Of Innocence, Naivete, Delusion and Denial

The victors, as always, write the narratives of history, the losers write apologia. But as with most false histories written by the rampaging victors, this too will be rewritten in due course

By Anil Madan

The US presidential election is over. Donald Trump is once again President-elect. The Republicans will claim that he won a mandate. The Democrats are hardly able to dispute this as false as the claim is. They are too busy licking their wounds. The victors, as always, write the narratives of history, the losers write apologia. Trump’s victory was more a ratification than a mandate as I’ll explain. But as with most false histories written by the rampaging victors, this too will be rewritten in due course. But “due course” could be decades, or even longer. What will the America of decades or even longer look like?

“There was no surge of voters for Trump. He got a little over 75 million votes this time, just 910,408 more than in 2020. But Kamala Harris got 71,875,053 votes, and that is 9,407,579 fewer than Biden in 2020. The simple fact is that almost 9-1/2 million Americans didn’t think this election was important enough to come out and vote…”

Why do I write that Trump’s win is not a mandate. I have little interest in dissecting the alleged causes of the Democratic nominee’s failure to win the popular vote or the swing states. There has been much written on that subject, pretty much all of it useless and of no redeeming value. It neither captures the truth of what happened, nor offers a path forward for the Democrats. What it does tell us is that the Democrats are not the party that can rein in the excesses of the Republicans and their MAGA enthusiasts. And it certainly does not tell us what the consequences will be for a more insular, isolationist America, if that is what Trump wants to make it.

For me, two numbers stand out among those that tell the tale of the election just concluded, as we compare the 2024 vote totals to the 2020 vote:

There was no surge of voters for Trump. He got a little over 75 million votes this time, just 910,408 more than in 2020.

But Kamala Harris got 71,875,053 votes, and that is 9,407,579 fewer than Biden in 2020.

The simple fact is that almost 9-1/2 million Americans didn’t think this election was important enough to come out and vote. Or, perhaps despite realizing the importance of the election, they were simply not inspired by Kamala Harris or willing to accept her as the standard bearer who would take America in a new direction.

The shame of it is that despite what happened on January 6, 2020, almost one million more Americans thought it was okay to vote for Trump.

Those two numbers, 9-1/2 million no-show Americans and 910,408 more who voted for Trump say everything that needs to be said.

We should keep in mind, however, that the 910,408 additional votes Trump got, if strategically placed in the swing states, would have been enough to win him the electoral college. And, at the same time, the same number of votes strategically placed for Harris would have been sufficient for her to have won. The tragedy for the Democrats then is that they could not manage strategically moving people to vote in the swing states when the numbers showed that as few as 10,000-100,000 votes can make a massive difference in a swing state. So, Kamala Harris lost badly.

Loss of innocence

In this process, the Democrats and America lost their innocence. Again. This time, innocence lost was about the old saw that every vote matters. In this case nine and one-half million chose not to matter. This is not the first loss of innocence in America. For our nation, it has been an oft-repeated tale.

So too, did the Democrats lose their innocence of immigration. While it is true that this nation is a melting pot, the Democrats simply never came to grips with the fact that Americans already here, regardless of their race or ethnicity, want an immigration system based on invitation, not invasion.

The Democrats never explained why they were not solely responsible for inflation, or that Trump’s promises of lower prices are a delusion. But perhaps this was not a battle that an incumbent president can win. The Trump campaign successfully portrayed Kamala Harris as the incarnation of incumbency. So, she lost.

When I first came to America as a college student back in the last century, I used to jokingly tell people that I flew over on a TWA Boeing jet christened “Mayflower.” I laughed as I suggested that I would apply to join the Mayflower Society. But the innocence about the original Pilgrims came a cropper in due course. Over the years, the tendency to glorify those refugees and asylum seekers, euphemistically referred to as the Pilgrims, who came over on the Mayflower has come down a notch or two. Perhaps this is because as the victors in the American saga, they wrote a false history of their achievements. As the lessons of what they did have become painfully clear, the story of the Pilgrims and, by extension America itself, sheds the myth of their supposed innocence and benevolence. And perhaps the sub-silentio realization that they were, after all, undocumented refugees and asylum seekers, fleeing religious persecution in England, puts them on a par with latter day adventurers seeking a better life for their children and their children’s children.

I started writing these words on November 11, the 404th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at what became Plymouth Colony. Abraham Lincoln, if he were here, would count that passage of time as twenty score and four years. We often hear complaints about immigrants of different faiths and cultures coming to America and, alas, insisting on recreating their cultural ways and religious practices here. But this is precisely what those first refugees and settlers did. They sought to establish “Christian values”. And, as we heard during the presidential campaign just ended, there is a movement afoot to reestablish those “Christian values.”

In the first part of that four-hundred-year phase of American history, the “Christian values” of those early immigrants and the caravans of their countrymen who followed them, were no impediment to their wreaking devastation on the indigenous population, stealing their lands, eviscerating their culture, committing a near genocide, and dotting much of the American landscape with reservations that were glorified concentration camps. America took a long time to lose its innocence over this phenomenon as historians, the Hollywood film industry, essayists and novelists, and the comic book industry exalted their conquest of the American Indian.

