Biden supporters taunt Trump fans. Credit: Chris McGrath/Getty
If people thought that the last four years in American politics were divisive, then they’ve seen nothing yet. With Donald Trump off the scene, many seem to believe that the country’s political arena will emerge into a bright new future, but things are about to get a whole lot worse.
American polarisation pre-dates Trump by decades, but in the past few years it has intensified to such an extent that a paper on US tribalism from Cambridge University says it is now approaching levels of ethnic parochialism seen in Bosnia and Kosovo — two countries noted for their recent political stability. However, even before Trump’s election, a study of Democrats and Republicans showed similar levels of distrust as exist between Israelis and Palestinians.
Yet while many people recognise the symptoms of this American balkanisation, they do not recognise the cause. It is not just that people believe in different things, it is that they believe in different facts — there is no longer any agreement on what has happened and what has not. This applies from the most serious and major event to the most mundane, but it starts with the words people believe were said or not said
Take two of the claims about Trump that most enraged the Left in recent years: that he described all Mexicans as rapists and that he refused to condemn white supremacy. Both these are false. Neither accurately reflects what Donald Trump said, at the bottom of the escalator in Trump Tower on the day he announced his candidacy in June 2015, or in his response to the events in Charlottesville two years later.
Yet for four years the anti-Trump “Resistance” was happy to run with these claims. In the last couple of days, broadcasters on major American networks have claimed on air, on the basis of Trump’s Mexicans comment, that Hispanics have suffered more prejudice than at any point in their lifetimes. The same Hispanics who just voted for Trump in record-breaking numbers.
Meanwhile, Trump’s supposed failure to denounce white supremacy is such a part of the historical narrative that it came up in the presidential debates and was raised by Kamala Harris in her vice-presidential debate with Mike Pence. The transcript (what we used to call “the record”) shows that the claim is false; Trump condemned white supremacy clearly in his post-Charlottesville statement. As has been observed by others, Trump has not only said more lies than any other president, but he has also had more lies said about him.
And now the man who looks set to become the next president of the USA announces that he wants the country to heal?
This split version of reality extends beyond words. In the past month, American politics witnessed a scandal of potentially enormous proportions, a story that once would have exploded across the political scene to be met with the usual cycle of allegations and denials.
Hunter Biden’s laptop contained an awful lot of things, including photos of Biden Jnr allegedly smoking crack and exposing himself. But more damaging was the allegation that it contained emails suggesting not only that Joe Biden’s brother and son enriched themselves by selling their access to foreign powers, but that the man himself — “the chairman” — enriched himself through these means, too.
It may be said that the timing of the story was awfully advantageous to the Republican cause — and that would be right. Such a story emerging right before an election would have a major impact on a campaign; and obviously the Republicans wanted it to have such an effect. But in the end it did not — almost as if it never even happened.
Of course, the American public may well regard Hunter Biden’s personal life — quite rightly — as entirely a matter for himself. But these emails contained claims that in any healthy democracy would require serious investigation, implying monumental levels of corruption at the top.
The American Left, however, decided to pretend that the whole thing was either a Russian disinformation drop, that it was simply a matter of personal intrusion, or that there was otherwise nothing to see. With the help of social media, it smothered the story.
Twitter and Facebook decided to censor all references to the corruption scandal. It even locked the New York Post — America’s oldest newspaper — out of its own account and muted the Post’s story on their platforms. So except for the small number of people with unusual interest in hard-to-access stories, that portion of the country which gets its news from Twitter or Facebook did not actually know what the Biden laptop story was about. It simply doesn’t exist in that universe.
Half the country knows that the laptop scandal appears to contain questions about the Biden family’s search for funds. The other half either believes that the story is entirely fabricated or was content to pretend to believe that right up until the day of the election. Because whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, it was worth ignoring in order to see Donald Trump and his family leave the White House.
And now we have the biggest disagreement of all about reality. One portion of the country — some way over half — believes that Joe Biden won this election. Another portion — nowhere near a majority, but possibly a majority of people who voted Republican — believes that Donald Trump won. Trump himself is irresponsibly laying the groundwork for the next four years of his career by sticking to this claim. And while he may at some point say that he is stepping aside for the good of the nation — which would not entirely be in character — he and his many supporters are likely to hold to the idea that this election was stolen from them by a corrupt and rigged system.
The only counter that the Biden camp currently has is to pretend that this is wholly untrue and that there is no corruption in the US voting system, especially not when it comes to mail-in votes. And all the while, that crucial middle ground, those people who recognise that there certainly are voting irregularities in the American system and that, notwithstanding, Donald Trump lost the election, is vacated.
At such a moment, a society enters a crucially dangerous juncture. Because once we no longer share the same reality, we can no longer empathise with our opponents or compromise, and from that point on absolutely anything can happen.
