How many other countries on earth have “anti-lockdown protestors,” waving guns around? Or a President who’s literally blockading life-saving supplies from reaching hospitals? What the?

There’s a certain truth that I think we have to confront right about now. America under Trumpism is going from a failed state — to a rogue state.

What do I mean by that?

How many other countries have cut funding for the WHO during a global pandemic — the only international institution really capable of coordinating the fight against it? Who’d even imagine doing something so vain, hostile, aggressive, foolish, spiteful? How many other Presidents are encouraging people — who’re already waving around machine guns — to “liberate” themselves from lockdown?

These are actions which don’t just endanger Americans, anymore. They’re beginning to be actions which endanger the world. To help a pandemic spread? That’s not just some kind of anodyne “policy failure.” It’s not even just “reckless.” It is downright dangerous. And it betrays a certain set of values: the idea that America doesn’t care about the world, in extreme, and absolutist ways, that the whole world can go to hell, as long as the Trumpists come out on top. What the?

Should a country like that really be a member of the ranks of civilized nations? My question isn’t rhetorical. You can be sure that governments around the world — saner ones — are watching all these actions with horror, and writing America off. As a leader, partner, ally, and friend.

Do you know what they are going to do? Quarantine it. Not just in the terms of this pandemic. But as a nation worth knowing at all. Americans will be treated something like the nations it has long despised — Iran, the Soviet Union, Iraq — as a danger, a menace, a threat not just to the abstraction of “global order” but to something much more elemental: basic civilized values.

It’s true that America’s been on this trajectory for quite a while now. Under Trump, America set many precedents for the sheer lunacy of cutting funding for the WHO. Remember when Trump insulted the world’s leaders at the G7 — and the next time they all rolled their eyes at him, and mocked him, for the globe to see? Or the many times when, not even bothering to understand basic politics or history, threatened to pull out of NATO? Or when he encouraged the folly of Brexit, astounding and horrifying, well, most of Europe?

Ah, but that’s a mere beginning. Then there was the time he hugged North Korea’s murderous dictator. Or the time that he visited India, incited literal riots, and walked away grinning. Trump is a man who’s never met a tyrannical dictator he doesn’t seem to idolize in an oddly childish way. That’s not a coincidence: he’s essentially still looking for the love of an unloving father, which he can never have, and the closest he’ll come in this lifetime is the warm, soothing embrace of a…Kim Jong.

Such is the mind of a man who doesn’t have basic human values. Trump doesn’t just revel in cruelty, domination, hostility, and aggression — he revels in such things because he has genuinely never experienced true care, warmth, empathy, grace, or love. All his relationships are obvious proof of that. Men like Trump are made from just such a lack of love in childhood — and they try to fill that void forever, knowing that if love is beyond them, then at least maybe they can command obedience with fear.

Now, all that strikes a chord in a certain kind of American. The American who’s been just as traumatized and wounded as Trump. Not by inadequate parenting, in their case — but by a broken society. There’s the abandoned formerly upwards middle class white, the declining working class one, and so forth. They have been left in a profoundly hostile and aggressive world, one which feels perpetually threatening, frightening, unsafe — the world of American capitalism, where the most predatory and ruthless win everything, and the weak perish.

What they’ve learned, though, is just the same perverse lesson the unloved child does. They’ve learned to be like their oppressors — to value being predatory, ruthless, hostile, selfish, greedy. They have learned to punch down, seeking Mexican babies to blame for all their problems — instead of a badly broken system of predatory capital, helmed by billionaires, whose fake “thinktanks” and the propaganda they churn out teaches the very victims of that system to be it’s greatest proponents.

How else do you explain the bizarre spectacle of that kind of American crying to be “liberated” from lockdown? They feel they need to “go back to work” — not that they need massively more support from the government, which so far has offered them the equivalent of one week, though it’s already been a month, and going to be more. They don’t see any fault in the system — they want to go back to being cogs in its machine. They are willing to sacrifice their own health and that of their loves ones to do so. They’re martyrs for capitalism.

I don’t say all that for a pointless theoretical disquisition, but to make a real point.

