by PANKAJ MISHRA
WEB Du Bois diagnosed the built-in contradictions of democracy and liberalism as early as the 19th century PHOTO/Alamy Stock Photo
Donald Trump and his demonisation of minorities are not the exception in US history – they are its logical conclusion. Pankaj Mishra examines the dream of the multiracial democracy, and America’s failure to realise it
Never in human history have so many diverse peoples lived together as in our time. Nor has the appeal of democracy ever been so widespread. The promise of equal rights and citizenship held out by modern society has been universally embraced, especially keenly by people long deprived of them. But, as Donald Trump, the favoured candidate of white supremacists, becomes president of the United States, the quintessential multicultural democracy, the long arc of the moral universe, as Martin Luther King called it, does not seem to be bending to justice.
Trump came into political prominence accusing the first black president of the United States of being foreign born; he rose to supreme power stigmatising Mexicans as rapists and Muslims as terrorists. His election victory was engineered by Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, an online site notorious for its antisemitism, racism, misogyny and xenophobia. The joint arrival of Trump and Bannon in the White House, where they will enjoy nearly unlimited power, completes a comprehensive recent rout of the founding principle of the modern world: that, as the revolutionary phrases of 1776 had it, “all men are created equal”, entitled to the “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
Hatemongering against immigrants, minorities and various designated “others” has gone mainstream universally – even in Germany, whose post-Nazi politics and culture were founded on the precept “Never Again”. An era of separatism, in which people barricade themselves in fortresses, united only with those who look and speak like them, has unexpectedly dawned. Back in 1993, the suggestion from Gianfranco Miglio, the intellectual theorist of Italy’s Northern League, that “civilised” Europe should deploy the atavistic nationalism of “barbarian” Europe (the east) as a “frontier guard to block the Muslim invasion” would have seemed preposterous. Today, the demagogues ruling Hungary and Poland claim to be the sentinels of a Christian Europe threatened by Muslim refugees and immigrants. Brexiters in the UK, imitating Tory tactics in London’s mayoral election, conjured up minatory visions of foreigners. A near-majority in the Jewish population of Israel wants the country’s Arab citizens to be expelled. Geert Wilders’ demand for mass deportations of Muslims may help him become prime minister of the Netherlands.
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