We are all concerned about the rise in fuel prices and such, but, forgive me for mentioning it, there is one more reason for alarm, let’s say, primary. The two countries that possess 90 percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, more than enough to end human life, are very crazy. Mental instability is what defines the United States and Russia today. The question is: Which of the two experiences greater political instability? Or which one is closer to civil war?
Russian Marina Litvinenko, widow of the KGB agent assassinated on the orders of Vladimir Putin, told me last week in London that the conditions existed in her country for a repeat of the 1917 revolution. I suspect that Litvinenko has succumbed to a bit of wishful thinking. thinking, to believe that what you want to happen will happen. But I do not know. What will happen in Russia? It is the million dollar question and nobody has the answer. Churchill’s description of Russia in 1939 still applies: “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, within an enigma.”
In the United States, on the other hand, they don’t hide their dirty laundry. They take them out, almost brag about them, in the light of day. So they are, individually and as a nation. Open people, without shame and, in too many cases, without much contact with reality.
Like, for example, the public addicted to Fox News, the television channel that is for Donald Trump what all the Russian channels are for Putin. The most disturbing episode in American politics since at least the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974 was the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 last year. On Thursday, the television broadcast of the conclusions of the House of Representatives committee that was created to investigate what happened began. Of the major national news channels, Fox News is the only one that refused to broadcast it live.
Why? For fear of exposing their public to the truth, so as not to dilute the polarization that feeds both Fox and Trump, to prevent devout Trumpists from questioning their faith, the absolute certainty that their sacred orange cow would still be in the White House today if it weren’t for the Big Steal, the great robbery he suffered at the hands of Joseph Biden and his accomplices throughout the United States judicial system. Fox News doesn’t want them to find out about the committee’s report because Trump doesn’t want them to see his former attorney general claiming that the accusation of electoral fraud was bullshit, ridiculous, they don’t want their faithful to have to suffer the disgust of hearing that the The bloody insurrection of January 6 was, according to the information collected from a thousand witnesses, the culmination of an attempted coup.
Trump and his people refused to accept the rule that all electorally defeated US presidents have made their own for 200 years: shut up and walk away. The spectacle that Trump put on was that of a little boy who refuses to go to bed. He yells at his parents that “no, no and no”, he throws his mush on the floor and, this being the United States, pulls out his pistol and starts shooting.
Today half of America is made up of rabid children whose political habitat is a darker version of Alice’s Wonderland. The other half is made up of adult people –or, in any case, less childish– who continue to believe, for now, in the peaceful transfer of power as a fundamental pillar of democracy.
The investigative body that provides the most reliable social snapshots of the United States, Pew Research, said six months ago that “partisan polarization remains the pervasive, perhaps unalterable condition of American politics…Republicans and Democrats agree on little and when they are, it is usually in the shared opinion that they have little in common”. It is still true today. The situation that has been reached is this: if your party loses the next presidential election, you will feel as if your country has fallen into the hands of a foreign occupation regime.
So, civil war? In October of last year, I published a column here in which I proposed that the old concept of the indivisible nation was in ruins in the United States. I cited two articles in two sober Washington magazines that warned of the possibility of civil war. I quoted the Financial Times as saying: “Today the fashionable question in Washington is: ‘Are we Weimar?’ Is America, like the Germany of the 1920s, a democracy in terminal decline? I mean, is there war and dictatorship in sight?
Today these same questions continue to be asked, but with more insistence among more and more people. Alarmism becomes routine. Not one, not two, but three books have just been published in America entitled How Civil Wars Start, This Won’t Happen: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, and The Next Civil War: Reporting from the Future from the United States. Everyone warns that the classic conditions for a civil war currently exist, that the country inhabits two radically different worlds divided between the countryside and the city, that there has been a recent explosion of armed militias, that political language is becoming more violent every day, that the The concept of loyal opposition has given rise to hatred of the rival, who when Trump came to power in 2017 one in ten Americans said that violence was justified to achieve political objectives, and today it is one in three.
Given the information we have, Marina Litvinenko’s prediction seems more applicable to the United States than to Russia. We see a hint of this in a T-shirt popular with Trumpists that reads, with a double meaning both unconscious and revealing: “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” Faced with such a panorama, would there be reasons for consolation? In the event that Trumpist fascism triumphs after a war, perhaps one. Since there would be two psychotic dictators in control of 90 percent of nuclear weapons, they might get along and reduce the chance that planet Earth would end up as inhospitable as the Moon. Whether or not that would really be a consolation, each one will say.
