by Dr. Piyush Mathur

Thoughtfox would like to thank Dr. George Davis, Marshall University, for providing critical feedback on the penultimate draft of this essay.

Like his first impeachment, his second impeachment has also failed to convict the former US President Donald Trump—thanks to his Republican supporters. What that crucially implies, of course, is that he is free to run for the White House a second time. No matter how you look at it, though, his second presidential run would be nothing the healthier than the last one; in fact, it would magnify the nationwide chaotic bitterness that has been unfolding ever since he got into the political fray at all—all the way to the mob attack on the Capitol, and his second impeachment itself (which has left even the Republicans divided between pro- and anti-Trump camps). Meanwhile, violent pro-Trump episodes have been popping up across the country.

Under these circumstances, Trump should at least be prevented from a second effective run—say, inside the hitherto credible 2-party format. Accomplishing the above should be not only the United States’ domestic priority but also its global imperative; even though one realizes that it would fall to the Republican National Committee, RNC—and primary voters—to accede to it. Preventing Trump from a second effective run should be a global imperative not just in conventional diplomatic or geo-political senses; rather, the United States must understand that it should not fritter away anymore its long accumulated appeal of the sweet variety to the global masses.

On its own, that last statement appears infirm on many counts—and it thus requires a calibrated clarification: which may still leave all types of readers dissatisfied for contradictory reasons; but I feel that I should not withhold the statement or its eggshell clarification. I suppose I would have to present the clarification in three parts—given that the statement’s apparent infirmity is also apparently tripartite:

The first clarification I must make should have to do with the status of a sovereign unit’s international appeal beyond its diplomatic or geo-political interventions. What I mean here is that while a sovereign unit usually generates its global image diplomatically and geopolitically, its reputation overall depends on a wider range of factors than such efforts (or its rivals’ countermeasures); to some extent, it depends on the global word of mouth regarding its internal system and foreign citizens’ experiences with it.

The second clarification would have to do with my need to specify a sweet variety of the United States’ appeal to the global masses. For, to the chauvinistic strand of nationalistic Americans, the United States could be nothing if not sugar and spice and everything nice anyway—a presupposition that precludes the need for my type of specification. But we must realize that chauvinistic nationalists (and, for that matter, the hardcore Right wing) anywhere do not like to earn alien affections—but they presume their presence in regard to their own political unit as an inevitable testimony to its unquestionable awe. That is another way to say that the chauvinistic-nationalistic sweet is always already the fiercely sweet—and it is not the type of sweet that I have in mind.
What I have in mind overlaps with what otherwise falls under the so-called ‘soft power’ indices—except that this verbiage pre-renders sweetness in terms of power. What I rather wish to highlight is the fact that the United States has successfully groomed itself—relatively consistently since 1970—into one of the world’s most favoured immigrant destinations (if not the most favoured one). As it stands, ordinary humans, on an average, have tended to covet the United States more than any other country—most of the years through the 1970s onward—as a civic, intellectual, and commercial resting place.

The third clarification is tied to the foregoing mention: on the first count because to many it should seem trivial qua common knowledge; and on the second count because there are people (including some Americans) who are baffled, even riled, by the global draw of the United States: The American charm escapes those who have suffered (or continue to suffer) the consequences of that country’s external as well as domestic interventions—be they militaristic, economic, cultural, linguistic, or strategic. (Many groups from around the world have, of course, spent their lifetimes standing their grounds against the United States.)
To this third clarification, though, there is also a third count—which dilutes all claims regarding any country’s pull as an immigrant destination! This has to do with my safe presupposition that the vast majority of humans simply do not consider it an option to leave their own country for another: Many humans even pity their brethren who, they feel, are required to move abroad at all—even if to the United States (yes, even if)—out of one compulsion or another. This cluster of people tends not to have an appreciation for—or an inkling of—why sovereign political units should even be assessed from the viewpoint of whether foreigners wish to get into (and settle in) them or not.

