'Conventional wisdom suggests that the United States has already reached its peak,” writes the philosopher Bruno Maçães. “But what if it is only now starting to forge its own path forward? What if American history is only just beginning?”
In his book History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, Maçães suggests that the US, despite its centuries-long fun ride, is only now decoupling from its origins as a colonial imperial outpost of someone else’s empire. It is only now forging its own political vocabulary, and only now is American Republicanism listening to the reverberations of its soul.
And what it hears is that democracy and hypertuned capitalism are not necessarily compatible. What it hears is that democracy is not particularly necessary.
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'Conventional wisdom suggests that the United States has already reached its peak,” writes the philosopher Bruno Maçães. “But what if it is only now starting to forge its own path forward? What if American history is only just beginning?”
In his book History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America, Maçães suggests that the US, despite its centuries-long fun ride, is only now decoupling from its origins as a colonial imperial outpost of someone else’s empire. It is only now forging its own political vocabulary, and only now is American Republicanism listening to the reverberations of its soul.
And what it hears is that democracy and hypertuned capitalism are not necessarily compatible. What it hears is that democracy is not particularly necessary.
Illustrative image: (Supplied)
Madison Square Goblins
Anyway, I had this quote in mind when I watched the Trump campaign parade the surgically modified end of the MAGA movement at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, 27 October. As the wild, weird 2024 US election marathon rounded into its final sprint, AmeriKKKa Inc showcased a wilful, puerile middle finger raised to good manners, good taste and the brotherhood of man.
Here was the nation’s Id on full display, and it was a neon-drenched Nazi fest that was at once eye-wateringly dumb and also poignantly, shamelessly frank.
What, then, of the American Ego? Across the country, in some swing state or other, Donald J Trump’s opponent, the former California prosecutor and current Vice-President Kamala Harris, was running on a platform of Joy.
It’s a strange premise, given that the Biden administration, in which Harris was a bit player until her late game substitution three long months ago, has been an agent of mass death in two far-flung wars.
Harris has received an endorsement from the old Republican guard like génocidaire Dick Cheney, a fellow vice-president who bears much of the responsibility for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. American liberals have grown so accustomed to their own hypocrisy that they’re genuinely baffled when they’re called out on it.
But we are now at the point in history when the country’s ruling class finds itself at an inflection point. The lies American liberalism has told itself no longer beguile.
Finally and irrevocably, it may be time for the real bullshit to take centre stage.
Police guard an anti-Trump protest as people line up to see former president Donald Trump speak during a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on 27 October 2024 in New York City. (Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Civil wrongs
War doesn’t need to be bloody to be brutal and, in many respects, an American civil war is already under way – years from now, armed with hindsight and perspective, the student of American history will identify this period as a re-enactment of the first Civil War, minus the period-accurate accoutrement.
Like most 21st-century wars, it is an information war – more specifically, an entertainment war – and its primary objective is to transform individuals into weapons. It is a war over states’ rights, revolving around the economic empowerment of racial minorities, specifically America’s black population, and it’s a war over an interpretation of the past – which is to say it’s a war for the future.
This war cannot be won by conventional means because it is a way-of-life war; a cultural war; a blood and soil war. Many such wars have been won over the course of human history by the physical destruction of one of the opposing sides. But nuking Alabama or New Mexico is, as the tech bros would say, suboptimal.
And so we arrive at a second-best option: the installation of an authoritarian who imposes a singular view of nationhood, an outcome with which America now flirts.
Just as the war cannot be won, neither can the peace. What will die first and most painfully — at least in the minds of those refusing to face reality — is the idea of America.
I’m referring here, of course, to the liberal establishment, who do not move as quickly in thought or in action as do their illiberal opponents. (A quick word on taxonomy: the terms 'right' and 'left' no longer have any coherence in describing America’s two monolithic opposing blocs. It is a case of liberals versus illiberals. Within those blocs, there are many subgroups – Hume-ish conservatives, Trotskyites, Furbies, Trekkies, and so on.)
