The rhetoric of the Trump versus anti-Trump discourse is inescapable, however much we may want to steer clear of bombastic certitudes. Without trivializing the current political battle, I find a degree of solace in visualizing episodes of Spy vs. Spy comic strips as I move around in my home town. At least for the time being. For example, the sudden discovery of “an independent judiciary” is a lesson in hypocrisy for me. I mean, at the State level, judges are elected by both partisan and non-partisan elections, selected by state legislatures, and appointed by Governors. Federal judges across the board and at all levels are appointed by the President, and confirmed by the Senate.

All appointments may be partisan and it is easy to check who were appointed as District Court and Circuit Court judges by which POTUS. These are the judges who are in headliner courts ruling on Trump’s travel ban order. The next step is SCOTUS, which as we well know is a highly partisan body. Otherwise why bother about the rightness or wrongness of decisions like Roe v. Wade, Gore v. Bush, flip-flop on the Voting Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education, and so on? Courts are politically charged at all levels, and whichever side loses a decision condemns the court/judges involved as “activist”.

If the independence of the judiciary is not a fantasy, then we should care who replaces Scalia on SCOTUS based only on legal expertise, clear understanding of precedence, principled decisions made in lower courts, general honesty, etc.

But that is not the real world of politics and government in the US. Is it?

I recall too Andrew Jackson’s notorious words: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it,” in response to the Marshall Court’s 1832 decision in Worcester v. Georgia. The ruling restored a degree of sovereignty for American Indians (Cherokees) in so far as they were to deal directly with the federal government. In defiance of the Court’s ruling, Jackson went about merrily uprooting and relocating Cherokees from their habitat in Georgia. Who was to stop him?

We need to be clear about politics, precedence, procedure and power, no?

About my last essay on “American Values”. Thanks to everyone who wrote comments and more. My principal argument was that if we appropriate these values in arbitrary ways then everything can be in the pot or nothing. Rather, we need to discover the contradictions embedded in these values and then work with them. Don’t matter who we are. Therefore, Jefferson’s personal contradictions represent in fact the nation’s contradictions.

Our task is not to itemize the “good things” and “bad things” we have inherited/internalized, or what leaders and politicians perpetuate daily, but to understand the totality of our condition. A condition fraught with immense inequality in all spheres of American life that must be changed. In the present context, Donald, his allies and adversaries all share the same check list of “values”, as exemplified by the recent SEAL operation in Yemen. The quibbling has been about the fruits of this specific undertaking, not the continuation of America’s “cleansing” policy.

Also, if I wasn’t clear about thus, it was the system of slavery, conjoining two classes—slaveholders/plantation owners and slaves/plantation workers—that gave rise to both the Confederate ideology (what Stephens said) and before that Jefferson’s ambivalence—his “suspicions” about the true nature of slaves. In the end, slaves could be free only by ending the system of slavery, not by producing more generous and compassionate slave owners and well-mannered slaves.

Exceptional or not, the entire American experience must be seen in the same way.

From the decimation of the native population and hardship of English settlers, import of slaves and the war of independence, the power of American workers expressed through trade unions and their near collapse today, the immense violence in every historical turn, as well as an abiding pacifism that has remained an undercurrent in our history, and so on. This experience cannot be explained by truisms like “nation of immigrants” or deflected by “identity politics.” We’ll confront these categories again and again I’m sure.

I take counsel and comfort from the words of the German philosopher and social theorist Theodor Adorno. Perhaps that’s a generational thing. In any event, I tend to quote often and with vigor one sentence from Adorno’s essay on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Theory is not free to choose good-naturedly that which suits it in the course of history and to omit all the rest.”

Obviously, this injunction doesn’t apply only to “theory”, as most of us understand it, but in fact to any consideration of historical, political, social and strategic discussion and debate we would like to see in these confusing times where thought and action must merge.

[Incidentally, a must read for anyone who wants to examine the rise of Donald Trump are excerpts from The Authoritarian Personality, vol. I of Studies in Prejudice, by Adorno and his co-authors. Easily available online]

Before thinking about the American experience I wish to describe, I want to take a short detour through the present situation in France. I believe it is imperative for us to keep track of the rise of French reactionary nationalism as exemplified by Marine Le Pen of the National Front, now the most prominent candidate for the French Presidency. Her success is very much a product of severe contradictions in French life the old guard (The Socialist Party coalition and the Republican Party coalition) has not been able to resolve. Major factors are the demise of industrial capitalism within France and the concomitant job loss on the one hand, just like our rust belt, and the sequence of terrorist acts and flow of refugees marked by the national origin of the “new immigrants” on the other.

But this newly redefined not-one-of-us “other” in France is not new at all. It is the identity brought to France from its colonial days—from North Africa, Indo-China and other French colonies. Like other European powers, France practiced bourgeois democracy at home and imperialist rule in the colonies. A colony like Algeria, which fought for its liberation at one time, subsequently brought to the mother country “post-colonial immigrants” many of whose children, experiencing the brunt of injustice and discrimination, of all forms of “thingification” really, have turned now to essentially a form of nihilism.

There is sadness for many of us as we remember the uncompromising Jean-Paul Sartre in this context. Sartre’s commitment to anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles evolved, quite logically, to his fierce opposition to French colonialism and equally fierce support of the Algerian war of independence. His denunciation of French militarism (including the use of torture) in Algeria and his public and illegal support of the revolutionary violence of the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) and of French army deserters, made many French citizens very unhappy. Algeria wasn’t just a French colony, Algeria was a part of France. That was a popular slogan during this time when one day Sartre’s Paris apartment was fire-bombed.

My father read us a news story from the French press which said that in spite of the intimidation and terror let loose on Sartre, when he was interviewed following a trip to South America, he boldly asserted that had he the power, knowledge and resources to do so, he would supply arms and ammunition to the Algerian rebels. This did not sit well with many tri-color waving French “patriots” and they appealed to General de Gaulle—who was the French President then—to put Sartre in his place-- in prison. Although there was no love lost between de Gaulle and Sartre, the General is reported to have answered, “I can’t do that. Sartre is France.”

Unfortunately, in the US today, there’s neither a passionate world-intellectual like Sartre, nor a rebel thinker who is respected by even some of our generals. To the extent we have produced the likes of I.F. Stone, Daniel Ellsberg, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, by and large they have been vilified and ostracized as “un-American”. In the present political debate, their kind of thinking seem to be singularly absent. Perhaps I am just ignorant.

And long before Trump, Edward Snowden was forced into exile and Glenn Greenwald made a persona non grata forever. Their criticism of the State has made them eternally un-American, regardless of who sits on the Presidential throne. And how do we remember critics from the past? How do we remember Richard Wright, Michael Gold, Agnes Smedley, John Dos Passos, or for that matter Charlotte Gilman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Langston Hughes? With a nod? With a hint of reverence?

A friend reminded me of the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, in which “Buzz” Windrip defeats FDR to become President, having promoted a return to tradition, patriotism and greatness. “Not too well written, but predictive,” says my friend.

“…Foreshadowed Donald Trump’s authoritarian appeal” writes someone at Salon.com, I just discovered.

I'll continue with the next part of my essay on "American Exceptionalism" with the experience of our separation from the rest of the world-- with our stories.