American operational features worth saving
But as an individual who pretty accidentally ended up going to the United States—and rather unforeseeably ended up living there for more than a decade (before abruptly leaving it, just the same)—I came to realize that it cannot be easy for any political unit to become one of the most coveted spots for immigrants even if it wanted to. Many modern-day political units seem to want to repel immigrants anyway, with the United States under Trump having led that pack, too. The way I figured was that, paralleling its multifarious crimes of omission and commission—whose details could be readily found in the voluminous publications of its native son, Noam Chomsky—the United States had tended to cultivate and enjoy a positive reputation globally owing to a couple of its domestic operational features.

It is these operational features, I contend, that this nation-state should strive to preserve by preventing a second Trump run (and not just a second Trump victory: which of course would be for the American voter and the national electoral system to prevent—as they did in the last election). I should identify those operational features as follows—before briefly explaining them theoretically:

democratically powered system-internal accountability—be it of the legal, political, economic, academic, or any other variety; and,

political seriousness (internal as well as external).

By the first of the above two features what I mean is that the country’s enforcement agencies and multi-level political systems ordinarily keep system-wide functionaries at all levels on the right side of the policies and laws (with which they keep themselves updated); that they do so largely within transparent, democratic, and lawful frameworks of institutional interactions; and that they punish erring parties appropriately across the sectors. By the second of the above two features, what I mean is that the country’s institutions take themselves and one another seriously; and that individual functionaries, no matter the level, do not trivialize one another’s ideas and actions (but sincerely listen to, and consider, them for the sake of collective improvement); and that the country takes its international interactions and roles seriously.

I won’t go into details regarding whether the United States deserves a positive reputation even for either of the above two features—and surely there is a lot that its strident critics find in its domestic history (all the way to the present) that makes its recommendation as ‘accountable’ laughable to them. But I am not trying to talk about these matters as an unalloyed, utterly indisputable, or absolute truth; all I am saying is that, in comparison with all other contemporary sovereign polities around the world, the United States commands a far, far better-than-average reputation pertaining to these two factors. The integrity of this reputation is, of course, not difficult to illustrate (well beyond my personal testimony).

As to accountability and internal political seriousness, global indices focusing on 'freedom of press’, ‘judicial independence’, ‘rule of law’, electoral integrity, transparency, ‘ease of doing business,’ and ‘quality of life’, among others, have all placed the United States among the top 25—and mostly among the top 15—countries ever since researchers began to publish them (starting out through the 1990s, but mostly from the 2000s onward). As to its external political seriousness, it is best evidenced in the fact that the country has cultivated and maintained the most successful strategic and institutional alliances globally at least since the Second World War—inside largely consistent and transparent frameworks; and its hypocrisies and double standards notwithstanding, it has tried to be a leading voice for individual liberties the world over.

Indeed, I should suggest that an important reason why the United States—rather than the Soviet Union—is often viewed to have rid the world of Nazism through the Second World War (despite the far bigger size of the Soviet sacrifice) is that it has been better able than the Soviet Union (including most of the former Soviet states since the Union’s disintegration) to reflect the will of its own in its self-governance, with far superior checks and balances, through the ensuing decades. In this self-governance, the United States has generally been able to sustain and expand internal institutional democratization, on the one hand; on the other hand, it has also been able to strengthen freedoms of thought/belief, expression, and enterprise within (and sometimes outside) its borders.  All of the foregoing traits mentioned above reflect a consolidation of accountability and political seriousness as the core operational features of that country.

History matters—even as it unfolds
Consider this: Following the end of the Nazi era in Europe and Japan via that war, the Soviet Union and the rest of the Communist bloc remained trapped in a governmental and mass-communication framework that inhibited their own citizens while also failing to generate wider inter-national trust in the accuracy of their own narratives. The Western bloc, in contrast, expanded and refined its own freedoms of thought/belief and expression while also strengthening its systemic transparency as well as privacy rights. And so, despite the facts that Japan would have been nuked; the apartheid won’t end in South Africa until such a late year as AD 1994; and that Western propaganda (with all its prejudices) would remain widespread throughout the Cold War (and beyond), the West—as a strategic and intellectual collective—continued to cultivate a better-than-ordinary trust inter-nationally in its own sources of information on all manner of things.

