In the present situation, I'll depart from my original intention of discussing the continuity and discontinuity emerging in the Trump Presidency. Everyday now, everyone I see proclaims to hold dear "American Values", but everyone in America and the rest of the world doesn't understand or experience these values in the same way. So I'll take a different path for now.

All Trump versus counter-Trump words and actions have become a binary code made up of many sequences of ones and zeros. As such, it seems the reality of the present has become fragments of our imagination. Alongside unleashed killer drones, right now what else hovers over our daily burden? Built with what “American Values”? I can’t tell. And yet, I can tell with certainty that any malignant conviction without humanity always ends up with Hiroshima, Dachau, Agent Orange, Surat and other “killing fields”. And for that matter, the American Civil War as well.

The new President’s first “anti-terror operation” conducted by Navy SEALs in central Yemen was not a dream about surreal shrapnel. Here the values were clear. More than a dozen "bad guys" were killed in the battle while one American SEAL lost his life. All news reports I read say that the particular “mission” was in the making for months and the old Pres Obama’s people had started the cannon ball rolling, so to speak. In fact then, Trump simply carried out Obama’s plan against those “bad” Muslims. Those “evildoers” as GW Bush used to call them. And, the reality of all such operations has included the slaughter of many “good” Muslims, who should have had no problem seeking refuge in the US had they lived longer.

About this incident, Eric Schmitt of NYTimes writes, “After initially denying that there were any civilian casualties, American officials said they were assessing reports that women and children had died in the attack.” (NYT, 1/30/2017) These victims must not have shared the American values of our Navy commandos. Details about this raid are now published all over the news media.

Introspection is enlightening—most of the time. After the massacre in Charleston, South Carolina—the killing of nine Black worshipers in their own church by a hateful, white supremacist, I had written a piece to put this in context of our real history. According to the killer, he was simply carrying out a task ordained by nature and fueled by patriotism, without passion or vengeance. (At his trial, the young man proclaimed he was perfectly sane and simply carried out a martyr’s duty.)

The Charleston butchery was followed by America’s preoccupation with the Confederate flag—its meaning, its place within history and tradition. In such circumstances it would be wise, I thought, to recall a few details from the Americanization of America. The values thing.

I decided to choose our most violent event, America’s bloodiest war at home, looked at some Civil War stories, written by candlelight perhaps, right next to thundering canons and dismembered warriors. The questions that looms large for me in the present discussion are: what indeed were the separatists—the Confederate States—fighting for? What is this “tradition” which many Southerners were clamoring to uphold in 2015? Why would anyone wish to fly high the Confederate flag today? So I looked again at a speech Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy gave in the state of Georgia, in 1861, explaining the Southern cause. Here’s some of it verbatim, along with some summation.

“The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. [Thomas] Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the ‘rock upon which the old Union would split.’ He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.”

Stephens goes on to argue that Jefferson and his friends did not fully grasp the eternal truth upon which the institution of slavery was founded. They were ambivalent about slavery because they knew the institution was unavoidable and even intrinsic to the formation of American democracy. Thus the first American Constitution guaranteed its existence and these founders were themselves slave-owners. On the other hand, Stephens argues, the Jefferson crowd thought the enslavement of Africans may be morally, socially, even politically indefensible. So, they surmised—more wished than reasoned—that “somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.”

They dared not incorporate this view in the constitution which did guarantee the rights of slave-owners because of the “common sentiment of the day”. But the ideas of Jefferson and company “were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the ‘storm came and the wind blew.’ ”

What then was the Confederate solution?

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. [my emphasis]

"This our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth. [my emphasis] This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics … They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just—but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails …”

This truth, with which the South is armed, is unique also because it is the truth of a natural order, and not the unfortunate subjugation of one class of people of the same race by another that has been previously found in human history. “With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.”

This is part of God’s plan whatever his reason may be. “It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of his ordinances, or to question them. For his own purposes, he has made one race to differ from another, as he has made ‘one star to differ from another star in glory.’ ” Therefore, concludes Stephens, the Confederate cause is just and, in the end, must triumph.

Let me add a bit from the European past here. Ernest Renan—the 19th Century philosopher from Brittany and champion of the French empire—writes, quite earnestly of course. A complementary bit I think to Stephens's thinking.

“The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity. With us, the common man is always a déclassé nobleman, his heavy hand is better suited to handling the sword than the menial tool. Rather than work, he chooses to fight, that is, he returns to his first estate" [my emphasis].

How much of this kind of thinking has really disappeared from the Western World, including America?

