It is becoming harder and harder to pretend what kind of country we live in anymore. The irony of it is that we do pretend, harder and harder, every day.
As the distance between the rich and the poor becomes ever more vast, and the aspirational middle shrinks to the point of vanishing, we engage in petty finagling over whether or not people are correctly understanding the particulars of their own desperation. We make, fix, and do less and less, but we cannot seem to find a loud enough voice to condemn the ‘solutions’ presented by big capital — its representatives naked emperors almost to a man, and increasingly with the kinds of esoteric mental derangements once only found among interbred aristocrats — as transparent boondoggles meant only to wring the last value out of a dying system while the wringing is good. And we drift, through inertia and incuriosity, towards a state that is, if not fascist in the commonly understood sense of the word, at least one that, as Burroughs put it, empowers “inept, frightened pilots at the controls of vast machines they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them what buttons to push.”
At present, the man chosen by Donald Trump, or by his handlers, to be the next vice-president of this floundering empire has been busying himself by trotting out to whatever camera is pointed at him a fabulous tale of people in his state of Ohio, who he would like us to believe are some sort of alien degenerates who engage in — among other disgusting behaviors — the theft and subsequent consumption of household pets. These people are, by and large, Americans, but because they are black Americans (the most despised minority in a country teeming with despised minorities), there is a large and willing cohort that is willing to believe the worst of them. And because they are Americans of Haitian origin, and Haitians are one of the most constant and most abused victims of Western imperialism, it is easy for many to conceive of them as an unnatural and malignant invader, rather than what they are: living reminders of our own cruelties and depredations.
It is easy enough for me, or for anyone who will not immediately be on the receiving end of the stochastic terrorism J.D. Vance’s repulsive statements are already causing, to breezily dismiss the specifics of this kind of lie. It does not even rise to the level of propaganda, because it is not really meant to convince anyone of anything, or to point them in the direction of an ideological position; a better writer than I will ever be has already assayed the framework in which this is all taking place, correctly understanding the “basic bully’s instinct undergirding it all, a calculation that seems less about political appeal…and more about an innate understanding of what they can get away with, and which people are easiest and cheapest to hurt.” There is no point in finessing it, fact-checking it, or massaging out of it some sort of fundamental conclusion of the Way Things Are Right Now. Nothing can be gained from discussing it in the way one would discuss, say, unemployment or pollution, because it is not a serious issue; it is a pure lizard-brained appeal towards the worst tribal instincts of a social dynamic that no longer exists.
The ongoing discussion about it is important, insofar as it is important to know which of the people who lead or seek to lead our government are virulent racists, or are willing to use virulent racism as a tool to get what they want, whatever that is. It is important in the sense that there will be real human suffering behind it, suffering that will harm people who have already been harmed almost beyond comprehension by every great power that had a chance to take a swing at them, and whose presence in America has led them not to liberation but to seeing themselves marginalized in new and different ways. Everything about it is bad: the appeal to the lowest grade of reactionary cruelty, the naked bigotry, the victimization of the already victimized, the privatization of state violence, the ongoing detachment of politics from any connection to history, economics, or the realities of power.
But — and here is where I would lose so many of my readers, if I thought they could be numbered in even the double digits — while it is positive that it seems to be causing the Trump/Vance ticket more harm than good, and that there is a consensus that it is a vile and monstrous thing to have done, and that it reveals the GOP as the racist hate-mongers that they are and have been for generations, it has an occluding effect. It serves, or seems to serve, the purpose of making the choice between the Democrats and the Republicans — as always, the only choice we are ever offered — crystal-clear, an obvious and unquestionable binary between pure demonic hatred and…well, something else: something, if not perfect, at least more human, less harmful, more in step with decency and justice. A choice that may be shaded, that may involve compromise, but a clear choice just the same, a choice no sane person would refuse.
No matter how little we want to hear it, if we look at this through a material lens — if we view the situation as it is in the world in which we live, and not in the world of statements and beliefs and intentions — the choice is far more murky. If we truly believe in rejecting reactionary politics in all their manifestations, if we truly want our politics to stem from a universal view of the humanity of all who live and the inalienable right to life and liberty and an existence free from fear, then the Democrats represent not truth in opposition to a lie, but, as the Soviet poet Yevtushenko put it, a situation where “the truth is replaced by silence, and the silence is a lie”.
That silence — that lie — provides cover for the fact that the Democratic Party has played a near-constant role in the exploitation and destabilization of Haiti and the mistreatment of its people, not in the distant past or a few fading decades ago but during the current presidential administration, as recently as May. It lets us ignore the fact that Joe Biden’s immigration policy, which has been enthusiastically taken up by Kamala Harris, is markedly more reactionary than even that championed by the Republicans, a move deliberately intended to appeal to the kind of voters most likely to believe that Haitians are eating cats — people less likely to see immigration as creating problems that must be solved through politics and more likely to see it as an invasion by subhuman barbarians to be stopped at any cost. (That those peoples’ votes are more important to the Democrats than the votes of leftists who say we should stop terrorizing immigrants altogether is a fact that we may interpret how we like, but we cannot pretend it is not a fact.) It lets us claim that we have chosen to protect, to defend, to cherish the lives of migrants, when the side we have chosen deported more people than the side we despise. And it allows us to assume a stance of moral superiority when every day, we send more tanks and bombs and planes to Israel, which uses them to obliterate the civilian population of a people as widely loathed, oppressed, and scapegoated in their part of the world as Haitians are in theirs.
This is the point where the familiar questions are posed. Don’t you know that these are our only two choices? Don’t you realize that Trump would be worse? Don’t you get that we have to appease reactionaries in order to win and do good? Don’t you understand that this is, for better for worse, the only system we have?
And in response, I can only say — in exhaustion, in exasperation, in the bone-tired way of someone who has had the exact same conversation a thousand times before over decades: Is this the way you want it? Did anyone ever ask you whether you prefer this system to another? Can’t you see how self-reinforcing this logic is? Do you know that there are countries — not in the annals of history, but in existence today — that have chosen another path? Do you ever wonder why policies that everyone seems to hate are perpetuated no matter who is in power? Do you think of yourself as someone with no capacity to effect change, someone for whom politics is presented as a spectacle that you are occasionally welcomed to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, but no more able to change than if you were watching a troupe perform Shakespeare? Do you, in short, like things the way they are, and if not, what do you think you might do about it? This is the moment to stop pretending, to not settle back into the lie of silence that says the party of Trump and the party of Harris are diametric opposites and not just one that says the unspoken truth out loud instead of being decently quiet about it — or to say you are fine with the kind of country we are, and accept fully what that means.