This is not to say that there aren’t qualitative differences between the two sides. Equality – or rather, the American version, equity – is a nice thing to reach for. It’s good to have elections, because voting is one way to exercise the right to self-governance. Conversely, it’s bad to try to overturn the result of an election and incite a mob to kill your vice-president, while watching it all on TV.
Rules, norms and laws are helpful in any social construct that includes more than two people. It’s unwise to use the armed forces to manage protests and unrest. The mass deportation of refugees and migrants is classically fascist.
It’s probably also best to hedge policymaking on scientific consensus – after all, it would be unfortunate if Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina were wiped off the map by a rageful megastorm named Fred. And, as fragile as democracy may seem, it is nowhere near as brittle as dictatorship.
More pointedly, there are communities that would genuinely suffer if Trump’s more rabid apparatchiks get their way.
Because of something Walter Benjamin probably explained, American identity politics has become fixated on gender norms, and there are more than 540 pieces of anti-trans legislation floating around red states. As more and more insanely MAGA-ist judges are jammed into the courts, it stands to reason that reproductive rights will fray even further, and a return to 18th-century abortion procedures will be the best many American women can hope for.
Except for the Warren Court’s brief interregnum, the US Supreme Court has always been a revanchist orgy of jurisprudential pretzel-making. Trump’s court is bad – its judgments have been so idiotic and mendacious that they cannot be taken seriously – but genuine creeps like Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas predate his administration.
And let’s not forget that Joe Biden behaved appallingly during Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings, all but laying down the welcome mat for Brett Kavanaugh three decades later. But as we peruse the list of Trump’s infractions, we can also see how far American liberalism has fallen from its own ideals. If Kamala Harris loses this election, it will be because of many factors. But while racism and misogyny were long ago priced in, I’m not certain how many moderates realise that the rise of American fascism happened in lockstep with the stumbles of American liberalism.
Trump is the bastard child of the 2008 financial crisis – a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from cheeseburgers and golf balls, reanimated by the wattage generated by shitty reality TV, sent into the heart of the establishment by the Tea Party, nativism, white supremacism, evangelicalism, and good ol’ fashioned American boredom.
The stupidity, the cruelty, the racism, the anti-intellectualism, the QAnon conspiracy porn and the anti-technocratic paleo-politics is, sad to say, the entire point. The eggheads didn’t cut it, so let’s see how it works out with a moron.
It’s all helped along by the fact that 21st-century Americans do not seem to know their country, a place of infinite complexity. At best, they know half their country, and possess an image of the other half that is based entirely on media portrayals that are, nevertheless, terrifyingly accurate.
The political beliefs held by each tribe has narrowed to a regulated set of talking points, predigested and rehearsed “arguments” swayed neither by fact nor by rational counterargument. The original American counterpositions – rugged individualism versus government interventionism – have congealed into a 50-50 proposition.
Is there any longer a distinction between stereotype and complicated, nuanced individual? Not in the public sphere. Choice has been boiled down to non-choice, to a set of predetermined options on an empty dropdown menu.
The question of American democracy’s failure – or, rather, its potential failure – is this: How did a national union based on bounty and infinite choice get reduced to a duopoly, not of parties but of ideas?
Democratic presidential nominee US Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign rally at the Alliant Energy Center on 30 October 2024 in Madison, Wisconsin. (Photo: Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Zero dim sum
It’s become popular among progressives to insist that America’s original sin, slavery, has incurably poisoned the country’s politics. And the original sin is preceded by the physical destruction of Native Americans – a genocidal act which has steeped the country in racist violence from which it cannot decouple.
Maybe. Or perhaps the answer to America’s floundering is more prosaic: except for a three-decade pause in the class war between the ’50s and the ’70s, America has been vastly economically unequal, and humiliation of the poor is built into the social infrastructure.
