‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?
The ‘rich confusion’ of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as well as Americans. The French film critic Serge Daney, who loved America’s cinema as much as he despised its imperialism, called it ‘the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash into’. Octavio Paz, evoking the country’s immense scale, described it as ‘geography, pure space, open to human action’. In the words of the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘America is the sublime and the abominable.’
Critics of American racism, class inequality and foreign policy have tended to focus on the abominable. ‘Two centuries ago,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, ‘a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which the … sickness and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.’ George Kennan, the least sentimental of American diplomats, echoed Fanon, describing America as ‘a prehistoric monster’ with a ‘brain the size of a pin’. Yet even Fanon, who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’
Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, there has been one battle after another, both inside America itself, and over the idea of America and its role in the world. Currently led, if that is the word, by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming fact’ is that ‘everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in this world.’* Not just enormous, but existential: consider, for example, the recent termination of USAID programmes, which may lead to as many as fourteen million deaths by 2030. Or the kidnapping of foreign leaders in countries with large oil reserves. Or the insistence on acquiring Greenland, even – or especially – if it means tearing up the rules-based order established after the war. Or the creation of a ‘Board of Peace’ in Gaza, designed to replace the United Nations – the list goes on.
Donald Trump’s presidency is many things, but it is, above all, a violent attempt to resolve the ‘rich confusion’ that surrounds the word ‘America’, to make it synonymous with his vision of a fortress state at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists, ‘narco-terrorists’ and domestic enemies. During his first term, some influential commentators on the left argued that Trump was little more than a pro-business Republican, even if he lacked the impulse control, the deference to civilised norms of behaviour, to say nothing of the habit of couching racism in euphemisms, exhibited by traditional conservatives. The argument wasn’t persuasive in 2016; today, it is a flight from reality. It’s true that Trump’s efforts to downsize the administrative state, to eliminate regulations on workplace safety, consumer protection and the environment, are in sync with much conservative thinking. But the pardoning of insurrectionists and other criminals, the undermining of birthright citizenship, the attacks on Somalis as ‘garbage’, the aspersions cast on the competence and honour of Black members of the military, the mainstreaming of neo-Nazis, the calls for the execution of political opponents, the shakedowns of law firms and universities, the war on scientific research and historical knowledge, and the expansion of a vast police state which is used to hunt down and deport migrants and, increasingly, to prevent critics of American policy from entering the United States: this is something else. So is the administration’s warning against ‘civilisational erasure’ in Europe. And for women seeking an abortion, for migrants and trans people seeking merely to exist, America has become a dangerous place.
Some may protest that Trump’s policies aren’t unprecedented: Democrats, too, have imposed border crackdowns and supported pre-emptive wars. Both parties have been complicit in the creation of the imperial presidency and a neoliberal economic order. All of this is true, and the era of ICE, CECOT and DOGE should not make us nostalgic for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama’s infatuation with drones, or the carte blanche that Joe Biden gave to Benjamin Netanyahu in Gaza. Yet anyone who cares about the stability of the republic might have reason to regret the disintegration of moderate Republicanism, one of the defining structural features of American political life. George W. Bush led the United States into its most catastrophic war since Vietnam, yet he never expressed any hostility to Muslims. Richard Nixon, a brooding, often monstrous leader who spied on his fellow Americans and presided over bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia, made significant contributions to environmental protection and to the welfare state, which are being dismantled only now.
Trump’s movement, which has captured the Republican Party, represents a radical acceleration of the darkest tendencies in American political culture: the violent braggadocio of 19th-century wars of expansion and extermination; the racist revanchism of the campaign to end Reconstruction; the repressiveness of the two Red Scares; the glowering populism of Father Coughlin and George Wallace; the savagery and corruption of slumlord capitalism. It seeks to dismantle what remains of the country’s already diminished democracy, and to establish in its place a predatory regime answerable to a single leader and his entourage. Whether the regime is ‘fascist’, ‘post-fascist’ or ‘neo-authoritarian’, what is indisputable is that it has unleashed what John Ganz has called a sense of ‘moral anarchy’, in which there are no longer any limits to the expression of sadism, or to its implementation as policy. Children are forcibly separated from their parents. Migrants from Venezuela are flown to a concentration camp in El Salvador, where they are tortured and sexually abused. The murder of the movie director Rob Reiner and his wife by their mentally ill son is explained away by Trump as a product of Reiner’s hatred of him. The murder of Renée Good in Minneapolis by federal agents is justified as a response to ‘domestic terrorism’. To quote a line from one of his recent speeches: ‘No one can believe what’s going on.’ As for all the talk of American greatness being restored, one is reminded of what Frederick Douglass, a former slave, said on 5 July 1852 of the Declaration of Independence, that it was nothing more than a ‘thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages’.
