'I Am Disappointed, Fearful, Numb.' Pulitzer Prize Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen Reflects on Trump 'Racially Purifying' the US
The acclaimed novelist's essay on the Republicans' attempt to take us back to the 19th century – and where he finds hope.
Donald Trump does not represent something new in the United States. Instead, he is part of a fundamental contradiction that the United States was born from, a contradiction that has never gone away. On the one hand, the beauty of democracy, opportunity, freedom, and equality (for some). On the other hand, the brutality that made that beauty possible: colonization, genocide, enslavement, occupation, and war. Some willingly embrace the brutality, others are willing to look away from it. That is why the Democratic Party’s loss of its moral compass on Gaza and calling what Israel is doing a genocide was not simply a “single issue,” but a symptom of the rot within a party that hoped that the beauty of multiculturalism and diversity would somehow be enough to overcome the brutality.
So long as that contradiction between beauty and brutality is not resolved, it will return, and the country – and the world – will be haunted by the original sins that made this country and are still a part of this country. Too many Americans benefit from the contradiction, which has shaped the US into what it is today: a military-industrial complex that is profitable for some, and a global hegemonic power that justifies itself through the narratives of American Exceptionalism and the American Dream.
Trump and Kamala Harris do not disagree about these narratives, or about the necessity, even divine inevitability, of overwhelmingly dominant American power. As part of the incumbent party in the White House, Harris could hardly be pessimistic about the current state of affairs. Instead, she sought to fine-tune the operations of American power – domestically and globally – and hence turned to the idea of joy, implying that Americans just needed to overcome any gloominess and simply reject Trump’s spectacular politics of demonization and hate. While those politics should be refuted, Democratic legitimacy was undermined by the other spectacles that the Democratic Party helped to perpetuate and had a hand in creating: the obliteration of Gaza and the bombing of Lebanon, as well as the highly visible presence of the unhoused in many American cities, the most direct reminder that the neoliberalism championed by Democrats (and Republicans) had failed too many Americans.
Trumpian Nostalgia
Trump’s solutions to these complex problems are simplistic but evidently effective, tapping as he did into nostalgia. His campaign slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Take America Back” both gestured at a Golden Age America found somewhere between 1882 and 1942. 1882 marked the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, whereby Chinese immigrants became the nation’s first illegal immigrants, occurring during the eras of Jim Crow and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. 1942 saw a unified America and the rise of the Greatest Generation, who embarked on the last, uncomplicated Good War even as Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. signed Executive Order 9066 and mandated the incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps.
In between these years, the Gilded Age and its unrestrained power of the rich happened, which many of the billionaires of today clearly long for. And while women had earned the right to vote in 1920, the disruptions of the 1950s and 1960s had not yet arrived: Civil Rights, Black Power, the anti-war movement and the counterculture, and the rise of ever-more vocal feminists, queer and trans people, Latinos, Asian Americans, and Native Americans. In seeking to roll back these gains, Trump expresses a nostalgia for a simpler, more unified, more powerful, more profitable past, with fewer upstarts and fewer critiques of whiteness, maleness, and straightness, along with muted doubts about capitalism and militarism.
But nostalgia literally means homesickness, a term invented to describe the melancholia of soldiers who had spent too much time away from home. Nostalgia could kill its victims, most likely in a slow manner, and perhaps that is one way to read America’s gradual decline. By “America,” I mean not only the United States but the trademark and sales pitch that the United States has sold to its own people and to the world through its appropriation of the name of America for itself, at the expense of all the other American countries. The value of that American brand has declined, however, with the US finding its global hegemony contested from multiple sides and with Americans themselves pessimistic.
Trump’s nostalgia is an attempt at rebranding, with the implied promise of returning to a 19th-century America where white men were white men. The threats of detention camps and mass deportation are a naked gesture at racially purifying the United States, a fantasy that ignores the economic reality that the United States needs the easily exploitable (most likely poor and working-class immigrants from nonwhite countries) to work its lowest-paid jobs. But this is a capitalist system whose logic is ultimately about the maximum extraction of labor for the most minimal amount of pay, which damages not just economically disadvantaged people of color but also white people, from the poor and working class to the precarious middle class.
