[Yes, I had the 1966 iconic film of director, Sergio Leone, in mind in choosing the title for this week’s column. But since the very catchy title has been adopted for many uses, I am only following a long line of appropriations of the famous movie and its title. Thus, in what follows, in using the film and its moral fables as an inspiration, I give my sense of developments in US politics, government and public affairs after the midterm elections of 2018. I do this in the belief that we in Nigeria and other parts of the world will find much to learn from the exercise. Dear reader, as you read the following notes on the good, the bad and the ugly in America at the present time, please remember that many aspects of our own politics, governmental structure and even constitutional arrangements in Nigeria were copied wholesale from the United States, with very little or no revisions to suit our own historical, cultural and economic conditions.]
The Good
The United States is a diverse, pluralistic and multicultural nation, like Nigeria. Indeed, like many of the nations of the planet, since monolingual, monoethnic and monocultural nations like South Korea and Lesotho are in the minority of the states of the world. Trump and his white-nationalist, neofascist base came to power on the basis of stoking the fires of division and separation between the communities of the country, using hatred, bigotry and violence as their tools. At the height of the “success” of Trump and his movement, it seemed as if their energies, their mojo came from elemental forces, from nature itself. For this reason, only the comprehensive mobilization of all progressive, unified and also elemental forces could defeat Trump and his movement. And that is what happened in the midterm elections of 2018.
In about the last a century and half, America had not seen the kind of coalition of forces and combination of energies across generations that won the landslide victory against Trump in last year’s midterm elections. Black, brown and white, old and young (especially the young), men and women (especially women), and citizens going back many generations together with recent immigrants to the country, all came together. It seemed like rousing all the binding, centripetal forces of nature – and it has been so celebrated. Fortunately, the victorious forces have not been carried away by euphoria; they know all too well that their victory was partial, that Trump and his allies still control the presidency and one of the two houses of Congress. But even so, look at what the branch of Congress controlled by the victorious forces of a united, progressive and multicultural America has begun to do. It has begun to exercise regulatory checkmates on Trump’s abuse and misuse of the presidency. It has begun to map out agendas and policies more beneficial to the working and non-working poor, to the protection and enhancement of the environment for living generations and the posterity of generations that will come after us.
Worthy of special notice is the fact that the new alignment of forces after the midterm elections of last year has shifted considerably in the direction of taking head on the blatant and corrosive misogyny and sexism of Trump and his base. The number of women that campaigned and won in the elections was unprecedented. But beyond number – although that is very important – there is the quality and the diversity of backgrounds represented by the new female congressional members. For beyond taking up the militant sexism of Trump and his allies, the new radical female members of the legislature have also taken up the establishment of the Democratic Party itself. Katie Porter, Ilha Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have given every indication that they will raise and promote issues that both ruling class parties, the Republicans as well as the Democrats, have for long been too timid or too obtuse to raise in a vigorous and spirited manner. One of these is the issue of socialized medicine that would, for the first time in history, make medical care free and available to all citizens regardless of class, status or lack of the means to pay for it. Here is another issue that they are taking up: complete equality of women and men in the workplace and in guarantees for state support of the work of raising children and members of the next generation.
In all these developments, it may seem both that good and evil are fighting it out in Trump’s America and good is increasingly more empowered than evil, but everyone knows that the struggles are not being waged by angels and demons but flesh-and-blood human beings. This is important because among all the economically and scientifically advanced nations of the world, America stands almost alone in still being considerably driven by Christianity of a medieval, fundamentalist and superstitious kind – like Nigeria, like many countries of the developing world. Thus, the moral fable of the good, the bad and the ugly will take us only as far as our rationality and our humanness will take us. This leads us to the rubric, the tale of the bad.
The Bad: the unfolding saga of Barr on Mueller
Only in America, you’d have to say. Robert Mueller submits his long-awaited Report and Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, gives a four-page report on the Report. Nearly three weeks after the release of the Report and two weeks after the release of his own “report” on the Report, Barr still refuses to let America and the world get the chance to read Mueller’s findings for and by themselves. Meanwhile, Barr’s “report” has completely overshadowed Mueller’s Report – at least for now and for the foreseeable future of the next few weeks or even months. To say that this is bad for Trump, bad for Barr and also bad for America is to make an understatement.