Trump appears to be on a roll. The attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, the abduction of Nicolas Maduro, and the threats against Iran, Cuba, Mexico and Greenland constitute a blunt reassertion of imperial dominance. But they also suggest a desire for diversion from domestic failure, recalling the ‘gladiatorial futility’ that Antonio Gramsci contrasted with America’s authentic innovations in his essay on ‘Americanism and Fordism’. Inflation is running at 2.7 per cent, and the Republican Party’s midterm prospects aren’t promising. MAGA is bedevilled by divisions over Israel, Venezuela and the use of force abroad. Philosemitic McCarthyites who want to weaponise false charges of antisemitism are clashing with those who prefer to use antisemitism to build the movement. According to the political commentator Ezra Klein, the vibe shift in Trump’s favour has already passed. But we are only a year in. Even if Trump fails, he can still inflict enormous, possibly irreparable damage. The United States looks more and more like the sick man of the Americas, a country of spectacular disparities in wealth, crippling political dysfunction and pervasive violence.
How did we get here? A variety of explanations, some of which overlap, have been advanced: the revolt of the non-college-educated against the college-educated; anger among whites in the heartland at coastal elites and their woke ethos; the politics of fear that emerged in the crucible of 9/11 and the war on terror; populist rage over immigration; an anachronistic constitutional order that gives far too much power to small states. All these accounts have a grain of truth, but none captures the full dimensions of America’s crisis, which is not merely political but spiritual, the latest chapter in an older struggle over what sort of country it wants to be – if, indeed, it still is a single country.
One of the more hallucinatory reactions to Trumpism during the first term came from liberals who saw it as an un-American movement, if not a conspiracy hatched in Moscow. They made visits to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and pored over Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, though a cursory reading of America’s own history could have shown them that even Trump’s most outlandish policies have a twisted precedent in its past of racism and intolerance. The white South Africans who are now almost the only ‘refugees’ admitted to the US weren’t the first fugitives from racial equality on whom the American sun decided to shine. As the historian Mae Ngai has pointed out, the first federal refugee resettlement programme, established in 1794, allocated the equivalent of $440 million to assist French colonists fleeing the Haitian Revolution. Washington, Madison and Jefferson welcomed the slaveholders into a country where slavery was the very condition of the white man’s freedom.
Two of the most powerful recent books about America’s crisis trace its impasse to the ideologies of infinite progress and freedom, myths that have provided American exceptionalism with its most enduring pillars. In Greg Grandin’s ambitious essay The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border in the Mind of America (2019), the regime of militarised, racist policing on the US-Mexico border is the all but inevitable heir to the now vanished ‘frontier’ – a physical barrier replacing a shifting and, for much of America’s existence, expanding boundary. Grandin quotes a letter Clare Boothe Luce sent in the 1940s to her husband, Henry, the publisher of Time, in which she wrote that, with the end of the country’s territorial expansion, America could survive as a nation only by preserving its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ‘strict barriers against further immigrations of Brown, Black and Yellow peoples’. The first barrier on the US-Mexico border, Grandin notes, was constructed from wire that had surrounded the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War. In the second book, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power (2022), Jefferson Cowie tells the story of Barbour County in Alabama from the 18th century to the present, and shows in granular detail that the idea of freedom has gone hand in hand, for many white Americans, with the right to lord it over others, especially Black people and Native Americans, but also the victims of the country’s foreign adventures and, indeed, anyone who stands in its way, including its (former?) European allies. Freedom, as most Americans understand it, is the problem, not the solution, an ideology that stands in the way of a more democratic, egalitarian politics.
In Cowie and Grandin’s books America’s violence, cruelty and obsession with racial purity are depicted as more or less ineradicable. From this perspective, every document of American civilisation is a document of barbarism. The pioneer spirit, the belief in plucky individualism, the religion of freedom itself – all these were written in blood. Has the American dream always been a lie? Is it just red meat for MAGA?
It’s tempting to think so – particularly if you’ve been on the other side of America’s violence. The weight of the historical forces that so frequently darken what Ornette Coleman called the ‘skies of America’ can easily turn hope into alienation. In The Fire Next Time, published in 1963, Baldwin summoned the exhortatory cadences of the preacher he’d been as a teenager. By coming together for the sake of ‘achieving our country’, he argued, politically conscious Blacks and whites could save not only America but the world itself. By the time he published No Name in the Street in 1972, a book haunted by the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Baldwin had lost all hope in white Americans, the ‘sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today’.
