THE UNITED STATES OF ANGER
By Gavin Esler
This shouldn’t happen. Timely books such as BBC reporter Gavin Esler’s survey of the political climate in America in the mid-1990s have an extremely limited shelf life. In most cases they are only slightly more enduring than the essays found in weekly magazines. So why return to Esler’s book now, over twenty years after it was published? In part, idle curiosity. But also to see how evident, or even obvious, the roots were of the calamities to come. Were we warned?
As I’ve argued before, the primary (and perhaps only) ideological constant shared by today’s political right is their hatred of government. Whether you’re a billionaire looking for tax breaks and deregulation, a libertarian with a hatred of the nanny state, or a survivalist eagerly anticipating the last days of civilization, the government has become not just an obstacle but a demonic adversary. This is the tie that binds together what Noam Chomsky calls the Republican party’s primary or real constituency (wealth and corporate power) with its popular or voting constituency (the rubes). It is also the force that unites the widespread anger, anxiety, and apathy Esler finds throughout his travels across the nation, the way “the US government is now routinely blamed by many of its citizens for every ill which befalls them.”
Esler begins his book with an anecdote of a woman vacationing in Florida who is told to address her complaints of an alligator in her backyard to a government official. “‘Pah,’ she exploded in disgust. ‘What good did government ever do anybody?’ The word ‘government’ was delivered like a swear-word.” The same observation is made when Esler travels to New Hampshire and meets another such figure:
Choo Choo Caron folds his arms across his chest and purses his lips angrily at the mere mention of the government in Washington. Like the woman tourist in Florida, and countless other taxpayers throughout this book, for Choo Choo “government” is almost a swear word.
The “red scare” of the Cold War had been replaced by the “fed scare” of the 1990s, and not just among the lunatic fringe. “The angriest Americans [that is, angry at the government] turn out to be neither poor nor uneducated nor from racial minorities. They are the white, well-educated middle-classes.”
The result of this is both the delegitimizing of government and the “search for a third party, an independent force of ‘anyone but a politician,’” to run for president. This has, Esler writes, “led voters into eccentric blind alleys,” throwing up figures like the billionaires Ross Perot and Steve Forbes and the television personality Pat Robertson. In the future, he prophesies, such faux-populist figures “will seek to bring about the collapse of one or other of the main political parties. Eventually they will succeed. A genuine third force will destroy either the Republicans or the Democrats.” Chalk one up for the forecaster.
Meanwhile, in the blue corner, we have Hillary Clinton. Esler: “The Clintons [note the plural] are despised by a vocal minority of the angriest Americans well beyond any failures of specific policies” or political successes. “It is difficult to think of a president in modern times who inspires quite as much personal loathing as Bill Clinton does. . . . He and his wife are symbols of the ‘Bad Generation’.”
This, I need to emphasize, was twenty years ago. Such feelings do not go away, especially when their objects remain prominently in the public eye. They ripen. Such was the politician who would want to run against the “third force” of Donald Trump.
Esler also had some ideas at the time as to what issues would come to dominate American politics. Immigration in the 1990s “had again joined the angriest issues dividing Americans from each other, as divisive as race relations and with an explosive potential to bring about serious political dislocation.” In a “malign scenario” he draws of a possible future he describes how “immigration will be the most notable scapegoat for ‘stealing American jobs’” and may fuel scaremongers “into demanding solutions along the protectionist and isolationist lines.” “The shock [of relative American decline] will quickly spill over into foreign policy, with the search for new enemies. The Chinese? The European Union? Mexico? Arabs?”
How about all of the above.
As noted, this is Esler’s malign scenario. He does, however, express confidence that, somehow, the centre will hold and America will not cease to be good and great. With hindsight, however, his darker imaginings have more purchase.
The malign scenario is, as its worst, very frightening indeed. America will come apart, increasingly divided on class and racial lines, staggering under a top-heavy bureaucracy, with an out-of-touch governing elite incapable of reform, buffeted by extremists, religious bigots and unscrupulous populists offering simplistic solutions to a shrinking middle class fearful of change.
Fear of change is, in fact, one of the likeliest guarantors of radical, disruptive change. A society can adapt and evolve or it can face revolution and collapse. In not choosing to make a choice a choice is made. Then apathy, as Esler shows, quickly turns to anger. Which will come too late.
Notes:
Review first published online May 21, 2019.
goodreports.net 