Sometime around 2010, I received one of the more unusual requests from an author*. I was visiting her in Dallas and, as I often did, checked into my usual hotel in Turtle Creek and planned to book a ticket for the Saturday performance at the Morton H Myerson Symphony Center. My author’s mother, who was visiting her family, was keen on music and her daughter thought she would enjoy the company of a passing Englishman and a little Beethoven. So, I collected my ‘date’ from home, invited her to dinner at my hotel and then on to the symphony hall.
You may already be wondering what this anecdote has to do with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Well, my author’s mother turned out to be a senior, and charming but formidable, official in the Pentagon, responsible for safety in the US Navy. She explained to me that she, and she alone, a civilian, had the authority to order an officer, a captain or admiral, even the Secretary of Defence (at the time Donald Rumsfeld) not to do something that imperilled the safety of a ship and its crew. The only exception to this authority was deployment for the purposes of defence (which obviously had safety implications, but which was, after all, the very purpose of the navy). I asked her if she really had the unquestioned authority to order Donald Rumsfeld – not a man inclined to be told he could not do something – to prevent a particular ship from sailing, for example. She replied that she did indeed have that power and that Rumsfeld would be obliged to comply. We spent a pleasant evening of dinner, conversation and Beethoven (a rather second-rate performance she thought).
The point, and relevance of my story, is that here was one of the more unexpected checks and balances built into American public life at all levels, either by the Founding Fathers themselves or by legislation at some level of government or the judiciary. If my dinner companion judged something to be contrary to safety rules, she had the authority and the integrity to prevent it, and those who she instructed to desist recognized that it was their duty to comply. Nobody had a license to do something simply because they wished to.
By the time Donald Trump was elected I had spent 40 years living or working in the USA and had got to know, the country pretty well. I told my dejected friends that Trump might be a man of appalling character and utterly unsuitable to be President, but that the many checks and balances of the system would severely constrain what he could do. Well, January 6, 2021 very nearly proved me wrong: as one British friend observed, what stood between Trump and a coup d’état was his incompetence. And, of course, the scruples and backbone of Mike Pence subverted Trump’s plan, for his Vice President phoned every living Vice President to ask them what he should so – they all told him to refuse to comply with Trump’s request to overrule the Electoral College and declare Trump to be re-elected. Subsequently, of course, Trump has gone still further by eliciting from a Supreme Court stacked with hand-picked ideologues an opinion that a President has substantial immunity from prosecution. Thus, a President like Trump, whose guiding principle is that he should be able to do whatever he wishes, can ignore many checks and balances.
From my decades of experience of the USA and its peoples, I had come to respect their commitment to free speech, to a commendable commitment to professional standards, duty and doing the right thing (I am thinking especially of friends in the military, the library profession, educators etc), to protections of rights and of democratic institutions (not always perfect, but with the heart in the right place), and to a general courtesy and sense of decent behaviour. I have been profoundly depressed by the assault on these values by Trump and his acolytes/devotees. The country I had come to love is no longer quite what I thought it was.
I remember early in my time in the US, when I was still astounded by the number of people who owned guns (although many, many fewer than today) and who (not always the same person but frequently so) regarded government and taxes as infringements on liberty, I was at a party of World Bank and government officials. I met a young woman who worked for the Internal Revenue Service. She had recently been involved in an armed raid on a home in Maryland whose occupant refused to pay taxes and had declared that he’d shoot anybody who tried to collect them. Fortunately, the delinquent tax payer was arrested without anybody being injured. However, his behaviour seemed to me bizarre in the extreme, and I had not (or only rarely) encountered such attitudes until recent years when the addiction to guns and the worship of tax cuts (and a conviction that government is out to get you) obsesses a substantial number of Americans.
One of the things that amused me when I met Americans was the widespread belief that we Brits are supremely polite and love queuing. I suspected that this conviction was inspired by watching too much British period drama on PBS. In fact, my fellow Britons are increasingly likely to be positively impolite and aggressive, while in general Americans are by nature more courteous. Much of my travel in the USA was to university and college campuses. If I asked a student for directions I would invariably be addressed as ‘sir’, and faculty members would be hospitable and considerate. One art department, reasoning that an Englishman would be longing for his afternoon tea, even in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ordered in tea and cakes for our meeting.
True, political life could be aggressive and very dirty. Even at local level for very lowly elected offices, attack ads were as a rule extremely aggressive, frequently assailing an opponent for voting many times to put up taxes or some other unspeakable transgression. One suspects that the accusation was usually a radical simplification or distortion of the truth, but nevertheless the attacks seemed not to exceed certain accepted limits. Certainly, as far as I recall, the baying mob calling for somebody to be locked up and unfounded accusations of criminality are very recent and well beyond the bounds of decent behaviour.
Initially, I found it incredible that Donald Trump could, as a matter of rhetorical practice, use insults, demeaning nicknames and scornful remarks to belittle those who oppose him – and that his devotees could find this in any way acceptable. Unfortunately, many Republicans have followed him in debasing political discourse.
Of course, public life was far from squeaky clean. There was always some criminality because government is big money, and where there is big money there is corruption and misconduct. I Iived and paid taxes in Maryland, whose governor from 1969 to 1979 was Marvin Mandel, who in 1977 was convicted of mail fraud and racketeering. He spent 19 months in jail until President Reagan commuted his sentence in 1981. I vividly remember reading a report in the Washington Post that state officials had alleged that when Mandel and his wife left the governor’s mansion in Annapolis they took with them 87 items of furniture and other objects that were the property of Maryland, together with $3,800 in state cash used to buy various things for their personal use. Mandel’s disgrace was not particularly unusual, since Spiro Agnew, his predecessor in Annapolis, and later twice Vice President, eventually pleaded no contest to a charge of corruption while governor in order to escape several other charges.