Baldwin’s anger was understandable: the backlash was in full swing, led by Nixon in the name of the ‘silent majority’. No one has paid a higher price for America’s refusal to face its past, to face itself, than Black Americans. But America’s traditions of resistance in politics and culture shouldn’t be underestimated. Abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights, labour and antiwar activists, advocates of women’s and gay liberation, jazz musicians, Abstract Expressionist painters, Beat poets: all were deeply American in their way. So were many of the communists who in the 1930s declared that communism was ‘20th-century Americanism’. As Eric Foner has emphasised, America’s radicals developed a distinctive language of freedom, as far away as possible from the white man’s freedom to dominate others, as espoused by Andrew Jackson, George Wallace and Trump. These radical traditions have always been embattled, but they have not vanished, and they have been enriched and reinvented by successive waves of immigration.
Athird generation American, born in 1972, I am an heir to some of these traditions. My great-grandparents were part of the wave of Eastern European Jews who fled the pogroms in the early 20th century. America, as Philip Roth wrote of his ancestors, was their Zion, not Palestine. They revered FDR and despised Joe McCarthy and his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, Trump’s future mentor. They were grateful for America, but their gratitude was tinged with anxiety. My paternal great-grandfather, a socialist carpenter born in Minsk in 1892, was shaken by the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970, where the National Guard killed four students protesting against the Vietnam War. As an adolescent, he had seen workers being shot by tsarist troops during the 1905 uprising, and he could not believe that it was happening in his adoptive country.
My parents’ understanding of America was less innocent. Having reached political maturity in the era of civil rights and Vietnam, they were all too familiar with the gap between American ideals and American realities. Yet they, too, for many years, believed that the arc of American history ultimately bent towards justice. In my teens, I found this narrative hard to reconcile with what I was learning about US support for death squads in Central America, involvement in coups against democratic leaders in Chile and Iran, cosy relations with apartheid South Africa and bankrolling of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. It was also hard to reconcile this belief with what I already knew about the history of slavery, segregation and racial discrimination in America, thanks to the writings of Baldwin, the Autobiography of Malcolm X and, above all, thanks to jazz, the music that had obsessed me since I was an adolescent.
Yet, paradoxically, it was jazz in particular, and Black music more generally, that prevented me, as it still does, from giving up on America. My guides to the meaning of American democracy, and to what Albert Murray called the ‘mulatto textures’ of American culture, weren’t the Founding Fathers. They were Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had evolved into the country’s greatest art form. ‘It was a new song,’ W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of Black music in his 1935 study of America’s still unfinished revolution, Black Reconstruction,
and its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed and thundered on the world’s ears with a message seldom voiced by man … They sneered at it – those white Southerners who heard it and never understood. They raped and defiled it – those white Northerners who listened without ears. Yet it lived and grew … and it sits today at the right hand of God, as America’s one real gift to beauty; as slavery’s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.
Since slavery, Du Bois argued, Black people had wrested the sublime from the abominable, from everything they’d suffered since their arrival on American shores after the Middle Passage. Yet rather than repress the horror, jazz musicians placed the struggles of Black America, and therefore the question of American democracy, at the centre of their work. Throughout his career, Ellington composed tone poems about Black life. Rollins dressed up as a cowboy on the cover of his 1957 album Way Out West, in a mischievous appropriation of the frontier legend, and a year later released the first civil rights album, Freedom Suite. Charles Mingus, one of the most outspoken jazz musicians, introduced his 1964 piece ‘Meditations on Integration’ by warning that while segregationists didn’t have ‘ovens and gas faucets yet’, they did have ‘electrical fences’. His piece, he said, was a ‘prayer that we can find some wirecutters and get out’.
Mingus didn’t have to look far. Jazz itself acted as a superb pair of wirecutters. Few art forms have proved as supple, as welcoming of foreign influence. I am thinking of Mingus’s embrace of mariachi music, Ellington’s Far East Suite, Coltrane’s exploration of Carnatic traditions and Davis’s fascination with Spanish folk music. I am thinking of the violinist Billy Bang swinging with Vietnamese musicians in a work reflecting on his experiences as a ‘tunnel rat’ during the war. Jazz, the most American of musical languages, has also been the most open to the world.
