'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.