By Alade Fawole
The United States of America, that country whose diplomats and officials love to project as the quintessence of democracy, the epitome of human rights, the paragon of good governance and everything that is decent, is increasingly looking like any Third World dictatorship under President Donald Trump.
In any case, people around the world have always known that America is a far cry from the splendid image its spin-doctors and propagandists have always projected.
It is thus nauseating when visiting US officials lecture Africans how they ought to emulate “America the beautiful” in everything, and to keep non-democratic competitors like Russia and China at an arm’s length.
And many gullible people hang on to these sanctimonious preachments as basis to vilify their own nations. But in just three years of the Trump presidency, all those lies have been exposed; all that is wrong, rude, undemocratic, unjust and evil about America have become visible to all.
The whole world is watching the casual subversion of the ethos of governance, even as all a bevy of US military top brass could do is grumble.
Actually, all that Americans have done is grumble as their self-serving, narcissistic bully of a president is willfully subverting every decent procedure and rubbishing every institution Americans have always flaunted.
And the rest of the world is looking on in utter disbelief as America daily glides into autocratic lawlessness. Each day that passes reveals Trump becoming more like the Third World despots that Americans love to ridicule.
The question is: why have Americans been so supine about this slide into autocracy under Donald Trump? Whatever happened to all that fabled “American Exceptionalism”, the myth that what happens in the rest of the world cannot happen in America, that America is too sophisticated to degenerate into the kind of authoritarianism of the Russians, the Chinese and even Third World “shithole” countries?
Americans are being force-fed the stark and unvarnished realities of their own hypocrisy, the egregious lies they have repeated with Goebbelsian dexterity for so long, the contrived narratives which paper over their dark side.
What are these lies? The commonest include: the delusion of grandeur; the myth that there is something exceptionally unique about America; that America is a great democracy and a defender of democracy across the globe; that America is the quintessential bastion of human rights and basic freedoms; that America is a veritable land of equal opportunities; that all men are created equal, blah blah blah.
These myths have all spectacularly exploded in a cloud of smoke in the wake of the public murder of George Floyd through the instrumentality of extreme racial prejudice and police brutality.
Reality check: there is nothing exceptional about an America that lags behind other developed countries in terms of its citizens’ social wellbeing. Education and healthcare are so expensive in America and unavailable to the vast majority of hard-working citizens.
College graduates spend their first decade of employment paying back the loans they took for their college education. Healthcare is in the hands of predatory private corporations, and God help you if you can’t afford health insurance.
In reality, America is neither truly democratic, nor is it a respecter of human rights, no matter what its spin doctors say to.
So much for democracy and respect for human in America where Donald Trump would unleash armed soldiers against peaceful protesters on the streets of Washington D.C. in manner characteristic of Third World despots!
One more thing: America may be a great country, but a great society it is not (there is a difference); it is not a country of equal opportunities but a rabidly racist society with justice only for whites; it is a country steeped in white privilege, structural and systemic inequalities and inequities for its racial and ethnic minorities, and this is what the massive protests after George Floyd’s murder have exposed.
Often touted as evidence of “American Exceptionalism” is the fabled strength of its institutions. Even Barack Obama arrogantly excoriated Africans for having strong men in the place of strong institutions.
One wonders whatever has happened to those mythical strong and resilient institutions that they have failed to checkmate Trump’s aberrations.
Obama himself can’t even raise a finger as Trump disdainfully dismantles all the achievements of his two-term presidency.
Why have Americans not been able to confront or checkmate Trump’s creeping autocratic (and increasingly authoritarian) tendencies the way they have always expected Third World peoples to do?
Why is Trump emerging as America’s strong man right before their very eyes and they have no clue whatsoever other than grumble?
Two Harvard political science professors chronicled the incremental subversion of democracy in their recent book, How Democracies Die, yet Americans have not been able to bridle Trump’s predilections for authoritarianism? Americans are like hapless onlookers as Trump attacks and subverts every famed American institution (the judiciary; the mass media which he classifies as enemy of the people and purveyors of fake news; the military services, the security and intelligence community; the diplomatic service, the Congress), his open encouragement of lawlessness by extremists, his use of divisive and incendiary rhetoric; his thin-skinned, ill-mannered and abusive nature; his general lack of decorum and basic decency. Truth be told, many Third World despots are even more refined and polished in their manners and carriage!
Institutions mean nothing when a rampaging autocrat with willing collaborators is determined to destroy them. Americans look on helplessly as Trump subverts one institution after another, demands absolute loyalty to him from state officials rather than to the US constitution, runs riot with all known governance values, incites bigotry, impounds extra-constitutional powers to himself at the expense of state institutions, cows the entire Republican Party and pockets all elected GOP senators, and it seems Americans are merely waiting to see if he will either self-destruct or reach the limit of his possibilities.
In their hubris and unwisdom, America boasts the most formidable military force on earth, preparing for a major global conflagration that would never happen. But when a real attack did happen on 9/11, not from a foreign enemy nation as expected but from a mere non-state actor, its formidable army and arsenal had no answer.
This is the shame that national hubris, the delusion of exceptionalism, can bring. How ironic that Americans are today face to face with their own Idi Amin! Remember him! the clownish Stone Age despot that tyrannized Ugandans for nearly a decade in the 1970s, and who truly finished Uganda.
And speaking of collaborators, Anne Applebaum’s incisive article in The Atlantic reveals there is never a shortage of people willing to collaborate with evil and subversive rulers, and the US is no exception.
The good thing, for me, is that Americans have lost the moral gravitas to grandstand henceforth on democracy, human rights, good governance, and decency. We have had enough of American hypocrisy already.
Unfortunately, because Americans have inebriated themselves with this grandiose superiority complex for decades, it is difficult for them to readily accept that contemporary tectonic changes are happening across the globe that would eventually relegate America.
Regrettably, the powerful corporate news media organizations that control the narratives would never cease to project this delusion of grandeur and exceptionalism even as Trump sinks them deeper into autocratic rule.
- Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.
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