THE AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

 

J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon 

The Burglary: The discovery of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Betty Medseer.
Chaos: Charles Manson the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties. Tom O’Neil & Dan Piepenbring
The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the History of The United States of America. Gerald Horn.

 Trump is the worst, but not the first manifestation of the American nightmare.  Given A close examination of American history how could it be otherwise. A Jekyll and Hyde nation in which the idealism incorporated in the Declaration of Independence, many of its signatures were slaveholders, co-existed with the grotesque industry of slavery and the genocide of the indigenous people of the land being occupied. The legacy of slavery on white consciousness has perhaps been given insufficient attention, though some of its manifestations in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and Jim Crow are as obvious as they are grotesque.

The other tale is one of freedom and hope for the oppressed millions, exclusively White of course, who escaped from semi feudal conditions in Eastern Europe,and in the case of Russian and Polish Jews, the constant threat of  pogroms. Others escaped and the rigidity of a class system and social order that made social mobility little more than a pipe dream for the overwhelming majority of Europeans. 

Although the reality for millions was not quite the land of milk and honey, with poverty and hunger being daily companions there was a level of freedom and the possibility of social mobility unheard of in Europe. Countless stories testify to this reality.

Moreover, within considerably tighter bounds than is often allowed, freedom of speech, protest and assembly existed for all and, most importantly for many, provided you stayed within the law and observed social norms, the state left you alone. This, combined with the possibility of social advancement, constituted what many understood as the American dream. In truth however the nightmare was never far away.

Civil wars usually settle disputes for good or ill and a new settlement is imposed by the victors, thus it was in Russia, Spain, and Nigeria, with history being written by the winners. The United States is the exception to this rule, for after the civil war it was the south that controlled the narrative, blocked reconstruction, and set the agenda for the next hundred years. So that rather than eradicating the legacy of slavery the subjugation of black citizens became entrenched. That legacy is manifested today in the toll of young African American men being slaughtered on the streets of US cities.

The shadow cast by the Civil War and the failure of reconstruction or any serious attempt to address the injustice and inequality experienced by Black citizens was saw  a growing confidence, both in the North, but especially the South of the forces of white supremacy and the anti-Liberal right. The American nightmare was alive and well, manifested by the ku Klux Klan, lynching, and Jim Crow in the South, and strike breaking, and red hunting in the north.

After the American entry of the United States into the First World war suspicion of foreigners and particularly radical foreigners led to repressive legislation and the closing of the gates to mass. European migration. 

If there is one individual who personifies the American nightmare, it is not Nixon, not McCarthy¸ Charles Lindbergh or Donald Trump, it is J Edgar Hoover, emperor of the FBI.

Hoover ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1971 a period of 47yrs. During that time he became untouchable, the master of a private fiefdom, whose primary function was spying on US citizens and identifying possible subversives, a very wide category in the mind of Hoover. It was Hoover who ultimately decided who went on his index of those to be incarcerated without trial in case of emergency. It was Hoover who fed Mccarthyite witch hunt and heresy inquisitions. It was Hoover who declared war on dissent in general and the anti-Vietnam war movement in particular. In doing so he broke every law in the book. 

Hoover was also a rabid racist whose fear of Black Americans, -it seems doubtful that he ever considered them as fellow citizens, -led him to consider literally every Black American as a suspect.

Rather as the Queen has seen countless Prime Ministers come and go, so Hoover saw off eight presidents, all the time honing, shaping and developing the skills of deceit, subterfuge and blackmail that ensured that no president could sack or control him. When his old friend Nixon became President, he was for the first time confronted by someone as ruthless and unscrupulous as himself.

At no stage did the much-vaunted American constitution, or even democratic norms and conventions prevent Hoover, McCarthy, Nixon, the CIA, and now Trump from criminality and abuse of power. All have ignored constitutional restraints and legislation passed by Congress. What has Eventually confronted and finally stopped these acts has been the courage of individual citizens, either as whistleblowers or activists, and the power of a free press. This is not necessarily good news.

The American nightmare has always been stronger than the dream, however if it is to finally to triumph over the dream of an open and vibrant democracy this November surely represents its best shot.

Trump is not the first manifestation of an American ideology hostile to democracy, irredeemably racist, and authoritarian, but he is perhaps the most potent manifestation. America was founded on a lie, that lie was slavery, a lie that the civil war ought but failed to correct. It is surely no accident that the United States faces its existential crisis against the background of this failure.

There is a mantra that is constantly repeated that Trump’s level of criminality, obstruction of justice, and outright corruption, - I heard it repeated this morning on MSNBC, -is unique and unprecedented. This is simply untrue, even during my own lifetime the anti-democratic nightmare has flourished, waxed, and waned. Is Trump more morally corrupt, - he is certainly more financially corrupt -than Hoover or Nixon? I think not, though the difference was that Hoover operated in secrecy, Nixon attempted to do the same. Trump on the other hand operates, clumsy lies notwithstanding,  more or less openly. His exact relationship with Vladimir Putin is a mystery, that he has a relationship is not. His duplicity, corruption and misuse of power is manifest daily. He has learnt that the American nightmare can be packaged and sold.

There has never been in American history, least of all in the Stepford wives America of the 1950’s,   a ‘golden age' of liberal freedoms, just times when the nightmare was frustrated and the dream showed  more signs of life. People had to fight for these times. Whether this nightmare can be frustrated this time is uncertain, what is certain is that for the US and the rest of the world is important that it is.