I’m tired of hearing about how Russia intervened in the recent
U.S. election and tired of the talk about collusion, and I’m especially fed up
with the speculation that all this will doom the Trump presidency.
My weariness is not due to a lack of indignation at how a
foreign country covertly helped a reckless con man become president. And I
would certainly celebrate if the uncovering of crimes forced President Trump to
abandon the White House and slink back to his tower. But I fear that the Russia
investigations — and the hope that they will save the republic — are turning
too many opponents of this administration into passive, victimized spectators
of a drama performed by remote actors over which they have no control.
Russians voting in Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin [didn't hand] the election to the Republican
candidate by a bit more than 80,000 votes.
Those were not Russians voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin, handing the election to the Republican candidate by a bit more than
80,000 votes. They were American men and women. As were the 62,984,825 others who
decided that such a troublesome, inflammatory figure expressed their desires
and dreams. Trump could be impeached or resign, or his policies could simply
implode under the weight of their malice, divisiveness and mendacity, and the
country would still be defined and pressed by the same conditions and dread
that enabled his rise. America would still need to engage in a process of
national self-scrutiny to fathom how such a nightmare could have been avoided,
how it can be prevented from happening again.
Now, every desperate American must gaze in the mirror and
interrogate the puzzled face and puzzling fate that stares back: What did I do
or not do that made the cataclysm possible? Did I ignore past transgressions
that corrode today’s society: the discrimination, the sexism, the violence, the
authoritarianism, the intolerance, the imperial ambitions, the slavery and
greed and persecutions that have darkened America’s story? Did I overestimate the
strength of our democracy and underestimate the decency of my neighbors? Was I
too fearful, too complacent, too impatient, too angry? Whom did I not talk to,
whom did I not persuade? What privilege and comforts, what overwork and debts,
kept me from giving my all? What injustice or humiliation or bigoted remark did
I witness and let pass? How can I help to recover our country, make it once
more recognizable, make it luminous and forgiving?
We must vigorously protest the president’s craven actions, but above
all we need to acknowledge that what ultimately matters is not what a foreign
power did to America, but what America did to itself. The crucial question of
what is wrong with our country, what could have driven us to this edge of
catastrophe, cannot be resolved by a special counsel or a Democratic takeover
of the House of Representatives or spectacular revelations about Russia’s
interference.
Our inevitable moment of reckoning should be seen as an
opportunity rather than an obstacle. Thomas Paine, that foreigner, that
immigrant, that subversive who loved America, said it best in December of 1776,
as his adopted homeland’s inaugural revolution was in danger of being defeated:
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with
us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
I cannot guess whether we will be spirited enough to find the
consolatory answers to our crisis. What I do not doubt, as America cries out
for a second and much needed revolution, is that a long night of searching lies
ahead of us.
Ariel Dorfman is the author of “Homeland Security Ate My Speech”
and the forthcoming novel “Darwin’s Ghosts.” He lives with his wife Angélica in
Chile and in Durham, N.C., where he is professor emeritus of literature at Duke
Universities
Such a process will prove
arduous and gut-wrenching. I should know. As a Chilean who is now also an
American citizen, I went through a similar grueling quest to comprehend the
origins of another political disaster: the 1973 overthrow of the Chilean people’s
peaceful revolution and its leader, Salvador Allende. I had to learn that
attributing that tragedy to foreign entities did not alleviate or overcome it.
In 1973, a military coup against Allende, the democratically
elected president of Chile, terminated an extraordinary experiment in social
and economic justice. The assault was aided and abetted by the United States.
For many years after the coup, I dwelled on Washington’s responsibility for the
brutal dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
And yet, some years after Pinochet’s depradations forced me to
flee Chile with my wife and our first son, I stopped automatically alluding to
America’s role in my country’s misfortune. I continued to be outraged by the
invasion of our sovereignty, which had also occurred in places as diverse as
Guatemala, Iran and Indonesia. But I realized that obsessing about what America
had done was delaying a more imperative obligation: to minutely, painfully,
collectively examine what had gone awry in my own land. How could our attempt
to build a nation free of exploitation have paved the way for a tyrannical
regime?
It took many years for the self-criticism to bear fruit, but
without it the followers of Allende could never have built a coalition with the
Christian Democrats, many of whose members were fierce opponents of the
revolution’s radical measures. They had at first thoughtlessly welcomed the
coup. Our coalition beat Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite and then voted into
office a center-left president two years later. Since then, Chile has organized
five more presidential elections. Yet another will take place Sunday, and
whatever its outcome, Chileans can be certain that our democracy is robust
enough not to be fooled by foreign intelligence agencies.
As an immigrant who has embraced America as his home, I would hope that my compatriots here might be inspired by the way Chile went about healing its wounds. Our confusion and angst forced us to look deep inside our despair, and deeper still into the enigmas and abyss of history in search of a response to the Pinochet tragedy. The fundamental ethical work went beyond politics and intellectual theories to more personal, more intimate, more piercing territory. Chileans had to think ourselves out of our crisis.
Such a process of inquiry and exorcism began in the U.S. soon
after the election, with no lack of culprits to blame. And yet so far the
multiple, conflicting theories and explanations for Trump’s startling victory
have not produced a common national narrative that might unify the opposition
and point the way forward.
Now, every desperate American must gaze in the mirror and interrogate the puzzled face and puzzling fate that stares back: What did I do or not do that made the cataclysm possible? Did I ignore past transgressions that corrode today’s society: the discrimination, the sexism, the violence, the authoritarianism, the intolerance, the imperial ambitions, the slavery and greed and persecutions that have darkened America’s story? Did I overestimate the strength of our democracy and underestimate the decency of my neighbors? Was I too fearful, too complacent, too impatient, too angry? Whom did I not talk to, whom did I not persuade? What privilege and comforts, what overwork and debts, kept me from giving my all? What injustice or humiliation or bigoted remark did I witness and let pass? How can I help to recover our country, make it once more recognizable, make it luminous and forgiving?
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