This sensibility , this wire-cutting cosmopolitanism, is under assault today, but it has deep roots in American culture. ‘You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,’ Herman Melville wrote in his autobiographical novel Redburn, published twelve years before the outbreak of the Civil War. ‘We are not a narrow tribe of men … our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world.’ Writing six decades later in the Atlantic Monthly, the social critic Randolph Bourne elaborated on Melville’s reflections, describing America as ‘not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colours. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one colour, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision.’ This vision of America as a ‘federation of cultures’, Bourne emphasised, was the antithesis not only of white supremacy, but of the ‘melting pot’. And nothing threatened it so much as war and what he called ‘the sewage of the war spirit’. Liberal intellectuals who ‘still seem to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war’, he warned a year before Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, should understand that ‘willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it.’
Bourne lost his battle: most of his peers were infected with the war spirit. The United States emerged from the Second World War – an existential battle against barbarism, if ever there was one – as the world’s most powerful country and soon evolved into a national security state, with hundreds of military bases in countries around the world. As Stephanson writes, ‘no single event … changed the geopolitical position of the United States in the world’ as much as the Second World War. Two years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as the Cold War and the anti-communist purges began, Beauvoir published a travelogue, America Day by Day, one of the most acute studies of US character since Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. She felt, at first, ‘a dizzying attraction for America, where the memory of the pioneers is still recent and palpable’. She appreciated the whiskey and hamburgers, the spirit of ‘energy, expansion, conquest’ embodied in New York’s skyscrapers and the ‘ready warmth’ of the people, ‘disconcerting’ as it was to an intellectual from Paris. She loved the jazz she heard in the clubs of New York and Chicago, music of ‘mourning … sensuality, eroticism, joy, sadness, revolt, hope – Black music always expressed something.’ Jazz seemed to her to reflect experiences beyond what she called the ‘propaganda of the smile’.
That propaganda was ubiquitous in Cold War America, which Beauvoir described as a coercively cheerful country that refused to confront the reality of death, that expressed its horror of the body in advertisements for deodorant and laxatives. Most Americans, she found, were incapable of nuance, since ‘to accept nuance is to accept ambiguity of judgment, argument and hesitation’. They preferred to believe in ‘a geometric world where every right angle is set against another, like their buildings and their streets’. ‘The arrogance of Americans,’ she wrote, ‘is not their will to power; it’s the will to impose Good.’ And, she added, to fight evil: intellectuals told her that ideas ‘detrimental to democracy’ should be suppressed and spoke with resignation, even fatalism, about the inevitability of war with the Soviet Union. For all America’s vaunted freedoms, the people she met were strikingly conformist, expressing an optimism about their country that not even ‘the sight of Buchenwald could shake’. America’s rugged individualism had left them atomised, incapable of imagining themselves as a potential collective with the power to alter their circumstances.
America, Beauvoir feared, was at risk of becoming ‘no different from the totalitarian regimes it claims to oppose’. On a bus in Texas, she saw a group of whites jeer at a pregnant Black woman; the woman fainted. America’s ‘democratic culture’ stopped at the colour line. Richard Wright took her to churches in Harlem and showed her that the North’s de facto segregation was just as oppressive, in its own way, as the de jure segregation in the South. By the end of her trip, Beauvoir had concluded that equality and freedom had been ‘emptied of their meaning’ in the United States. The only way to continue loving the country, she decided, was ‘to love it sorrowfully’.
C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian radical and pan-African activist, a child of the British Empire and one of its fiercest critics, loved America with stubborn defiance, and would probably have taken citizenship if he hadn’t been deported as a foreign subversive in 1953. James had settled in New York in 1938, after the publication of The Black Jacobins, his classic history of the Haitian Revolution. He married a white American woman, Constance Webb, who gave birth to their son, Nobbie, in 1949. A West Indian Marxist, James had no illusions about the condition of Black Americans or workers, but he had an intense admiration for America’s democratic traditions and its popular culture. The country’s ‘essential conflict’, he wrote in American Civilisation in 1950, lay in the chasm between its ideals and the brutal realities of class and race oppression. These contradictions generated an unbearable tension at the heart of American life, which expressed itself in ‘the subservience of the intellectuals’, a longing for a ‘man of force, resolution, will, power to command’, and therefore the threat of dictatorship, the negation of America’s political traditions. ‘The greatest power in Western civilisation,’ he feared, ‘no longer knows what to believe about itself.’