As a result, despite its remarkable history of religious persecutions, state-sanctioned slavery, racist colonization, and authoritarian lying (overall a history that had imploded anyway qua Adolf Hitler: and a history whose differing reflections could still be found in various contemporary administrative frameworks of definition and exclusion worldwide), the Western bloc managed to consolidate its global attraction as the port of call for rule of law, individual freedoms, and fact.  Inasmuch as the foregoing observation sounds paradoxical, it is inconvenient: if in part because it is not explained entirely via the postmodern-postcolonial translation of power into truth (not that the formerly colonized need to be informed of that, either).

But to bring itself up to this status after the wreckage left by Hitler, the US-led West—along with crucial Soviet participation (and also in reaction to their mutual differences)—had to start out by setting in place an ethic of accountability for itself in regard to the Second World War (but with an eye on the humanity’s future). The Allied powers accomplished all that by articulating the Nuremberg principles and by conducting the Nuremberg Trials.  This experience, on top of the war itself (which was of course fought against a White-colonial international backdrop), turned accountability for the West—and especially for the United States as its leader—as something that would tie domestic politics into immigrant/refugee/alien (and thus colonial) affairs.

In the years and decades following the Allied victory, the United States’ geostrategic programme would broadly continue to reflect Western-Christian-White supremacist mould of imperialism—say in Asia, Africa and elsewhere—under various disguises (one of them indeed being anti-Communism). However, that country would also end up adding to its charm as a destination by legally ending racist segregation internally in 1964—and by passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (full 18 years after independent India would have institutionalized universal suffrage by revolutionizing its barely democratic colonial-British legacy). Along the way, the United States would also begin to liberalize its policy outlook on immigration and immigrants.

During this time, the United States was responding to the following elements: a growing humanitarian concern relating to war refugees and American soldiers wanting to bring home their foreign wives; a changed world order; the growing discreditation of racial eugenics; an unfolding black civil rights movement within its borders; and a rising political desire, especially from 1953 onward, to contrast itself from Communist countries. For example, with China’s becoming its wartime ally, the United States got rid of its Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882 in 1943; and passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965—which did away with ‘the racially discriminatory national origins policy’ that had been enshrined in the National Origins Act of 1924 (Lee).

Altogether, via a series of executive and legislative measures, the United States admitted around 1, 200, 000 refugees between the Second World War and 1968. In a statement supporting the proposed 1965 legislation, President Lyndon Johnson’s Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, contrasted it from the hitherto operational 1924 law as follows:

Under present law, brilliant and skilled residents of other countries are prevented or delayed from coming to this country. We are depriving our selves needlessly of their talents. As President Johnson observed in his immigration message, “This is neither good government nor good sense.”

[…] Under present law, we choose among potential immigrants not on the basis of what they can contribute to our society or to our economic strength. We choose, instead on the basis of where they—or in some cases even their ancestors—happened to be born. There is little logic or consistency in such a choice, when we proclaim that our system of freedom is superior to the rival system of fear; when we proclaim to all the peoples of the world that everyman is born equal and that in America every man is free, to demonstrate his individual talents.

H.R. 2580 would eliminate such illogic and such injustice to immigrants. (U.S. Congress 1965:1) [Cited in Lee]

The alien factor—and what makes the United States somewhat exceptional
All in all, via the lessons that the Second World War had taught it, the United States set in motion an openness toward alien strugglers as well as foreign talent by articulating a national immigration policy outside the framework of prior racist preferences. As a result (and even though unintentionally), the ethnic makeup of immigration into the country got vastly diversified from 1970 onward (Massey & Pren; Lee). Fast forward to the 2000s, and in 2015, just to cite a random finding, the United States topped the world in immigration as well as refugee resettlement. There is no better indicator of that country’s global attraction as a destination than the above measure—and it also reflects the sweet aspect of its worldwide mass appeal.

