserted that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto needed to “file a complaint at the United Nations against US government and against Donald Trump for human rights violations and racial discrimination.”⁷² Markus Feldenkirchen condemned the United States’ treatment of the Nativeamericans and African Americans, and argued that the United States has never formally apologized and “instead, many patterns of institutionalized racism still exist.”⁷³ German Justice Minister Heiko Maas observed recently that “it’s insufferable the way Trump is trying to whitewash the right-wing violence of the thugs in Charlottesville…. No one should be allowed to trivialize anti-Semitism and racism by neo-Nazis.”⁷⁴ The conservative British Magazine The Economist published on its mid-August 2017 cover an image of Trump using a KKK hood as a megaphone. The Prime Minister of England, Theresa May, criticized Trump’s comment that “I see no equivalence between those who propound fascist views and those who opposed them. I think it is important for all those in a position of responsibility to condemn far-right views wherever we hear them.”⁷⁵ The Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, called Trump out for not openly condemning the march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, and for his “soft and vague position” after the event. The report cites Andrew Cuomo and other US politicians declaring that there were not many sides in the incident. Even Ivanka Trump tweeted that “there should be no place in a society for racism, white supremacy and neoNazi.”⁷⁶ Finally, an editorial in Le Monde called President Trump’s behavior “erratic and unpredictable,” and an “unprecedented transgression.” By “establishing an equivalency between the anti-racist movement and the extreme right,” the daily declared, “the president rides on the evil demons of white American who elected him.” Le Monde suggested that Trump was creating an “irreparable rupture between the president of the United States and the fundamental values he is supposed to incarnate and defend.”⁷⁷

Closely related to the issue of race is Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. Diverse manifestations of animosity toward foreigners during the 2016 presidential election and first year and a half of the Trump administration attracted the attention of overseas observers. Trump declared that Mexicans bring drugs and crime to the U.S. and are rapists; he promised to build a wall on the US southern border (“a beautiful wall, and Mexico will pay for it”); asserted that the United States would give priority to Christian refugees; and promised a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. These are just some of Trump’s anti-immigration statements. In times in which war, repression, famine, violence, and genocide have led people to seek better life in other countries, Trump’s words resonate ominously and loudly in the minds of many around the world.

Anti-immigration rhetoric is a persistent phenomenon in American politics. The existence of the Know-Nothing and Native Americans of the 1830–1840s, the American Protective Association (1887), the Immigration Restriction League of the late nineteenth century, the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the New Nativism of George Wallace, the American Immigration Control Foundation, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and several neo-Nazi organization among many others remind us that antiimmigrant positions have been a constant presence throughout American history. Animosity toward immigration and immigrants can also be found in the words of popular and influential TV anchors like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, in the views expressed by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a liberal scholar opposed to multiculturalism, or the conservative thinking of Samuel P. Huntington, who espoused an ethno-cultural perspective.⁷⁸

According to historian John Higham, animosity toward foreigners during the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was expressed in three different forms: anti-Catholicism, political anti-immigration, and racism.⁷⁹ Today, new arguments—like the alleged links between terrorism and immigration—coexist with old prejudices. Historically, anti-immigration movements have coincided with political arguments in favor of embracing immigrants. These represent “two opposing and yet interlocked views of immigration, a double helix of negative and positive attitudes that have existed throughout America’s history.”⁸⁰

At the core of the pro and anti-immigration debate is a dispute about American identity. Over the years, this topic has generated heated disagreement in the United States. Roger M. Smith argues that there are three related and distinct notions of American identity: liberalism, republicanism, and ethno-cultural Americanism, which, at its extreme, is nativism. This last notion emphasizes certain cultural characteristics that have existed in the United States since the birth of the nation and defines national identity in restrictive terms. In this view, only white Anglo-Saxon Protestants count as true Americans. Ethno-culturalism facilitates the growth of anti-immigrant sentiments. In Smith’s view, these conceptions of identity are at odds with each other, and none of them have prevailed throughout US history.⁸¹

The kind of anti-immigration tendencies and debates over American identity that voters heard in 2016 thus predate the most recent presidential election and the Trump administration. One only has to remember Proposition 187 in California, Alabama’s anti-immigration laws of 2013, or the actions of former Maricopa county sheriff Joe Arpaio to realize that resistance to the integration of immigrants is an on-going concern in contemporary America. What Trump did was fan the flames, helping to reenergize these views. In a time of stark economic inequality and significant demographic changes, Trump’s rhetoric resonated. He found in immigration—especially undocumented immigration—an ideal scapegoat. To blame unrestricted immigration for falling salaries and job loss, as Trump did, seems logical to many, and it sells well.

In the current moment of massive immigration in various parts of the world, Trump’s rhetoric provokes anti-immigrant animosity not only in the United States, but also in people and countries around the world. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Teresa May have expressed their concerns about the “geopolitical effects of a [US] ban on immigration and refugees from predominantly Muslim countries.”⁸² Politicians from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and Turkey, among other countries, condemned Trump’s travel ban.⁸³ I show in my contribution to this volume, how Mexican intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and the population in general reacted to Trump’s declarations about immigration policy. For many Mexicans, Trump’s statements and policies are discriminatory, can provoke humanitarian crisis, and violate human rights. In his contribution to this book, Luis Maira notes former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos’s strong condemnation of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along the southern border between the United States and Mexico. Lagos declared that if the wall is built, “we will be all Mexicans and we will protest that wall because it affects us.” In his view, Latin Americans will respond to Trump’s wall policy by “building bridges to understand that we are all equal in dignity as human beings.”

Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-migration views constitute one of the most-criticized areas of his policy. In a country characterized by the diversity that results from a history of almost continuous immigration, an antagonistic perspective toward immigrants tends to generate opposition and disapproval in the eyes of many Americans and many around the world. Today, the movement of people from one country to another, or from one continent to and other, is constant, and world opinion is highly sensitive to the human, political, and economic implications of restricting immigration.

Trump’s statements and policies—such as zero tolerance—are perceived in many quarters as intolerant and xenophobic, casting a dark shadow on a central component of the American Dream.