I dwell on this discourse some because the theory of “natural slavery” goes back to Aristotle, and was closely involved in the Spanish conquest of indigenous peoples of the Americas. The difference in the United States was that from the outset the slave labor force of the plantations came from Africa, while the indigenous people—the natives— (referred to as savages in the Declaration of Independence) were by and large uprooted, relocated and exterminated.

Secondly, Jefferson and friends were themselves slave owners, and as such it is not clear at all that they agreed that slavery was unnatural. Unfortunate perhaps, but not decisively unnatural. These men may have wished that as an institution, slavery would eventually wither away, but not necessarily because slaves and their masters were of the same species. Anyone who thinks otherwise should consult Jefferson’s only book Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1784.

Here I’ll note a few points Jefferson makes as he considers the difference the two races, whites and blacks. Obviously, the first notable difference is skin color. White is better than black because it is nuanced, while black is monotonous.

“Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of color in the one, preferable to the eternal monotony, which reigns in countenances, that immovable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?” [my emphasis]

TJ speculates too: “The circumstance of superior beauty is thought worthy of attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?” Was it then Jefferson had several children with his slave mistress Sally Hemmings—as a personal breeding experiment?

It is not apparent to me that discussion of slavery in America consistently notes the “double oppression” of enslaved women. (Scholars pontificate about these matters of course, but most of us don’t read their stuff.) These women were victims of a range of sexual “exploitation” by their masters, not unimagined at all in contemporary sexual violence, but carefully denied by our culture. The truth is that the absolute power over their existence did not allow slave women to be subjects—in mind or body. Every encounter was “consensual” by definition—from seduction and coercion to multiple rapes and other forms of violence.

Naturally, many slave women gave birth to children fathered by their masters—like Sally Hemmings. This phenomenon—predatory sexual practice of slave masters that led to mulatto children, was lamented by Mary Chestnut, wife of a wealthy South Carolina slave holder in her journal on March 18, 1861—three days before Alexander Stephens gave the speech I have cited here. Chestnut was a loyal Southerner, and her condemnation of slavery was driven more by her disaffection with the moral degeneration of slave owners than the extinguishing of slave lives.

She muses: “Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system and wrong and iniquity... Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household—but those in her own [house] she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think … Alas for the men! No worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.”

Back to Jefferson the intellectual. He proceeds to compare whites and blacks along the faculties of memory, reason and imagination. “In memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one [black] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigation of Euclid...” I suppose TJ had found a number of Euclideans among the “unenlightened” white farmers and laborers of his time! And, to no one's surprise, “in imagination they [blacks] are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.”

Blacks produce no art or artifacts compared to, for example, American Indians, but Jefferson acknowledges that “in music they are more generally gifted than whites, with accurate ears for tune and time. But that does not mean they will ever produce intricate melody or “complicated harmony.” And finally, “misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.” Earlier Jefferson had argued that “their griefs are transient,” and “in general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”

In conclusion, Jefferson advances “as a suspicion only [my emphasis], that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Once again, he urges us to look at nature out there: “it is not against experience to suppose, that difference species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.”

If we now revisit the “natural slavery” contention of Stephens, what seems to remain as a decisive heritage in America is not only the conflict between ideas upholding freedom and ideologies defending enslavement, but a more persistent yet less articulated conflict between the absolute conviction of Mr. Stephens and others under the Confederate flag, and the “suspicion” expressed by Mr. Jefferson and internalized by millions of white and non-white Americans of successive generations.

Where it may be inconvenient or inadvisable to articulate this “suspicion” about other Americans, it is easily transformed into some form of overt or covert xenophobia. Like the “sand-niggers” of Iraq or the war between “round-eyes” and “slant-eyes” in Vietnam.

This way of restructuring the world has remained intact all the way through Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, the Obama presidency, multiple assassinations, tradition of the flags, militarization of the police, accepted hate speech of a President, life without hope in the prison system at home and refugee camps out there—and… and I'm afraid, on and on for many years to come. Only a new political vision with a new way of acting politically can change the “many years” to only a few.

I’ll consider a related concept next. The interpretation of “American Exceptionalism” along similar lines. All this with the contention that without a sound theoretical/political framework and an honest look at history, it will be impossible to derail Trumpian policies in particular and neo-fascist politics in general. Marching in the streets is necessary and commendable, and my generation did a lot of that. But public demonstrations in support of our current political system is not enough if we are to get beyond any remaining nostalgia for the two-party prison house that will surely paralyze us in the end.