In the small American town where I currently live, sixty miles north of New York, in Putnam County, at the foot of the Appalachians, a region of lakes, mountains and forests, the big news of the week is the opening of the wild turkey hunting. There are so many turkeys in this wooded region that hunting is only allowed briefly, for fifteen days, to avoid slaughter. Furthermore, to give turkeys a chance of survival, they can only be hunted with a crossbow. So I am surrounded by neighboring hunters dressed in camouflage suits and armed with medieval crossbows. But are they talking about the elections? The truth is, not much. My community is overwhelmingly Republican, all white, Christian, and fairly conservative. The only public monuments in the place, apart from the individual houses – there are no apartment blocks – are the evangelical churches, which I have given up trying to count, plus two rival synagogues, Orthodox versus liberal, for a tiny Jewish population. The few ethnic minorities represented are passing artisans, all of Mexican origin. It is impossible to do without them because they take care of the gardens and houses, but they do not live there and the local school does not admit their children. Republican voters, therefore, but not necessarily fans of Donald Trump. In reality, most of my fellow citizens clearly distinguish between the extravagant character who asked them for their vote and their political tradition, which goes far beyond the presidential elections of the moment.
For most citizens in the United States, voting Republican does not necessarily mean being a Trumpist; It means above all to be conservative, that is, to express attachment to an identity, to an idealized country that would remain immutable, protected against excessive immigration and even more protected against the always inopportune “interventions” of the public administration. The only thing that Donald Trump has done is surf very skillfully on this identity conservatism and this visceral anti-statism: the old debate between the right and the left has been replaced, and not only in the United States, by an alternation that revolves around this notion of national, cultural, religious and ethnic identity.
When describing what is happening around me at this moment, I am constantly struck by how different the perception is when experienced on the ground or analyzed from afar, from the armchair in Paris or Madrid, or even from what read or listen to correspondents sent to the United States; These are only in the big cities and for a very short time, immersed in the pools of the left-wing media, without true roots in the population. I have not read a single article in the international press about turkey hunting, which is a hallmark. Nor is there any mention of the fact that the United States is increasingly turning towards the traditionalist right, that the majority is increasingly hostile to any form of European-style socialism and to what is known as ‘wokism’, an ideological and dictatorial leftism.
Trump is the image of this conservative turn, as was Ronald Reagan in his day. Nor is it ever discussed that the election of the president of the United States is just one of many elections, certainly the most important for the rest of the world, but not necessarily for American citizens. Because here we vote all the time for all public offices: mayors, councilors, sheriffs, judges, school administrators, guardians of the landscape. All of them play a more decisive role in the daily life of Putnam County than the president, a distant figure in the geographical and social sense. There is not a month when the lawn in front of each house is not dotted with portraits of candidates for one office or another. Participation is usually higher in these local elections than in presidential elections.
Donald Trump has won the elections and his party has taken over the Senate. A future majority in Congress and the Senate will be at least as decisive as the White House. But is it really necessary to worry, or even be scared, as much as we do in Europe? Is it as historically decisive as the candidates and their propagandists would have us believe? Could this really be the last American election before the country descends into fascism? It seems to me that this dramatization orchestrated by the Democratic left is a huge hoax. Regardless of the outcome, in just two years Americans will renew their seats in the Capitol, and in four years the president will be gone. The virtue and paradox of democracy, as Karl Popper stated, is that it does not always allow the best candidate to be elected, but it does promise his removal on a fixed date, known in advance and without resorting to the guillotine or civil war.
In the current media dramatization, we also forget that almost no head of state or government puts their program into practice, but rather they run after the events imposed on them: the terrorist attacks of 2001, the Covid epidemic in 2020, inflation that does not depend on them, unemployment that obeys global cycles, or scientific and technological innovations, such as social networks and artificial intelligence, that revolutionize the panorama. In all these unpredictable circumstances, the leader reacts by pretending to act. Do you remember Donald Trump’s first term? What memorable decision did you make? He talked a lot, something that has gotten worse, but he worked little, and spent the day watching television, preferably Fox News. The only significant initiative he undertook, in reaction to an unforeseeable event, was to massively finance research into a vaccine against Covid: operation ‘Warp speed’ [a toda velocidad]. It is a success that he has never boasted about, but that we owe him. We have forgotten the rest.
The United States is certain to remain the dominant economic, scientific, and military power for the next four years. Washington’s military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower called it, will continue to rule the world. Better than if it were Beijing or Moscow. And Trump will be able to take credit, even though he has nothing to do with it; That’s called playing politics.
#Guy #Sorman #good #day #turkey #hunting
