Which is the real face of America?

The face of America that we witnessed following the US Presidential election was quite new to many around the world, quite different from the moderate face of the country, that had greeted people, most of the times, of all races, colours and religions with open arms – that was the face of America that the world was used to seeing. That has changed since Donald Trump was elected president. He had conducted his campaign exploiting fear, sowing seeds of division and sponsoring exclusivity. His “America First” is a new appellation for the very exclusive nature of some of his policies that he promised to craft, both external and internal.

Trump had promised to construct a massive wall between his country and Mexico at a time when political boundaries are losing relevance if not becoming altogether redundant, and at a time when people are trying to remove manmade barriers, both tangible and intangible, that separate countries and peoples. And to the surprise of many, he won. But then we also see a face of America that has stood up to Trump’s bigotry, bias and prejudice through the spontaneous display of disgust and abhorrence to his policies, the travel ban in particular, and rejecting his isolationist policies.

It is redeeming too that the majority of American voters did not vote for Trump. He managed only to garner the Electoral College votes. He was in deficit of more than three million in the popular vote count. And that is why he is now trying to castigate the very electoral system that elected him to the office of the president. And this is also a new face of America that we are witnessing. An America where the voting system can be tinkered with. And perhaps a few amongst us in Bangladesh may be taking some comfort in the fact that we are in good company when it comes to false voting and ballot tampering.

It is perhaps a solace to many that the majority of the American electorate doesn’t concur with his views or his policies. But the fact is that nearly 48 percent of the electorate do not seem to have realised that the agent of change they had voted for would cause the country to relapse to the days of mid-fifties and early sixties when the American society was nearly torn asunder by the exclusive and divisive nature of American politics. And that is borne out by the events following his many presidential fiats, particularly on the travel ban from seven Muslim majority countries, in his so-called attempt to “keep America safe”. And that also includes Iraq, a country that was under virtual occupation of the US for more than a decade, and whose soldiers are still fighting shoulder to shoulder with the US military against the IS. The furor he has managed to create in his very first week in office has compelled commentators to liken him to the bull in the China shop. And perhaps this is the first time that the US has acquired the dubious distinction of being considered an existential threat to its allies. The European Council President Donald Tusk has called the US under President Donald Trump, “one of the external threats to the EU along with China, Russia and radical Islam.”

But fear mongering and exploiting the collective psyche of the American people has been a tool of the American polity since the seminal stages of the country trying to gel as a nation. And this was particularly acute when it came to the question of migrants. The anti-immigrant protagonists forget that the country is a nation of immigrants, although there has been periodic enactment of anti-migrant policies. Immigrants were at times unwelcome, out of fear and anger.

The first group that was treated with suspicion and fright and met with resistance, and the entire community traduced, was Irish immigrants, who in turn looked apprehensively at the Italian migrants who followed them seeking better pastures in the ‘land of the free’. A passage in an article in The Atlantic dated November 21, 2011 sums up the traditional anti-immigrant slant. It reads, “There was a more sinister attitude toward immigrants in the country at the turn of the 20th century. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it government policy to restrict an ethnic group’s ability to enter the country. In 1896, an Atlantic author called immigrants “a hopeless burden” that would dilute the industriousness of the nation. In 1917, the Immigration Act barred a whole range of individuals — including the illiterate, the “feeble minded,” and homosexuals — from entering the country. Many of the images in this gallery echo these fears and portray immigrants, particularly the Chinese and the Irish, as parasites devouring what Americans hold dear.”

And in the early 40s the U.S. government had turned away thousands of Jewish refugees, on the excuse that they were Nazi spies, in the same manner as some immigrants from some Muslim majority countries are being barred from entering America under a Trumpian fiat, suspecting that there may be IS infiltrators among them.  The fate that the Japanese American had to bear during WW II is well-documented.

Therefore, one may well ask, which is the real face of America? And as the good professor Dr. Ali Riaz, a scholar with very deep insight of America, says, both are the true faces of America. It is the prevailing political force that gives one the preponderance over the other. Luckily, for the greater part of the last century and until now it was the rational and inclusive moderate face of America that we had witnessed. One hopes that the change, for the worst, that Trump has wrought, will be short-lived.