Editor’s note: This commentary is by Dan DeWalt, an artisan and activist interested in democracy and the Constitution. He writes from South Newfane.
[O]sama bin Laden is sleeping with the fishes, but his dreams may be coming true. Bin Laden thought that the U.S. is a corrupted shell of a nation. He thought that the September 11 attacks would expose a vulnerable underbelly, crumble our resolve and disunite us. He may have been wrong about our resolve, but, 20 years later, our unity is now crumbling like our neglected bridges.
Immediately following the September attacks, President George Bush admirably spoke about unity and peace at a Washington, D.C., mosque, vowing to not let the attacks divide us. But at the same time, government surveillance of mosques increased, the world (and Americans) were told that “you’re either with us or against us” and America’s current series of wars against the Muslim world began. Despite the president’s protestations, it became acceptable to vilify Islam and its adherents. Spying on Americans became commonplace and a large portion of the populace began to feel alienated by the lies of their government and from those Americans that supported it in spite of those lies.
The Bush/Cheney administration’s reaction to the attacks was to “turn to the dark side” as Dick Cheney notoriously said. The bulk of the country supported the military action in Afghanistan against the Taliban and al-Qaida, but Cheney’s move to the dark side created a significant fissure in our body politic. Prior to 9/11, the vast majority of Americans and the political establishment would have renounced and condemned torture anytime, anywhere. But after the attacks, as a result of administration propaganda and rhetoric, a significant number of Americans were willing to accept torture (as long as it was called extreme interrogation) and acquiesce to the new norm. With its tortured legal reasoning, Bush/Cheney did their best to legitimize torture, broadening the divide between traditional non-torture loving Americans and the new “git ‘er done and don’t worry about how you do it” Cheney-neocon Americans.
Whatever tortured reasons the administration had for going to war in Iraq, they gave bin Laden a two-fer; not only did we alienate and antagonize the entire Arab world by our illegal invasion, we also, and more significantly, began to inculcate an anti-Arab/anti-Muslim attitude in a new generation of our military culture, as well as to a percentage of the public at large. War crimes like random assassinations and torture became commonplace. This was possible only when those perpetrating and accepting the crimes had thoroughly dehumanized the “other” upon whom these atrocities were visited. These attitudes festered and spread like mold when those who had engaged in these crimes returned home from that disastrous war.
After eight years of feckless leadership, during seven of which we were at war, America tired of Bush/Cheney, (Bush himself even tired of Cheney) and the nation turned to Obama to change the dismal trajectory upon which the country found itself. But the fissure in our body politic was not to heal itself. The poisonous anti-Muslim attitudes had taken hold and were not to be cleansed away easily.
Obama tried to make amends with the Muslim world, but rather than acting as an antidote to America’s Islamaphobia, it instead sparked and fueled intense levels of racism against the first black president. How dare he question the wisdom of our country’s past errors? With a black man at the helm, it was all too easy for the poison of hate to bring to the surface our latent racism that has always existed, but had been kept in the shadows due to public opprobrium.
White supremacists, whether latent and tentative, or outspoken and on the internet, were incensed that their mythic — in every sense of the word – American values were being questioned or worse, debunked. Rabble rousers like Donald Trump tried their best to “other-ize” Obama, claiming that he was a Muslim and a foreigner. The virus of fear, panic and loathing metastasized and finally erupted fully formed in the person of candidate-now President Trump. At first, most Americans thought that Trump was so alien to our (also mythic) American values that he could never get any traction. But we didn’t reckon on the extent of the festering fear and hate. Surface norms, which so many trusted to keep us “civilized” failed to contain the sickness. Greed, selfishness, racism, sexism, Islamaphobia all crawled to the surface and started to grow in the open like a load of boils. Hate, bigotry and mean-spiritedness mainstreamed by Trump have also been fueled by the slow-dawning realization that, no matter our prejudices, America is slowly but surely turning brown. The current onslaught of overt racism, as well as sexism is a last-stage attempt to hold onto an outdated and discredited way of being which no longer works. Unfortunately, it could still be many years before our body politic rids itself of this disease, and we could be facing terrible strife, violence and disunity in the coming years.
There is no guarantee the the U.S. will emerge unscathed, or even emerge as a whole nation at all.
As long as we rely on old beliefs about American ideals being noble and thinking that “we are better than this” to heal our national disintegration, we will simply be witnesses to our demise. If we do believe that Americans value every other American, that everyone deserves a chance to succeed, that we do care about the world’s hungry, poor and those yearning to breathe free, then we will have to act differently.
We have to be willing to honestly examine our own biases, implicit and explicit. And not only about race, gender or religion. Historically oppressed classes of people are not the only ones who have been downtrodden and have seen the American dream grow further out of reach with each passing year. Almost 63 million Americans voted for Trump, and there are plenty of them who are not racist, xenophobic, misogynistic or fools. Those of us who despise Trump and his policies cannot simply write these people off because we can’t understand their reasoning. They are not failed citizens, we are failing to do the hard work of understanding them because of our own biases and disinterest in getting to the bottom of our national dilemma. We need to engage our neighbors (more than 95,000 Vermonters voted for Trump) in an empathetic and genuine way if we are to be able to figure out how to bridge the chasm that is now destroying our country. Doing so will not only give us insight on why people do what they do, it also will give those who were willing to embrace Trump the opportunity to learn that we are not the snobby elite who don’t give a damn about them and their grievances. Because up to now, they have no reason not to think that this is the case.
Do we really want to give bin Laden the legacy of having initiated the downfall of our democracy (imperfect as it is)? I don’t think so.