The incoming president and vice-president will naturally state that they now seek to put an end to all this. In his first speech since the vote appeared to go his way Joe Biden invited the United States to end what he called the “grim era of demonisation”. The President-elect begged: “Let’s give each other a chance.”
And yet that is exactly what he and his party spent the last four years not doing. After the election of their adversary in 2016, the Democrats came up with a fake allegation about Russian interference in the election. They claimed that Trump and his family colluded with the Kremlin to get him into office, and when the official investigation into that bogus claim found it was indeed bogus, the same people then attempted to impeach the president on the basis of a phone call with his counterpart in Ukraine. And now they say that people’s families are off-limits and that it is time to come together? It is obvious that Biden and the Democrats only want the “era of demonisation” and divisiveness to come to an end so long as it does so on their terms.
What if the Republicans decide to do to the Bidens what the Democrats did to the Trumps, by delegitimising the election result and with it the democratic process. And why not? Since the Democrats spent four years pretending that the last election was fixed, why shouldn’t the Republicans spend the next four pretending that this one was, too? Even if they do not believe so — as many Democrats doubtless did not sincerely believe their own claims about 2016 — that’s the game now.
And if the Democrats can pursue Trump and his sons over claims of collusion with a foreign power, why should the Republicans not as a first order of business order an official investigation into Joe Biden and his family? Indeed why should they not announce (as Democrat operatives did after the last election) that they intend to impeach President Biden the moment he enters office?
All of this would be to play the game in kind — it would indeed be “fair” — and would have as much point to it as the Democrats’ Russian vendetta had between 2016 and 2020. It would also tear this country further apart.
The problem is that neither side is any longer dedicated to viewing the truth in neutral terms — and the Democrats are still at it. At the weekend, one former National Security Council spokesman for President Obama condemned Boris Johnson’s message of congratulation to Joe Biden. Calling the British Prime Minister a “shapeshifting creep”, Tommy Vietor said “We will never forget your racist comments about Obama.”
But Johnson never made any racist comments about Obama — the Prime Minister had remarked in 2016 that Obama’s far from warm attitude to Britain may have been influenced by his Kenyan heritage, something no one would find remarkable if applied to, say, an Irish-American like Joe Biden. Vietor had simply elevated his personal interpretation of Johnson’s words into the status of fact and then used them as a political weapon to use against the enemy. He does so at the moment of his own side’s victory and triumph, a lack of magnanimity that bodes ill for the future.
Trump has gone, but if anyone thinks the age of vitriol and division is over, then they are truly living in a different reality. If you liked the last four years of American politics, you’re going to love what comes next.
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SubscribeI enjoyed this article. I’m not sure how objective is the author’s assessment of Powell since he obviously regarded the general as a friend, but I do think this article provides insight into the circumstances surrounding Powell’s apparent support of the Iraq invasion. If nothing else, the author was an insider to those events.
I still remember discussing the Iraq invasion with a neighbor (sadly, now deceased) while we waited for the morning bus to work. She asked why we were invading and we briefly discussed the suggestion that Saddam was developing nukes. Then she asked, “So how are we going to get out?” I had no answer to that one. If two ordinary people at a bus stop could figure out the key flaw in the plan, why couldn’t the giant brains in the Pentagon, CIA and government do the same?
It’s not a ‘key flaw’ at all. You could say that about every war. The fact is, the winner of every war imposes a settlement on the losers. Obama chose not to do that, and withdraw unilaterally, throwing away nine years, hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. He did it for stupid ideological reasons, not reasons of state. But then the West has no idea how to do anything effectively any more.
Thank you. A beautiful and informative picture of an interesting historical figure.
I liked the human warmth of the article reminding us that those at the top are human too.
On the general theme of the Iraq invasion I would like to see discussion on the strategic opportunism on the part of the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11.
“was not much mentioned at the time, as far as I can recall, except perhaps in the vernacular press that I do not read.”
haha… I quit reading after this as the article is obviously weighty and would have a lot which interested me, but this throw away line was so fun I could not return to the serious stuff…….
‘British India, the Vernacular Press Act (1878)’ was to stop native News Papers spreading anti British sentiment, or even facts, and imposed a system of ‘Fact Checking’ Censorship exactly along the lines of our current News system, NYT, BBC, CNN, Google, Youtube, and Twitter do. Anything against the hard implicit Liberal Bias is deemed to not be NOT true, or Harmful, or Wrong, and thus canceled, and deleted, including the writers.
History rhyming as it were, although my guess is the writer is not using the words in this way, but more to mean the ‘Gutter Press, or more plebeian news outlets of those days. But a great fit – as the Social Media today is really the new Imperial Government Mouthpiece, and it completely censors any wrongness, true or not, against our Postmodernist Liberal Elites, just as the Act of 1878 did against the British Empire.