More importantly, the United States’ attraction to aspiring as much as struggling immigrants seems characteristically tied to its positive reputation as a democratically accountable and politically serious sovereign nation-state. That has not exactly been the case with another immigrant magnate and serious polity called Singapore—a highly professional and authoritarian dynastic system; or with the theocratic monarchy called Saudi Arabia—which saw a tremendous uptick in immigration through 1958-1983, and where 66% of jobs were held by foreigners even as late as 2012. There are many other examples like Singapore’s and Saudi Arabia’s: sovereign units where immigration concentration, democratic accountability, political seriousness, and global mass appeal of the sweet variety do not come together.

To the extent that these factors have come to string together in the case of the post-WW2 United States, they make this sovereign political unit somewhat exceptional. As it happens, the United States was ranked Number 7 for Year 2020 in a ‘Best Countries Overall’ survey; the same survey had ranked it Number 4 in 2016 (and Number 8 through 2017-2019). That’s a loss of 3 ranks through the Trump years—a phase during which the United States also saw the greatest global decline in its trustworthiness; and we all know how the country altered its stance on immigration during the same time.

The eyes of the world—and lobotomized accountability
To a lot of people of the world, Trump embodies everything that is not sweet about the United States—which saw acrimonious chaos rising throughout his rule; intensifying through his lies about the results of the national election; and culminating in his supporters’ barely prevented attack on the Capitol. All of that of course unfolded when the United States had also been shocking the world with its pandemic statistics—and when the ruling top brass had been pointedly rubbishing the key prevention methods! Inasmuch as the Trump years epitomized political un-seriousness in all of recent and not-so-recent American past, the failure of his second impeachment constitutes the pinnacle of the growing domestic lack of accountability.

Curiously, what the United States exhibited overall via this second failed impeachment was not some outright lack of accountability—but an unnerving situation that I would call, quite unmedically, lobotomized accountability. In this procedure, the Head of the Mischief, Trump, was let go—by the Body of the Mischief called the Republicans—for an attack that he had instigated; even as the Feet of the Mischief, the attackers (many of whom financial strugglers), were rounded up, one after another (and counting). This lobotomization of accountability had brimmed out even earlier, in that the pusillanimous Vice President, Pence, was himself a target of this attack—and of course he participated in this lobotomization, as did all those who ensured the impeachment’s failure.

You may have an election to win—but a world to lose
And yet, the United States can still do some damage control—by preventing Trump from making a second effective presidential bid. A successful impeachment would not have automatically resulted in a ban on Trump’s re-election bid; contrariwise, a failed impeachment should not have to mean that he could run an effective presidential race again—which he could conceivably do only as the Republican nominee. The point is that the RNC is in a position to use Rule 9 to prevent Trump from accessing the Republican platform again for a presidential run; if not that, then it could undercut his support inside the party, whereby reducing his chances to win the Republican nomination.

Trump-2 at the White House is a difficult—though not that difficult a—prospect in terms of electability. However, a second (Republican-supported) Trump bid itself would undercut the United States’ global status as a democratically accountable, serious polity. And a second Trump reign, if it comes to that, may ultimately require the world to have some type of a Nuremberg 2; at the very least, it would leave the United States far more damaged domestically—and thus internationally—than his first reign. That would be so because there are lots of Trumpsters already in the higher echelons of the Republican Party—and their numbers would rise drastically through Trump’s second bid (and, just in case, through his second stint at the White House).

There is a very real danger that this section of the party would take over the organization—with or without Trump in the White House—and it would drag it, the country, and the world into some hitherto unpredictable version of the Second World War. Before it gets anywhere near that, the RNC might want to grasp what American exceptionalism since the Second World War might have really been about: It is a string of immigration positivity, democratic accountability, political seriousness, and global mass appeal of the sweet variety. And if any one of the above beads is broken, then the rest would fall apart, too; but if each of them is broken, then you may be left with lots of sovereign political units all over the planet except the United States of America.

References and background material

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Dr. Piyush Mathur is a political theorist. Click on its title to download his recent article ‘Understanding post-Covid-19 global politics: a tentative theoretical framework’ (TIGA Studies 3: November 2020); for his other publications, click here. (To post a comment on this article, scroll down to the box at the end of this piece; to contact Thoughtfox or Mathur, click here.)