Nostalgia assumes that a return to a more patriarchal white supremacist society is possible, but if it is not, then the slow deaths of a disenfranchised, white working and middle class will continue, addicted as they are to a vision of a beautiful and brutal America. The slow deaths of white people and white dreams are simply the blowback of a system that has already inflicted violence and death at disproportionate rates on the nonwhite. But racism is only one component of the settler colonialism that founded the country, a system whose goal is the maximum extraction of profit, whether that be from exploited bodies or the exploited earth. If being white, male, and straight was some measure of protection from profit extraction in the past, it increasingly no longer is for an ever-larger population of white people, most notably white men.
Lures and Glamour of Capitalism
Settler colonialism also requires patriarchy and homophobia, which is why Trumpian nostalgia also demands that women know their place, and why queer and trans people are so threatening. The heteronormative family reproduces not just itself but also a cultural system that is hierarchical and which funnels benefits to the patriarchs and their allies, which also includes a share of people of color. The blame or responsibility for a Trump victory mostly goes to these Trump voters and their willingness to dip into the deep and poisoned wells of racism, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, not realizing that they, too, will drink from these waters. These waters are also contaminated by the country’s weakness for spectacle, wealth, individualism, and anti-intellectualism, which appeal not only to Trump voters but to the entire population, conditioned by the lures and glamour of capitalism.
In the last few decades, the Democratic Party has offered little resistance to the excesses of capitalism and its basis in the settler colonialism that provided the lands and the labor for American wealth-making. Under the neoliberalism that has been lauded by the Democrats, the party has allowed itself and the country to move ever further right, as the Republican Party has moved the center in its direction. This is a losing proposition for the Democratic Party, whose promises may appear hollow to many Americans who see its leaders as an elite blend of the Ivy League, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the New York Times. How is someone living from paycheck to paycheck supposed to distinguish between a Republican or a Democrat when both will take six-figure honoraria to deliver talks to investment banking firms?
During these last few decades, the most urgent voices on the left have said intersectionality is what matters, which includes the poor, the working-class, the middle class. Intersectionality is a Black feminist concept from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, and insisting on intersectionality is important, especially as some in the Democratic Party and among the liberal classes argue that “identity politics” is really to blame for distracting the left from focusing on the real issue of class and the economy. This vision is as white and as nostalgic as Trump’s, which relies heavily on the identity politics of straight white masculinity, which has been unmarked and invisible until the opposition of women, people of color, and queer people made them visible.
I am disappointed, fearful, numb. But if our dire situation makes me pessimistic, I am also optimistic in knowing that previous American generations and populations … have faced much worse, and yet fought through the contradiction to survive.
As the theorist Stuart Hall put it, “race is the modality in which class is lived.” That has been true since settlers killed Indigenous people for their land and put enslaved Africans to work on that land. There is no separating class and the economy from race, racism, and white supremacy, just as there is no separating the capitalism of the United States from its violence, conducted against its own minorities and against much of the nonwhite world outside of our borders, realized most vividly at this moment in the genocide in Gaza.
It is the liberal-to-centrist part of the Democratic Party that has helped to fetishize the military and the wealthy, ignoring both the urgency of demilitarization and the need for, at minimum, economic redistribution. Harris failed because she, but also the entirety of the Democratic Party mainstream, were not capable of articulating how all of these projects have to go forward hand in hand: defending and elevating the economic interests of those who have less; representing the many different peoples of the country and their rights; opposing militarism, conquest, tyranny, and genocide. The left is based on solidarity, and solidarity should have no exceptions, but the Democratic Party has made too many exceptions, from its lack of willingness to more forcefully redirect wealth to those who have less to its inability to defend Palestinians. These exceptions have finally caught up to the party, and the contradiction of beauty and brutality has tightened even further as a result.
I am disappointed, fearful, numb. But if our dire situation makes me pessimistic, I am also optimistic in knowing that previous American generations and populations of certain kinds have faced much worse, and yet fought through the contradiction to survive. I also find solace in knowing that unlike 2016 to 2020, when I allowed my emotions to be dictated by Trump, I feel more stable, if just as committed to opposing him and everything he represents. Reflecting his rage, cruelty, and pettiness only makes us worse. Feeling lonely, isolated, and defeated is what he wants from us. Get out there and join an organization if you haven’t already. Start one if one doesn’t exist for you. Be visible and vocal, by yourself and with others. Work against Trump and everything he represents from a place of solidarity, love, and justified anger.
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Thank you for speaking such an insightful truth. Can you please send it the current president and his administration? I don think they understand.
He takes us through the historical scope of the American imperium with crystal lucidity. As a person of the global south, I woke up from my materialistic slumber and naive trust in the democratic party and in my desert and shifting sands, I find solace in Nguyen’s writing.