How Trump Made America Just Another European Country
America’s Racism, Hyper-Capitalism and belief in its own exceptionalism are proof of its European ordinariness
by
David Gottfried
For roughly the past two decades, many “historians” and “political scientists” have spoken, ad nauseum, about something they call “American exceptionalism.” Some of these allegedly wise men have waxed poetic about American exceptionalism, and with a febrile insistence they tell us that Americans have been "chosen” by the lord. Indeed, I remember that when Ronald Reagan spoke at the 1976 republican convention, he claimed that G-d had placed the United States in North America, separated from the old world by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, because He wanted to set America apart from the rest of the sordid world, pristine, princely and closer to perfection save for anything but heaven itself.
Today, large segments of the populace seem to suffer paroxysms of psychotic delirium over their devotion to Trump, even loving his terribly ominous statement that if he is elected, we need not vote in any more elections. The deification of Trump seems positively correlated with claims of American exceptionalism. Of course, there are many ways in which one can be exceptional. One can be exceptionally brilliant, but one might also be exceptionally stupid. Likewise, one might be exceptionally saintlike, but one might also be an orange ogre who reminds me that many New York City sewer rats have orange eyes.
What makes America exceptional ? We are, supposedly, uncommonly grand because we believe in freedom, liberty and human happiness. Alternatively, we are considered exceptional because we believe in religious freedom and capitalist enterprise. Sometimes, we sound like a four-year-old who doesn’t understand that he is sometimes chastised for his misdeeds, as we petulantly claim that we are just fundamentally good and nice and really swell.
Of course, when we tout our exceptional status, we forget that other states have also been staunch believers in their exceptional and grand status.
Being exceptional is as common as having a Mother Who Claims that you were the most Beautiful Baby
Britain and France both believe that they are exceptional as the origin of freedom and liberty.
Both Britain and France have claimed that they are exceptional because they also claim to have divined the virtues of liberty and freedom. The British can point to the magna carta, a medieval limitation on royal prerogatives that century by century expanded the scope of human liberty until, by the 1970’s, a militant working class was allegedly showing its oats with a labor party that supposedly gave it the right to have all their basic human needs paid for with a minimum of work. Indeed, the American revolution was not so much a revolution against England as it was an uprising against the tyranny enacted by King George the Third whose undemocratic edits contravened salient English political ideals. 1
The French considered English love of liberty a tepid, halfhearted affair. Whereas the British may write a professorial brief for freedom, the French gave us the blasts and bludgeoning revenge of full-throated revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the French Revolution made Classical British Liberalism seem a tired and tweedy recipe for rule by bankers and burgers.
The Soviet Union always claimed that it was Exceptional
In his ode to the Paris Commune, Karl Marx thundered:
“Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the Slaves to Heaven of the German, Prussian, Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the Church, of the barracks, of cabbage junkerdom and above all the Philistine.”
The Soviet Union saw itself as the light of the nations because it had decided to storm heaven, i.e., bring the joys of heaven down to men on earth by taking the money that was concentrated in the hands of beastly blood suckers the world over.
Germany’s Deadly Dalliance with Millennial Exceptionalism
Germany was intoxicated with delusions of its exceptional status for centuries preceding Adolf Hitler. Like a latter-day Babylon or Egypt, it reveled in the cruelty of its kings, paid homage to the murder unleashed by its armies, and tried to relive the legends of the warrior gods of Valhalla. According to more than one historian, various cults in Germany venerated the swastika long before Hitler came to power. The worship of all things German was so pronounced that Barbara Tuchman notes that in late 19th century Germany, the “Alldeutsche Verband,” a political organization dedicated to the exaltation of German power, burst into politics. These chauvinistic mental munchkins had a penchant for putting posters, in shop windows, which shouted, “The world belongs to Germany.” Among other things, this German predecessor of the MAGA movement held that all Germans living outside of Germany’s borders should be subject to the laws and rules promulgated by the German Reich. This of course could be effectuated by giving Germany “lebensraum,” or living space, by which territories governed by various racial inferiors would be conquered by the Reich.
American Racism is a Product of European, and more specifically German, Racism
I need not note that America has a long tradition of racism. Our addiction to racism is clear to anyone save the dingbats in an MGM movie celebrating Southern Princesses, in enormous dresses, telling their Mammies to fan them and smooth buttermilk on their loins so they will look fresh and sexually delectable to the swaggering Southern gentlemen swinging sabers to and fro.
And where did American racism originate. It was borne in the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Since America is a predominantly Protestant nation, our education has suffered from a sanitized history of Protestantism. Although Martin Luther rightfully criticized the Church for such things as the sale of indulgences, Luther, like any good American politician, knew that he needed some red meat to rally his Fellow Germans to his Cause. His issue, the issue that swayed the German rank and file to his banner, was race.