Arguably, the nation has still not come to grips with this part of its history and the injustice that it screams out. Of course, some of the sense of injustice is tempered by the justification that America would never have grown, prospered, and become the most powerful nation in the history of the world were it not for the early settlement of the country, its expansion, and development. The American Indian was a dispensable victim of this new order.

A new conquest of America

Today, a new conquest of America is underway. In an ironic twist, it is a conquest by Indians. These are the Indians whom Columbus came west to find in America and now, they have found America from the east. The new Indians do not sport feathers but wear dots. This development of the Indian diaspora in America will soon come to be viewed in the context of a loss of innocence about another subject, that being the notion of American excellence. Today, American-born children are processed through education grist mills that are sorry excuses for schools, and they leave less well educated than their elder predecessors, less well able to read, write, and unable to comprehend and compute at a semi-literate level. The new president to be threatens to dissolve the Department of Education.

Large numbers of our fellow denizens are ever more dependent on the opioids of modern life — whether they be chemicals such as marijuana, cocaine, fentanyl and the like, or sugary drinks, watered down beer sold with the marketing prefix “Light”, unhealthy fast food, oversized servings at restaurants exacerbating the crisis of obesity, or vapid television programming exacerbating the crisis of mindlessness. We celebrate mass sporting events and wince at mass shootings with seeming equal frequency. Our citizens are charmed repeatedly by politicians promising prosperity and a return to moral rectitude in the name of religion. They seek control, by stoking age-old hatreds and xenophobia, promising assorted levels of vengeance. The new president to be offers more promises of his own and places those who promise to dismantle government at the helm of little destroyers captained by new commanders.

The oxymoronic contradiction is that America’s continued excellence is more and more dependent on immigrants who sustain the kind of work ethic and dedication that has made this nation a proud leader of the world. As this nation benefits from the technical prowess of these new immigrants, how will the new focus on immigration find a way to separate those who contribute useful labor to this nation without characterizing all immigrants as undesirables or worse, criminals? We have not seen that part of history written yet. Let’s leave it at that for now.

Will the new immigrants act more benevolently toward the denizens of this nation, or do we naively ignore the potential for conflict?

From 1620 to1775 over those seven score and fifteen years after the first Pilgrim refugees and asylum seekers arrived, America lost its innocence over the notion that a distant King motivated by the interests of his subjects would be a benevolent ruler. The notion that men could live, with the right to think, act, and speak freely under monarchy was discarded and relegated to the debris of history. Or so we thought. Now, we test anew, as Lincoln suggested at Gettysburg that the nation was testing its very survival, the notion that governments are instituted among men to secure the rights of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. The new president to be threatens to dismantle government. Ironically and naively, he exalts the richest man in the world who has benefited from government largesse, to strip away the functions of government and eviscerate its employees, departments, agencies.

The nation lost its innocence again as the southern states rebelled and sought to secede from the union. The truths that “all men are created equal” did not mean “all” men, but only the privileged white men and not even their women were exposed. A denial of brotherhood led to the Civil War, or as the southerners called it, the northern war of aggression. As we look at Putin’s war of aggression, we wonder if the new President to be, will save Ukraine or yield to the delusion that we can embrace a tyrant and killer of hundreds of thousands of his neighbours.

An American Hitler

The Second World War saw America rise to defend itself after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and join with Britain and the Allied Forces to save the world from Hitler and his axis of evil. Today, nine and one-half million Americans did not rise to block a man his own running mate called an American Hitler. Is this an innocent error? Or is it delusion, naivete, and denial?

Despite the chilling demonstrations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world’s powers have not learned that their ongoing bluster and posturing about nuclear capabilities and strategic power are more a powerful incentive to the have-nots to join the club than a deterrent. So it is that from five nuclear powers, we now have at least nine and possibly ten. China threatens to and is actively engaged in increasing its nuclear weapons and missile capabilities by a multiple of 10 or 15. Kim Jong Nuke threatens South Korea, Japan and the US with regularity. Iran threatens to get and use nuclear weapons against Israel. And we naively expect that a new President to be can bring all this under control when experience tells us that all he succeeded in doing was exchanging what he called “love letters” to Kim Jong Nuke.

America’s technological superiority is being challenged like never before. American inventions are stolen and copied in the blink of an eye. Most recently, Taiwan Semiconductor reported that one of its chips was found in a Huawei AI processor. America is getting over the naïve delusion that technology invented by Americans cannot be replicated in a heartbeat by equally smart people around the world. Or by people willing to steal that technology.

The Democratic Party is in disarray. The nation is in disarray. The Republican Party is ascendant. The new President to be unearths new hatreds, new destruction of government, new vengeance. But then, in his victory remarks, he did talk about unifying the nation and making it greater, more prosperous than ever. Is this naivete, delusion and denial, all wrapped together. Has America lost its innocence yet again?

We are embarked on a new journey in a sea of denial, on a ship helmed by a delusional captain, with seemingly innocent passengers naively believing that they are headed to a destination they want to reach.

Cheerz…
Bwana

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 15 November 2024