Now Mandel defended himself against the charges of corruption, and eventually they were quashed on appeal (some time after Reagan’s pardon). To the best of my knowledge, he accepted the due process of the US legal system, without claiming that he had been unfairly targeted by his opponents and the entire legal system. Nor did he claim that his opponents themselves were engaged in criminal conduct. And Agnew’s plea implicitly acknowledged his guilt, again without claiming politically-motivated persecution. That is to say, they both accepted due legal process.
Trump has, of course, exploited the First amendment in a most shameless way, to criticize the judges and prosecutors of his various trials as well as the Justice Department for being politically motivated, and has sought to intimidate jurors. In the UK these would have been clear contempts of court, but the legal system has resolutely upheld Trump’s protected speech, even when he uses it to undermine the very basis of the legal system. Not even Mandel or Agnew were that contemptible.
Indeed, my time in the USA has inspired immense respect for the principled defence of free speech. It is true that, even in the late 1970s some sought to intimidate academics who espoused opinions that others found inconvenient and uncomfortable. I recall outraged citizens denouncing to the media some unfortunate professor as a ‘pointy-headed intellectual.’ I never did discover why intellectuals with whom one disagreed had to have oddly-shaped heads, but in any case, the criticism was purely rhetorical. Nobody actually sought to censor the academic’s opinions.
There were, of course, more serious threats to free speech. The American Library Association has long compiled annual lists of books that were censored in libraries. In 2023 4,240 titles were banned from a library somewhere in the USA. And school textbook publishers were well aware that school boards in large conservative states such as Texas would wield their purchasing power to censor textbooks. Even at the college level some of my competitors would, for example, edit anthropology textbooks to emphasize that evolution is a theory (which of course it is and has always been) and perhaps to include a modest coverage of creationist theory (as if it were a theory on the same level as evolution).
The attacks on woke are the contemporary political expression of efforts to limit free speech. The governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, who has passed laws enabling politically-motivated parents to object to books in a school library. The librarian is obliged to withdraw the book while a committee considers the objections (failure to do so is a criminal offence). The groups behind this legislation then objected to so many books that the committee process became so lengthy that the books were in practice banned on the opinion of one parent. De Santis has also interfered in the university/college curriculum by appointing ‘anti-woke’ members to the governing boards of state colleges. This is something I might have expected in a religious college, but never in a secular state institution.
One of the most appalling aspects of Trump’s rhetoric has been his vile portrayal of immigrants, and of Mexicans in particular, as criminals, rapists and the like. During visits to Mexico I have met many Mexicans who have worked as undocumented labourers in the USA. They returned to Mexico, but often had children born in the USA who are therefore US citizens and remain there. These hard-working, decent people who, it is true, entered and lived in the USA by irregular means, pose no threat to anybody. Several years ago, a friend who I had met in our student days in Cambridge was the Mexican Consul in San Francisco. Over dinner he told me that he had two principal duties. One was to visit Mexican citizens who had been arrested for some reason and to ensure that their rights were protected. But his major activity was to manage a fleet of mobile documentation centres which issued to undocumented Mexican workers (principally in the agricultural sector) a credential that certified that they were Mexican citizens. This did not make them legal, but enabled them to open a bank account, get a driving license and so on. My friend remarked that the US government approved of this arrangement since It also reassured the US authorities that the Mexican workers posed no terrorist threat, since all terrorists were assumed to be Muslims.
These workers were not in California in order to engage in criminal activity or to pose a threat to Americans. They were in there because Californian farmers needed them to run their businesses. Their undocumented status expose them to the risk of exploitation, and of deportation which can separate families for years, leaving behind in the USA a spouse and children. At one time I travelled frequently to Alabama, where, like Trump, the state government exploited fear of immigrants for political purposes. The state passed a law requiring public schools to verify the nationality of students’ parents and to report suspected undocumented immigrants to the state authorities. In the days before the law came into effect, the population of trailer parks emptied, and farmers were left with fields unharvested, as their workers fled to another state where they would not be subject to such scrutiny.
One time when I was staying in my hotel in Dallas workers of Mexican descent or origin organized a ‘day without Mexicans’ to demonstrate that they are not unneeded intruders, but that without Mexicans much of the economy could not function. My hotel room was invariably cleaned by a Mexican chambermaid, with whom I would chat and share experiences of Mexico and the USA. She decided to work on the day without Mexicans, but it was obvious that without her and her compatriots my room would have been left untidy. In a hotel I used for visits to Houston, there was a clear racial divide in the role assigned to employees: reception desk staff were always white or African American, chambermaids an restaurant workers Mexican.
Joe Biden, and now Kamala Harris, are characterising the election in November as a battle for American democracy. Whether or not the election of Donald Trump to a second term would fatally undermine democracy I cannot say. However, the positive-thinking, courteous, democratic America that protects free speech is under assault from social forces, attitudes and trends in American society that, while not entirely new, have been magnified by the undoubted self-promotional skills of a property-turned-media-turned-political entrepreneur. Whatever the outcome, Trump’s intentions are malevolent and he may well inflict great damage on the nation I lived and worked in and of which I am extremely fond.
*Note: the author was one of three writers of Gateways to Art, a textbook for art appreciation courses, first published by Thames & Hudson in 2012, now in its fourth edition, and quite possibly the biggest seller in the company's 75 year history.
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