On 10 June 1952, James fell victim to that confusion, when he was arrested by agents from the Immigration and Naturalisation Services (INS), under the anti-communist McCarran-Walter Act, and incarcerated at Ellis Island. Under surveillance since his arrival, once arrested he was treated no differently from the Stalinists he despised and was forced to share a cell with a group of communist activists, who, knowing that he was a Trotskyist, took a vote on whether to speak to him (they voted ‘yes’ on the grounds that his status as a fellow prisoner was more important). Over the next few months, while awaiting deportation, he threw all his energy into a manuscript that he published in 1953 under the title Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. He dedicated the book to his son, ‘who will be 21 years old in 1970, by which time I hope he and his generation will have left behind them forever all the problems of nationality’.
The ‘miracle of Herman Melville’, James argued, was that he ‘painted a picture of the world in which we live’, not just of America. In Moby-Dick, published in 1851, Melville had envisioned ‘an industrial civilisation on fire and plunging blindly into darkness’, a ‘world of massed bombers, of cities in flames’. James, who wrote the book in part as an attempt to secure his own release, does not include the word ‘socialism’ in it, but it’s clear where his sympathies lie in his account of the struggle on board the Pequod between the destructive, tyrannical Captain Ahab and his multiracial, working-class crew, with their ‘grace and wit and humour, and their good-humoured contempt of those for whom life consists of nothing else but fine cambrics and tea on the piazza’. In between Ahab and the crew, weighing his options with Hamlet-like indecisiveness, is Ishmael, a ‘completely modern young intellectual’ who is left isolated from the masses, unable to ‘embrace reality spontaneously’. (‘No intellectuals in the world run so much after the psychic realities of their own souls as Americans,’ James wrote witheringly in American Civilisation.) And then there is Starbuck, the first mate: ‘His story is the story of the liberals and democrats who during the last quarter of a century have led the capitulation to the totalitarians in country after country.’
Mariners, Renegades and Castaways concludes with an extraordinary reflection on James’s confinement in Ellis Island, the hallowed arrival point for immigrants that, since the 1920s, had become a detention centre for undesirable aliens and political dissidents. Although he distrusted his Communist Party cellmates, they leapt to his defence when his ulcer went untreated, inflicting a ‘moral defeat’ on the Department of Justice, ‘with all its officers and armed guards, its bolts and its bars, its thick walls and its power’. The DoJ sought ‘the extermination of the alien as a malignant pest’, but the aliens remained steadfast, ‘citizens of the world’ who knew it ‘better than many world-famous foreign correspondents’. In James’s description, Ellis Island comes to resemble Melville’s Pequod, ‘a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society’.
As citizens of the world, James and his fellow castaways were, he stressed, potential American citizens who, like others forced to struggle for their rights in the land of the free, understood those rights far better than most Americans. When the district director of Immigration and Naturalisation of the Port of New York tells James that he can always return to Trinidad and drink papaya juice, James asks his reader, the ‘average American citizen’, to consider the fact that the law ‘provides that the alien should have a hearing’, that even if the decision is unfavourable, there is a right of appeal, and that if the appeal is rejected, ‘the matter can be taken to the district court’, indeed all the way up to the Supreme Court. This process, he writes, could have originated only
in a country where the traditional role of the immigrant and the tradition of civil liberties are such as to have created for the alien every possible opportunity to make as good a case for himself as possible … Can that be reconciled with the brutal and arrogant statement: if he does not like what is happening to him, he can go and drink papaya juice? … You cannot reverse the whole historical past and traditions of a people by packaged legislation and loud propaganda … Try to carry them out by grafting them onto a traditionally democratic system, and the result is complete chaos.
The title of Martin Luther King’s last book, published in 1967, is Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community. In that year, King came out against the Vietnam War in an impassioned speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan. Just as James emphasised that American injustice was communism’s greatest recruiting tool, so King wrote that ‘nothing provides the communists with a better climate for expansion and infiltration than the continued alliance of our nation with racism and exploitation throughout the world.’ The ‘burning of human beings with napalm’ in Vietnam struck him as a ‘symptom of a far deeper malady’ than a passing political crisis.
That malady ultimately lay in the disregard for life that characterised the United States, a country based on ‘socialism for the rich’ and ‘individualism for the poor’. Racism and segregation, a ‘subtle reduction of life by means of deprivation’ whose ‘ultimate logic is genocide’, had generated a ‘schizophrenic personality on the question of race’. There was the self that ‘proudly professed the great principles of democracy, and a self in which she madly practised the antithesis of democracy’. White backlash was ‘nothing new’, merely the ‘resurfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there’, the ‘same search for rationalisation, the same lack of commitment that has always characterised white Americans on the subject of race’. When, he wondered, would poor, underprivileged whites whose egos were fed by white supremacy while their stomachs went hungry realise that they had much more to gain by forging an alliance with poor Black people? But, like James, King was less concerned with poor whites than with what he called ‘the protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions’ when ‘our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake.’