As a result, many Americans prism out their loathing and rage. They are not interested in racial conciliation, and consider the issue of racial equality closed. For some folks, Barack Obama’s presidency was a milestone on the road to true progress; for others, it was the last word – proof that black Americans have the same, if not more, opportunities than white Americans, and that the roles of victim and oppressor have in fact been reversed.
This grievance politics, practised both by liberals and illiberals in various ways and to varying degrees, is conducted as a zero-sum battle: for them to win, I have to lose. There can be no national politics under such conditions, but it remains immensely productive to stoke this thinking, to divide and conquer, especially when there are so few true zones of actual consensus-making remaining.
Or maybe there are a few. Leaving aside Ukraine, which American isolationists and fascists see as a lost project, there are two matters of foreign policy on which both liberals and illiberals display remarkable consistency.
The first is support for Israel, and its never-ending slaughter and subjugation campaigns. (Support that may cost Harris the election.)
The second is China. It appears that American elites across the spectrum finally understand that China’s political capitalism – its command capitalism – will never converge with the liberal meritocratic capitalism officially practised in the US.
It is now understood that there can be different species of capitalism, which American elites interpret as a threat. There is the capitalism practised in open societies with freedom of movement and expression; there is the version practiced in closed societies, with no freedoms except the freedom to consume.
Capitalism was once considered the gateway drug to a universal liberal value system. This idea is now laughably foolish. Indeed, China has not learnt from the West, but rather the reverse is true: we now have proof that capitalism can survive a transition from open to closed, from liberal to authoritarian. Indeed, a little bit of brutality may even act as fertiliser.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks to members of the media following his presidential debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris in the debate's press file in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 10 September 2024. (Photo: EPA-EFE / JIM LO SCALZO)
Agoa, agoa, gone!
What does all this mean for South Africa? Who knows. The Global South, as they now call us, will hardly benefit from either regime, but one will almost certainly be worse.
Should the Trumpistas emerge triumphant, South Africa will likely be punished for its support of Palestinian rights, if not its support for Russia after its invasion of Ukraine. If anyone has their tongue further up Putin’s ass than Trump, it’s half the ANC. In theory, a non-aligned country could act as a necessary interlocutor, but that’s not what the Americans are looking for.
As for trade, Trump is proudly the Tariff Man, which means the further dismantling of globalisation, further de-dollarisation and, for South Africa, a further pivot east, which will happen regardless of who wins.
Don’t get me wrong, the world will better off with Harris – which is not to say her version of liberalism is any less punitive than what has come before it. At least she pretends to take climate change seriously.
And should Trump attempt a second coup, or to dismantle democratic conventions should he take power legitimately, his actions will serve as welcome encouragement for African leaders who just need a little inspiration.
Best-case scenario: when Elon Musk takes control of the internet, he throws Limpopo a satellite or two.
Or maybe it just ends up with Harris in power, MAGA slinking off into the bog, and the status quo unmolested. But let’s stop pretending – when America comes this close to voting for the end of democracy for a third time, perhaps her victory would only delay the true start of American history.
If that’s the case, the problems must be faced, named and addressed – not by making concessions to some fictional centre, but by addressing the exact situation that liberalism perpetuates: a rigged system benefiting a small, cruel, fantastically rich elite.
And so here we have it. If unrestrained capitalism is the plan – growth without guardrails and without end – perhaps there is no other alternative other than MAGA, which is itself a coalition between culture warriors, racists, the working classes, and a fascist oligarchy that promises humiliation of the Enemy as a trade-off for handing the country – and, by extension, the economy – over to them.
Trump’s Supreme Court may have banned abortion, but it legalised bribery. The stage is set. The time is now.
This is an old story. The ruling class rules until it doesn’t. As the writer and historian Owen Wister put it: “We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money.”
American history is ready to begin again. This time, it drags the whole world with it. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