Trump reflects a certain set of American values, which are true-blue too. It’s nice to think of America as the land of the free and the home of the brave, but the truth is that it’s a country which fought a hidden world war for capitalism’s sake — installing dictators across the globe in any country that chose to be a social democracy, from Chile to Iraq. This hidden world war, to my mind, sealed a certain set of values in the American psyche, the American soul. Hostility, cruelty, aggression, violence — all these were perfectly OK. The end could justify the means. Sure, we were bombing them — but only to “liberate” them. So what if we installed a dictator here, and a tyrant there? It was for their own good!

So Americans — at least many of them — learned, over those bitter decades of hidden war, forever war, to internalize the values of nations that conduct such crusades. A kind of strange split arose in the American psyche. Americans saw themselves as the world’s noblest, most heroic people — even as they were doing terrible, terrible things, or at least their government was, and they were mostly silent. Whether that was funding actual fascists in Chile, or using drugs to fund authoritarian right wingers in Nicaragua, or turning a blind eye to death squads in Iraq, or even using the Taliban which would later exact its own terrible vengeance to fight the evil commies.

That split is what created the room for Trumpism. It’s to that kind of split psyche that the cry “Make America Great!!” really carries moral weight and meaning. Hey, we used to be great once! What happened to us? How do we become great again? As it turned out, the answer to this question was a very old one: find someone weaker than you in society to hate. Who was weaker than the Trumpist? Only the Mexican, the Guatemalan, the Muslim, the Jew. And so they came be demonized and vilified — and actually then put in concentration camps. But they weren’t the only ones who were demonized.

Who else was demonized? The world was. Trumpism is nationalism, of course, of such an extreme kind that fascism isn’t inaccurate — and to the nationalist, the world is an inferior thing, just another a body to be dominated and possessed, another “pussy” to be “grabbed”. That’s why Trump threatened to withdraw from NATO over and over again, why he insulted every friend and ally America has, why he demeaned the notion of a world living in peace and prosperity in every possible way. Right down to cutting funding for the WHO. This wasn’t an anomaly — but a trend. A trend that culminated in Trump — but began long before him, in that ugly, obnoxious streak of Americanism that, from Nixon to Bush, revels openly in violence, supremacy, and cruelty.

It’s ironic, though, that America ended up being a rogue state. Because of course that’s a term that George W Bush’s intellectual buffoons came up with to describe America’s mortal enemies, like North Korea, who are now it’s emerging friends. I don’t like using that term, because it legitimizes a certain kind of childish thinking. Us, them. But it serves the point well enough for now. That point is this.

How long do you think the world is really going to want to be anywhere close to a nation like America? A nation with a President so arrogant and stupid he cuts funding for the WHO during a global pandemic? A nation of people who want to “liberate” themselves from lockdown with machine guns? Sure, that’s not “all Americans”, you object, angrily. But your objection misses the point. The only such people in the world today are all Americans.

The only people in the world who’d support not having a WHO — or any other kind of international institution. Who think carrying machine guns is OK. Who vote against their own healthcare, retirement, education, childcare? Who want society to be a perpetual and literal battle to the death for basic resources? No, that’s not all Americans — as in each and every one. But the only people in the world today who want these things are all Americans.

So how long do you think the world is going to want to…do business with such a country — when it puts itself first, and beats everyone else down? Be it’s friend — when it’s people, enough of them, seem to value money over health, and could maybe them ill, too? Share investments with it — when it knows that such a state might pull out at any time, had no commitment to the cause? Be such a nation’s partner and ally, when all it seems to be able to contribute to a relationship anymore is childish insults and mockery?

How long do you think the world will put up with the surreal mess that America’s become?

I think that what’s going to happen — what’s already happening, in fact — is this: quarantine. America will be quarantined. As in shunned, like any proper rogue state. Not just against the pandemic. But so that the strange and bizarre and nightmarish things that happen in America don’t infect working countries, either. So that it’s lunatic propaganda doesn’t end up there. So that it’s crackpot “thinkers” don’t have an audience there. So that it’s politics of hate and supremacy doesn’t corrode them, too. So that it’s culture of violence and cruelty doesn’t erode their values, too. So that it’s bizarre trickle down economics which never trickled down and left the average person poor don’t end up there. And so on.

America’s sick, my friends. We can all see it. We all know it. And one thing the pandemic should have taught us is this. When someone’s that ill, you can only help them so much — before you have to quarantine them, for the greater good.

Umair

April 2020