At the end of his life, King was moving towards the view – echoed by Bourne, James and Baldwin – that America’s domestic agonies could not be disentangled from the country’s pursuit of its economic and political interests abroad. Cold War competition with the Soviet Union had hastened the demise of apartheid in America, since it could scarcely project itself as the land of the free while depriving Black citizens of their rights, no matter how many jazz musicians it sent abroad as ‘ambassadors’ of American freedom. But with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, the civil rights movement found itself at an impasse. The US was, for the first time in its history, a democracy for all its citizens, and Black Americans were now equal, on paper, to whites. But freedom often meant being free to live in substandard housing or to fight in Vietnam, where the funds for Lyndon Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ were being diverted. As King understood, the needs of the national security state, and of American multinationals, were eating away at the fulfilment of the promise of freedom. ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death,’ he wrote. ‘America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.’
By the time King was assassinated in Memphis a year later, he was a lonely figure, deserted by many of his allies because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. They told him to stick to what he knew and leave foreign affairs to the experts. Some accused him of giving ammunition to communists. Never mind that King’s anti-imperialism had an impeccably American pedigree. In 1821, John Quincy Adams, the then secretary of state and son of a Founding Father, warned that if the United States went ‘abroad, in search of monsters to destroy’, ‘flashing … the murky radiance of dominion and power’, ‘the fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force … She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.’
Today the warnings of King and Adams could hardly seem more prophetic. American democracy has been progressively hollowed out by forever wars, deindustrialisation, the tyranny of wealth and the creation of an archipelago of maximum security prisons, where the poor can be confined if they haven’t already succumbed to addiction or despair. The United States is neither ‘the freest country in the world’, as Noam Chomsky has often described it, nor even a very stable one. It would be foolish to deny the force and allure of Trump’s perverse charisma, but after the violent humiliation of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the financial crisis of 2008, he walked through an open door. His supporters were ready to hand over power, and many of their freedoms, to a man of force and resolution, a man who hated the ‘system’ that had betrayed them.
Even so, the speed with which the system caved to Trump 2.0 has been shocking. During the blitzkrieg of executive orders that followed his victory Democrats in Congress looked paralysed and impotent; 86 of them crossed party lines in November to join the Republican majority in the House in condemning the ‘horrors of socialism’, even as the administration was gutting the social safety net. Major American research universities, including my alma mater, Columbia University, have collaborated with the administration in its attempts to round up and deport foreign students opposed to Israel’s war on Gaza, drawing on a highly tendentious definition of antisemitism that has underwritten both genocide and genocide denial. Bari Weiss, a leader of an earlier anti-Palestinian campaign at Columbia, is now the head of CBS News, where she recently delayed for a month a report made for 60 Minutes about Venezuelan prisoners sent by Trump to CECOT, the maximum security prison in El Salvador. Billionaire university trustees and tech bros have scrambled to kiss the ring.
Seen from Europe, where I spent most of last year, America’s intellectual and moral defences against the Trump juggernaut appeared to be collapsing. Pining for the ‘rules-based order’ on which Trump turned his back, the foreign policy establishment seemed incapable of saying the word ‘Gaza’, much less ‘genocide’, as if Biden’s support for Israel’s war hadn’t done much to erode that order’s legitimacy, as if America and the world could be saved by a return to the safe shores of Cold War Atlanticism. Parts of the far left fell prey to a different form of Trump derangement syndrome, refusing to confront Trumpism except as a secondary symptom of neoliberal crisis or doting on Luigi Mangione (accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare) as a resistance hero. If the ballot couldn’t save America, perhaps the bullet could. School massacres seemed to be more common than demonstrations against Trump’s policies.
Everywhere I went, people would ask me: ‘Why aren’t Americans resisting?’ I would usually respond by saying: ‘But they are, you just don’t see it, because it’s taking place in the courts.’ I wasn’t satisfied with that response, however, not just because the Supreme Court invariably struck down the decisions of the lower courts, but because I felt like one of Beauvoir’s realist intellectuals, who plead helplessly that they cannot effect change on their own and are all too quick to defer to the ‘fraternities of the indifferent’. I knew that the Paris streets would be flooded with protesters if Macron’s agenda were half as destructive as Trump’s. We seemed to be sleepwalking through the counterrevolution.