Shortly before Luther thundered his theology, European explorers “discovered” the new world and the native Americans who lived there. Europe was not sure how it should view or categorize the native American populations. The pope in power held that they were also “children of G-d,” should be considered our brothers and were entitled to some respect. 2 Luther chastised the pope for his benign attitude toward native Americans, holding that their savageness and strange attire proved that they were an inferior race. Thus, we see in Martin Luther the birth of Modern European, and American, racism.
Martin Luther also decried the Roman Church for not being sufficiently antagonistic to the Jews. When Luther preached, the bubonic plague was still fresh in Europe’s collective memory, along with the rash of murderous riots against the Jews who were alleged to have used their alliance with the demonic to give Europe the plague. The Popes held that the Jews did not create the plague and certainly shouldn’t be killed for starting a biological catastrophe beyond their control. Men like Martin Luther considered the Pope “soft on the Jews” in much the same way that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon considered Robert Kennedy soft on communism for not relishing our routine destruction of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives through napalm, crop defoliation with carcinogenic compounds, free fire zones (large swaths of South Vietnam where we killed anything that moved), etc.
The racism of Germany was rapidly endorsed by the British, who saw it as a justification for their burgeoning colonial empire, and who, until recent times, were very often allied with Germany for numerous reasons, including their common hostility toward the French.
The American Fear of Cultural Contamination was cultivated in Germany
Europe is not only the progenitor of modern racism. It also bequeathed to America the belief that the races must never mix, that blacks not only were inferior to whites but that the combination of whites and blacks would lead to the creation of a mongrel race that would destroy civilization.
The seeds of this belief are evident in Fichte, in his “Reden A Deutsche Wolk,” or address to the German people, given in 1814, after Napolean was crushed. Napolean’s conquests stimulated right-wing opposition to the French, and Germany was the epicenter of reaction against the French Revolution and Napolean. Whereas the French sought to create a world that welcomed all of earth’s peoples, Germany was parochial in its tastes, parsimonious in its capacity for forgiveness and pugilistic in foreign affairs.
For example, the French designed the metric system, during their revolution, to advance international brotherhood. Very simply, the distance from the equator to the North pole is ten thousand kilometers. These measurements are not something with special significance to Italians or Germans or the Swiss. These measurements, and the metric system, is based on the principle that we are all earthlings and are based on the dimensions of the earth.
Parisian cosmopolitanism was anathema to Germany, hidebound, hierarchical, and filled with haughty derision to all things French and free.
Fichte held that Germany was a superior nation because the German language was a superior language. Why ?
Per Fichte, German was a grand language because it was pure, as in racially pure. German was not created by the merger of any other languages. English, by contrast, was an inferior language because it was a mongrel language, with deep roots in other languages, most prominently Latin and German.
Fichte’s belief that every force or thing had to be hermetically sealed off from everything else and that different tastes or ethnicities or styles must never share or borrow or exchange ways of living is very evident in America.
For example, large segments of this country thought the rise of rock n roll music would lead to the ruination of America because when white people adopted any traits associated with blacks they crossed a Rubicon into a wretched world of racial debasement and debilitation.
This fear of cultural mixing extended to an American fear of Southern and Eastern Europeans. In the first third of the 20th Century, conservative white protestant women found the influx of Italians and Jews offensive to their staid, Anglo-Saxon life. Some of these women founded a culinary movement termed the “American Purity Movement” which found the excessive use of spices in food suggestive of sex and sinfulness. Too much garlic was akin to letting underwear show. They counseled that bland food, and food that was predominantly white in color, were ideal.
America is Just Another European Country Because it is Governed by the Hyper-Capitalistic Excesses of John Calvin, Northern Europe’s Protestant Prince of Money-Grubbing Thievery
America is just another European country because so much of its politics and way of life is defined by the theology of John Calvin, the Protestant theologian who was the religious underpinning of the “dark, satanic mills” so eloquently excoriated in the poetry of William Blake.
John Calvin turned Christianity, which initially had some sympathy for the poor, into a faith that was safe for super rich robber barons, whether they were industrial superstars whose young employees from the East End of London were half a foot shorter than other Britishers because they were so hideously malnourished, or whether they were men like Donald Trump, who paid his undocumented immigrants in the construction trade next to nothing.
John Calvin said that a man’s wealth was a sign that he was a real pal of G-d. (The Pharaohs who enslaved the Hebrew people were rich dudes. Were they on G-d’s good side.) John Calvin also said that many or most people were predestined to go to hell, that nothing they could do could avert their eventual destination, and that poor wretched people, perhaps addicted to alcohol and drugs, were usually nothing but hopeless cases, predestined to go to Hell.
