Keeping Nope Alive: Tens-of-thousands of mostly young American protesters poured onto the streets of the major US cities in the hours following the shock election of Donald Trump as America's 45th President. It remains to be seen whether, in the days and weeks to come, middle-class Millennial hope is any match for white working-class resentment and rage.
ALL YEAR, NEW ZEALANDERS have quietly congratulated
themselves on not being Americans. Like so many others around the world, we
have looked on with mounting disbelief as the [Dis]united States of America
plumbed new depths of malevolent ignorance. If it’s been said once, it’s been
said 100 million times: “Thank God we’re not like that!”
But why aren’t we like the United States? What is it that
we, as a people, did – or did not do – that has kept our political system from
veering so suddenly, and dangerously, off course.
The most obvious and plausible answer is that we, along with
many other Western nations, have maintained a reasonably comprehensive welfare
state. More specifically, we have preserved a public health system.
It is easy to overlook the role a functioning public health
service plays in preserving even a modest level of social equality. By far the
most common reason for so many middle-aged Americans declaring bankruptcy is
the crippling cost of medical treatment and pharmaceuticals. In just a few
weeks, serious injury and/or chronic illness can swallow up every last cent of an
ordinary family’s life savings. There are tens-of-thousands of American workers
whose entire pay check gets spent on ruinously expensive medication.
It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 US presidential
elections that Donald Trump’s supporters have been so vehement in their
opposition to “Obamacare”. Granted, the Affordable Health Care Act has its
flaws, but, surely, it is also a small step in the direction of universal,
publicly-funded, health care?
“Hell, no!”, cry the Trumpites. “Obamacare is the thin edge
of the wedge of socialism!” And you’d better believe that this verdict is
delivered through bared teeth. As though, for people in their desperate
economic circumstances, socialism is a bad
thing.
We chuckle at the ideological incongruity of poor, white,
working-class Americans voting for a man like Donald Trump. “Why can’t they see
that they’re voting directly against their own interests?”, we ask. “How can
they be so blind?”
For an explanation we must turn to American history, and the
myths with which it disguises itself. The most enduring of these cultural
illusions is that every American has a shot at success. That the path from
shoeshine boy to billionaire is real. That it’s open to all. That it’s
possible.
Persuading Americans that their much-vaunted equality of
opportunity is a mirage is extremely difficult. But, convincing them that they
are the prisoners of a class system every bit as pernicious as Britain’s is practically
impossible.
But it’s true. As Nancy Isenberg demonstrates so
conclusively in her recent book, White
Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, the enterprises
(and that word is used advisedly) which eventually grew into the United States
were predicated on the most ruthless exploitation of indentured labourers and
servants. Before America was a slave society, it was a society into which the
English aristocracy and their entrepreneurial hangers-on decanted the poorest
and most powerless of the English people.
That these readily disposable servants of the American
ruling-class have, for more than 300 years, been regarded as more despicable
than dangerous is largely attributable to two key factors. The first is the
poor whites’ sullen awareness of their own worthlessness in the eyes of their
social superiors. And the second is the consoling knowledge that below them on
the American totem-pole there exists an even more wretched and put-upon social
strata: Non-Whites.
This is the vicious political alchemy which has fuelled every
outbreak of white racist populism from the Civil War to the rise of Donald Trump.
A crude compound of resentment and rage, it may be directed, with equal success,
upwards: against the One Percent and the disdainful middle classes (in whose
eyes poor whites are indeed little more than “deplorable” human “trash”) and
downwards: against the descendants of slaves, and that floodtide of immigrants whose
descendants threaten to strip these “crackers” of what little White privilege remains
to them.
And, before we congratulate ourselves too fulsomely on our
lucky escape from America’s political and cultural degradation, we should,
perhaps, recall our own national origins. New Zealand, too, grew out of British
“enterprise”. We, too, deceive ourselves with the mythology of egalitarianism
and classlessness.
There, but for the grace of God – and a still socialist
public health system – go we.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 11 November 2016.