Explaining the mysteries of America to people abroad, I felt, oddly, like the writers I met in the Arab and Muslim countries to which the US government had relentlessly preached, and who were forced constantly to answer questions about the supposed peculiarities of their political culture: the widening gulf between educated elites and the masses; the influence of religious fundamentalism and conspiratorial thinking; the susceptibility to authoritarianism; the outbreaks of senseless violence; the use of military solutions to social problems. How different were we? At least the people whom America had lectured hadn’t elected their dictators. ‘This is not who we are,’ Biden reassured us. In fact, it is, and the rest of the world sees this all too clearly.
No country, however, is impervious to the reactionary wave, as many prosperous expatriates are now discovering, having found a sanctuary from Trump’s America in European countries where the far right is poised to take power. America’s convulsions are part of a global transformation, brought about by neoliberalism, the loss of a socialist horizon and a pervasive sense of malaise and driftlessness – a ‘world in decomposition’, as the Lebanese-French novelist Amin Maalouf puts it in his book Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way (2019). For the first time in history, Maalouf writes, ‘we have the means to rid the human species of all the plagues that assail it … and here we are, however, launched at full speed in the opposite direction.’ The precariousness of life under contemporary capitalism and the return of scarcity have been a gift to authoritarian politicians who would rather fan anti-immigrant hysteria and bigotry than face problems that demand collective solutions, such as global inequality and the climate crisis. America may be an outlier, for now, in denying the existence of climate change, but European countries, too, have outsourced the control of refugee flows, are hoarding resources and turning themselves into fortresses. And in the face of Trump’s threats against Greenland, they’ve shown little willingness to fight.
Some observers, such as the historian Mark Mazower, have argued that European societies with memories of the Second World War have stronger guardrails against the temptations of neofascism, but it’s not clear how strong these guardrails are. Why bother to detoxify yourself, as the far-right Rassemblement National has done in France, now that Trump has succeeded by ‘becoming the very devil he was accused of being’, as Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, pointed out? ‘The Trump tornado has changed the world in just a few weeks,’ Orbán declared. ‘Yesterday we were heretics, today we’re mainstream.’
You might expect that America’s leadership of the far-right international would have sparked a paroxysm of anti-American sentiment among radicals and progressives, but it has not. Schadenfreude may partly explain this. As a swaggering and unspeakably tacky casino has taken the place of a smug city on a hill, the American empire has undergone a great, even an overdue, humbling. Exceptionalism, it turns out, does not exempt you from history, or decline. For many people outside the West, who have long known what lies behind America’s benevolent sermons, its self-conception as the end of history, seeing the mask stripped off feels like a vindication. At least, they say, Trump is not a hypocrite; at least he admits he’s invading Venezuela for its oil and not to promote democracy; at least he can impose a ceasefire in Gaza. As the historian Rahmane Idrissa, who grew up in Niger, reminds us in his essay ‘Statemania’, published in Equator, foreigners have always been drawn to the US as much for its ‘sheer power, the sense of boundless strength it projected’ as for its democracy, the defects of which are clear enough to people outside it.
There is also a recognition that while America is the avant-garde of reaction, taking a form as garish as the gold fixtures in the new Lincoln bathroom, it has plenty of company. Washington is not unique in its malevolence, even if its power to do harm is unequalled. In his liner notes to Coltrane’s album Live at Birdland, Amiri Baraka wrote that ‘one of the most baffling things about America is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’ I used to think this was a perceptive observation; today it strikes me as an example of American provincialism. People outside the US aren’t baffled by this contradiction, which is true of most societies, and are as likely to associate America with Coltrane, Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé as with Trump, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Like Beauvoir and James, they know that another country exists in America, one that’s immediately evident when you walk into a bookshop in Paris, Berlin or Madrid stocked with translations of Baldwin, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, David Graeber and other messengers from an alternative American future.
We are very far from that future. Instead Trump and company seem bent on returning to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy, invoking the threat of ‘narco-terrorism’ to justify acts of aggression and plunder – an inspiration to other states with imperialist designs on their neighbours. New York City, where I live, is currently the home of the imprisoned leader of Venezuela and his wife, hostages of a regime that makes no secret of its intention to loot their country’s oil. But New York is also the centre of one of the most promising developments in American life, the resurgence of an egalitarian left, moving from protest to politics.