You really shouldn’t have quit reading the article.
This is a very apt characterization of Powell’s contribution to US military doctrine in the post Vietnam era. He was foremost among the officers who embraced the strategic implications of what the US Army once called ‘Lessons Learned’, e.g., that incremental escalation and nation building are dangerous whirlpool’s that are unsustainable.
Gulf War I demonstrated what military power could successfully achieve given reasonable objectives and the political will to exercise overwhelming force. It also vindicated the concept of a professional volunteer force. The rush to war in Iraq in 2003 was a political decision, not Powell’s, that both parties voted for with a few exceptions. I do not think he could have resisted it given the circumstances of the time.
Like Powell, Luttwak was a member of good standing in the deep state before time passed him by.
A third term Regan Presidency? Somewhat surprised nobody considered the 22nd amendment to the Constitution limiting an individual to two terms. It’s all in the detail.
Interesting article
I judge the character of people I encounter by the way that they treat ordinary people who they deal with during the day. I have always had respect for Powell as a man. On a flight in Asia, after his retirement, he and his wife sat behind me. I recognised him and nodded a greeting then sat down. Over the next few hours I could not help but hear his interaction with the cabin crew and his wife. Polite and respectful of others, – he was a brilliant self made man, but he was, as far as I could see, a gentleman.
Personally I find it amazing that Powell is classified as black. He has got slightly curly hair and a slightly less European nose than normal and that, at least in America, is all it takes. Interesting to see that Americans are still applying the “one drop” rule, even when an understanding that f genetics makes a mockery of racial classification in this way.
Considering his work covering up for and lying about US war crimes in Vietnam and Iraq, it would have been a bit hypocritical for Powell to complain about racism.
What tosh! What a poser, what an international, intellectual grifter! A celebration of inside the Beltway intrigue. We who live and work inside the Beltway are so smart, we know better.
Except you don’t, and I refer to J Bryant’s comment about the complete lack of an exit strategy.
This article is poorly written–what one would expect from an author with a Phd who has published exclusively nonsense.
Powell was a putz (Yiddish). He was a disgrace, a toady to the Bushies, someone who was a massive beneficiary of so-called “positive discrimination.” An incompetent political hack who only rose because of his skin color–which wasn’t even that black. Wasn’t there some Scottish in his background?
The first Gulf War was not so much a war as mass murder. And it was entirely unnecessary, as 1. Kuwait really is/was the 19th province of Iraq, despite some Brits randomly drawing lines in the sand last century, and 2. the US, through US Ambassador April Glaspie, also a putz, told Saddam right before to go ahead and invade Kuwait, not an American problem (think I’m kidding? look it up!); 3. The first President Bush initially tried to sell the war to protect the “valiant Kuwaiti people who were fighting so hard against the invaders…..” This didn’t work when news coverage of “the valiant Kuwaitis” were seen with their Mercedes loaded to the gills with TVs, gold and other kit fleeing, to Saudi, I think….” When reality undermined this lie, President Bush said, “OK, you were right, this really is a war about oil,” and it was also about protecting the Saudis–great friends of the Bush family (See, 9/11). Trivia Question: Saudi Arabia changed its national anthem at this time in recognition that if not for the USA they would be speaking Arabic with Iraqi accents. What was the new anthem you ask? A: Onward Christian Soldiers.
The first Gulf War led to the second Gulf War, also mass murder. “Saddam tried to kill my Daddy….”
Powell was a disgrace and a coward. Can we stop with the hagiographies? He could have resigned when it counted, as the US and maybe the world was, unaccountably, under his spell at the time, as it would later be with another fake, Obama. Powell’s resignation would have stopped the second Gulf War, and changed the course of history. But he didn’t. Coward.
Rot in hell!
A bit harsh but who knows you may have a point.
Cheers, mate, and thank you for keeping an open mind. You might see my thoughts below.
Good heavens got out of the wrong side of bed or is Friday spleen day in your house?
With respect, I posted much of the same information on another CP obituary, (hagiography?), and it was quite well received. A bit gobsmacked that this had such a different reaction. I even copied “rot in hell” from another commenter, because I was afraid of the censor, but since his post made it, why not?
No apologies: I said it, I meant it, I stand behind it. The major difference is that this one attacks this foreign grifter as much as CP. Zhalimid Khalizad is another example of exactly the type that America all too often falls for–an Afghan poser/grifter/fraud and neocon who ingratiated himself with the Bushies and helped them start wars and commit war crimes. Does anyone think he was really representing America’s interests in the Middle East?
I don’t.
Another example is Orthodox Jew Martin Indyk, who became America’s Ambassador to Israel 15 minutes after becoming a US citizen. Does anyone think he was representing America’s interests in the Middle East?
I don’t.