When you believe G-d likes rich people, and that poor people are getting ready to go to hell where they belong, you are apt to believe in an economic order that makes Richard Nixon look like Abbie Hoffman. As Protestant Europe became ruthlessly capitalistic, and British castles sometimes sported as many as 500 rooms, Queen Elizabeth the First reputedly said something to the effect that most of her subjects has become poverty-stricken tramps. They had, and her zealous prosecution of the Protestant cause made the verdant fields of England a succession of dour and dreary factories where the poor limped through a short and broken life to the welcoming nothingness of death.
The economic and emotional havoc wrought by Calvinism ravaged America. Until Franklyn Roosevelt burst upon the American scene, most Americans led dour and dreary lives. According to Henry David Thoreau, most Americans led lives of “quiet desperation.” They were desperately afraid of impoverishment and the shame that was its companion – after all, poor people deserved shame as Calvin said poor people were usually destined to go to hell.
America is just another European Country because a huge proportion of Americans deplore concentration and analysis, have no interest in understanding problems and would rather just shout, “lock her up.”
In the days of the Roman circuses, no one really spent any time thinking about public policy. Instead, you got your rocks off by seeing someone get bloodied up and murdered. Thinking was for men like Julius Caesar. An ordinary Joe simply followed the orders of a Caesar and killed or got killed.
Of course, being in a democracy requires that men be made of sterner stuff, morally and intellectually. The founding Fathers of this country were remarkably talented, certainly when compared with most ordinary college graduates today. Most of them knew Latin and Greek and Hebrew and French. They had turned their backs on 18 centuries of Christian tradition by studying Hebrew, the Talmud and were such staunch semitophiles that a few founding fathers suggested that Hebrew be the language of the New American nation.
In any event the founding fathers were an argumentative, verbal and opinionated people, and they did not shy away from political debate. While most rank-and-file American citizens lacked the urbanity and erudition of those founding Fathers who could read Hebrew, they were not exactly dullards. An examination of letters written by men, away at war, reveals a variegated and rich vocabulary and a probing, exacting mind. After all, the early Americans were the Americans of the New England Town Hall in which lay people actually debated issues.
However, my sense is that today for a broad swath of the American people, the expenditure of the faintest amount of mental energy is just too taxing. It is so much easier for their feeble brains if all they need do is chant a snappy bitchy slogan, such as “lock her up.” And so when Americans become Trumpers they return to their true-blue European roots and are once again peasants screaming “Il Duce” or “Ein reich, ein Wolk, ein Fuhrer,” (One rule, one people, one leader).
This is not just my perception. This has been quantified. I read about 15 or 20 years ago that in the 1960’s, when a politician’s speech or comments were broadcast on the evening news, the median length of the snippet carried over the air waves was 45 seconds. By 2000, the median length of such snippets was 15 seconds. Our political discourse has been effectively infantilized. We speak in Garish, vulgar headlines; all evidence, complexity and honesty are denuded from the discourse.
America is just another European County because it is so certain it is so great.
Once America really was great. It was great when it doubted itself. Its doubt did not make it weak. Its doubt gave it a probing mind that examined and reexamined issues until we hit pay dirt. It was great when it knew that mortal men could not do immortal things. It was great when it did not believe in kings or dictators.
But today America is like Europe in 1914. hysterically swaggering and swearing before the abyss.
We are an uneducated, swirling mass of fools enjoying Trump because we find his madness so damn entertaining. If we really want to watch a bunch of violent, garish, gaudy bastards fight and fuck galore, and do it with class, we ought to just watch “The Godfather.”
When the American colonists demanded no taxation without representation, they were being very English. After all, in England taxes were not levied without representation because in England people could elect members of Parliament. However, when the English colonists moved to America and resided in, for example, the State of Pennsylvania, they could no longer elect members of parliament because the colonial governments of North America had no seats in Parliament. Also, the English were entitled to greater tax revenues from America. England had just fought the French, for years, for control of North America. The English colonists in America were adamant in demanding that England fight hard for North America. The English colonists, overwhelmingly Protestant, feared French Power because they feared the Pope (France was Catholic), and anything that reminded them of Roman Catholicism was denigrated as wicked and, to use the vernacular of the era, “Popish” or related to the ungodly Pope.
Of course, the ferociously Catholic Spanish had a perverse way of implementing Papal doctrine as they saw fit to slaughter millions of native Americans, reasoning that it was okay to kill a hundred here and a thousand there because some of them would learn to bow to the Roman Church and thus be saved from eternal damnation