Shortly before I left for Berlin a year ago, the Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and her husband, the political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, told me that their son, Zohran, a New York State Assembly member for Queens, was running for mayor. He’s either an idiot or he’s insane, I thought. At the beginning of his campaign, Mamdani, a 34-year-old Muslim socialist born in Uganda, had 1 per cent support in the polls. Now he is mayor of New York, after a brilliant campaign conducted in large part by young volunteers, many of them veterans of the movement to end Israel’s war on Gaza. With his singular charisma, his nimble use of social media and, above all, his emphasis on affordability, Mamdani assembled a broad coalition of recent immigrants, middle-class progressives and African Americans. And he defeated Andrew Cuomo, an establishment Democrat, not in spite of his critiques of Israel and real estate interests – the sacred causes of the local Democratic establishment and the New York Times, both of which tried to torpedo his campaign – but because of them. As Frank Rich observed in New York Magazine, support for Palestine was his ‘not so secret sauce’, particularly among younger voters who see Palestine not simply as a foreign policy issue but as a domestic one, since the repression of pro-Palestine demonstrations is part of a wider assault on the freedom of assembly, academic and intellectual freedom, and immigrant rights.
In his victory speech, Mamdani insisted that New York would always be a city of immigrants, and alluded to the American socialist leader Eugene Debs and to Nehru, interweaving his adoptive country’s radical traditions with the anticolonial politics he inherited from his parents. It was a syncretic idiom of a kind practised by jazz musicians. Soon afterwards, Mamdani appeared on stage with Mahmoud Khalil, one of the leaders of the Palestine protests at Columbia, a green card holder who was held in immigration detention for more than three months last year and whom the Trump administration is still trying to deport, an heir of James and the castaways of Ellis Island. Among those sitting on Mamdani’s inaugural committee were labour and community organisers; Muslims and leftist Jews; the novelists Colson Whitehead and Min Jin Lee; the legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins; and Sami Zaman, the owner of Mamdani’s favourite kebab house. New York is not America, and Mamdani’s experiment is a precarious one, but for many Americans the sea of faces at his inauguration represents the country’s future far more than the orgy of evangelical, Herrenvolk democracy that was Charlie Kirk’s funeral.
I was in Algiers when Mamdani won. My Algerian friends, who had followed his rise closely, were thrilled. Where else but in America could a left-wing, brown-skinned immigrant, a racialised ‘other’, become the mayor of a globally influential city? Algerians have long had a soft spot for the US. While it’s resented for its support of Israel, America has the advantage of not being France, and Algerians remember JFK’s 1957 speech in favour of Algerian independence and the pressure he exerted as president to end French rule. The morning after his victory, I spoke about Mamdani with the journalist Ihsane El Kadi, who had recently been released from prison after nearly two years and whose children live in the US. ‘We can always rely on America to bring us the best and the worst!’ he said. Later that day, several people congratulated me on Mamdani’s victory. Suddenly I felt homesick, and for the first time in a while, thrust back into the extraordinary drama of America as evoked by Baldwin: I was excited, even proud, to be a part of it. And for a moment I allowed myself to hope that another country might still prevail, that America could step back from its foreign wars and overcome its internal disarray. That other country was the one we saw on the steps of City Hall in New York on 1 January, when Mamdani was inaugurated. Two days later, Operation Absolute Resolve was launched. On 7 January an ICE agent, a veteran of America’s war in Iraq, shot and killed Renée Good. Citizens in Minneapolis have mobilised to protest against ICE raids, organising a general strike, but the administration has doubled down, launching a new crackdown in the state of Maine. Once again, it’s been one battle after another, in which one side has wirecutters, and the other side has nearly all the guns.
I don’t blame myself for letting hope in through the door. Who wouldn’t? Without hope we are lost. But hope can also nourish the consoling fantasy that things can be turned around in the next election cycle, or even in a mayoral race. I suspect Americans are particularly susceptible to this ‘obligatory optimism’, as Beauvoir characterised our collective fever dream, the innocence that remains the most enduring of American reflexes. Since the 2016 election and especially over the last year, I’ve tried to love America with sorrow, as Beauvoir did. I’ve reminded myself of the emancipatory potential of its founding ideals, underscored by James. And I’ve returned again and again to the prophetic words of Baldwin and King. But what I mostly feel these days, as I look at the disaster unfolding in America and its horrifying repercussions throughout the world, is an intense sense of shame. Shame isn’t a pleasant emotion, but any honest reckoning with what my country has become has to start with it.
23 January