In many countries of the world, when the findings of a report are so bad, so damaging to a ruler and his administration, the report simply is suppressed and it never sees the light of day. America being one of the hallowed leaders of the “free world”, to completely suppress the Mueller Report is obviously out of the question. But what is the effect of delaying and prolonging the release of the Report? Here is one development: a firestorm has erupted about what Mueller’s Report actually contains, based on what Barr has “reported”. This is partly because some members of Mueller’s team have told some newspapers that Barr’s “report” severely misrepresents Mueller’s findings. But these disgruntled members of Mueller’s team have done this in secret, not boldly, not openly. Meanwhile, note that Mueller also is completely silent on what his Report contains. This leads us to what is bad, very bad about this charade of Barr on Mueller.
Mueller’s Report contains findings on allegations of the worst possible crimes against the state and against the American people: colluding with a foreign power to subvert elections to the highest echelons of public office and the most consequential institutions of American and Western liberal democracy. And on top of that, obstructing the course of justice. It is impossible to think of any crimes or misdemeanors worse than these two and indeed in American political and constitutional history, no president has ever been accused, credibly, of these two crimes – with the singular exception of Donald Trump. I say credibly accused because everything contained in the investigations was actually either said or done in public by Trump and/or his allies during the campaigns of the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. In all truly democratic countries of the world, not only would Trump and everyone connected with the actions and the charges voluntarily stay far away from the investigations, they would be compelled to do so. But throughout the two years of Mueller’s investigations, Trump himself and dozens of his surrogates were extremely vocal, extremely sanguine in their attacks on Mueller and his team. Only in America? More precisely, only in Trump’s America.
There is a name, a diagnostic appellation for what has happened with and in the Mueller investigation and what is happening now, as the delayed release of the Report in its fullness: it is institutional decay of the highest order. We look to politicians and their supporters when things are vey bad, so bad that the rulers seem to be working against the interest of the nation and its peoples. That is correct and necessary. But perhaps far more deadly is when transindividual institutions don’t work or can’t work. That’s what is at stake in the unfolding saga of Barr on Mueller. We are familiar with institutional decay in Nigeria and in many parts of the developing world. The Americans are not. Let us hope that they will not pay a very costly prize for this.
The Ugly
Ordinarily, we do not think of ugliness as something alarming, something terrifying. But think of the following detail from classical Greek mythology: the head of the Medusa was so terrible in its ugliness that anyone who gazed on it had his or her heart turned into stone. Obviously then, the ugliness we are talking about here is moral rather than physical; experiential rather than innate. Welcome to Trump’s America and the great circulation of moral ugliness, of ethical ugliness as a tool of political and financial opportunism. The evidence is galore.
Perhaps the most egregious, certainly the most blatant, is Trump’s complete merger of his personal economic and financial interests with the interest of the American state. His children and his son-in-law all use their connection to their father to make clients and benefactors of the family businesses to do their bidding quite openly – and often quite at odds with the interest of the American state or even economy. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is completely in the open about this, as he goes about the Middle East and the Arab world as a sort of American diplomatic ombudsman for the region, extracting commercial advantages from some of the world’s worst autocracies in return for shielding them from Western and world condemnation. At the height of the scandal of the murder of Khashoggi in Turkey by the Saudis, Kushner coordinated Trump and America’s cover for the Saudis. Please note that Trump and Kushner maintained that they were acting to safeguard Saudi contracts for supply of American military hardware, whereas Trump and his son-in-law were in reality acting in the interest of their own commercial and economic windfalls from the Saudis. A life, the bloodily severed head of Khashoggi, with the torso chopped into pieces for the hundreds of millions reaped by Trump and Kushner – that is the face of the moral ugliness at the heart of affairs of state in America at the present time.
It needn’t and doesn’t always take such lurid, melodramatic forms. Indeed, for the most part, the form it has taken with Trump is the kind with which we are very familiar in our region of the world: filling cabinet posts and political appointments with kinsmen, friends, and business partners who are not only unqualified for the positions they are appointed to but are the very worst, the most mediocre and dysfunctional for their posts. In all of American history, no president has appointed more incompetent, lazy and clueless cabinet members and public officeholders than Trump. It gives no comfort to Americans that many of such appointees have been exposed and been forced out of office because no sooner has one departed than Trump appoints another in his or her place. As I write these words this week, the Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, has just been fired. Why? Not because she refused to carry out the monstrously inhumane orders of Trump to separate children from their parents at US borders, but because she wasn’t thorough enough in carrying out the orders. This is symptomatic of the ugliness in Trump’s officialdom: you must not hold back one inch from the lies, the deceptions, the cruelties of the boss!
Nero. Caligula, Mussolini. Trump is in this faux-illustrious company.
Biodun Jeyifo
bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu