The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Paul Auster: "Everything in the history of the United States always returns to racism, it is the deadly defect of this country"

2020-10-28T02:53:49.497Z


The novelist, who promotes an anti-Trump writers' association, laments that Democrats have given the working class "no reason to vote for them."


Paul Auster, at Oxford in 2017.David Levenson / Getty

This interview is part of a series of talks with leading intellectuals, editors, activists, economists and politicians who help to describe the state of affairs before the elections.

You can read the other installments here

.

When you open the Writers Against Trump website, you see a sepia-toned photograph of a young man lying on the ground, as if in a fetal position, surrounded by numerous legs of men in suits.

"That young man is me", reveals Paul Auster, lowering his unmistakable black eyebrows in a gesture between modesty and joke.

"It's 1968, when I was 21 years old, and they are arresting me at Columbia University."

Those were the years of that civil rights movement that sneaks into the pages of his latest novel,

4321

(Seix Barral, 2017), one of his most ambitious and celebrated works.

Photography proves, explains the novelist, that he has always been involved in politics.

"But never as actively as now," he acknowledges, "because I feel that now the entire future of America is at stake."

The author of

The New York trilogy,

with hordes of readers around the world, has taken action at 73, leading a writers' movement against the Republican president who is up for re-election next week, and attends stunned and concerned. to a campaign that defies the limits of your prodigious imagination.

Question.

Even for a novelist like you, it would be difficult to imagine a campaign like the one we are experiencing ...

Answer.

It's crazy.

It is the kind of complex narrative typical of bad literature.

When Trump fell ill, however, it struck me as the kind of story Sophocles or Shakespeare could have written.

And keep in mind that we live with the possibility, for example, of a kind of coup if Trump loses.

They seem ready to try to invalidate the election.

They are really saying it, I don't know if it is a bluff or if they have an organization in motion, prepared to destroy the vote.

From a distance it looks like it is total chaos and they have no idea what they are doing.

But we also thought that four years ago and they managed to put Trump in the Banking House.

Q.

How has your country been after these four years?

A.

I think it is weaker and more divided than it has probably been in the last 150 years, since the end of the Civil War.

For decades the Republican Party has moved more and more and more to the right, so much so that it is even difficult to speak of them as a party that believes in democracy.

They believe in power.

And among their philosophical foundations is the fact that they don't really want a state.

I think that with Trump the dismantling of the entire fabric of the public in America has accelerated in ways that we have not seen so far.

We have an environmental protection agency that does not want to protect the environment.

We have a secretary of Education who does not believe in public school.

And so everything.

Many of the people who are suffering the most from their decisions are supporting them for very complex reasons, which have little to do with politics, and everything to do with what we can call an American culture war.

Q.

And then a pandemic arrived ...

R.

I think I have not felt more outrage in my life about how a public problem has been managed by the people in power.

They called it a sham, or something created by China.

They have not taken on the responsibility of managing a national crisis.

Q.

Four years ago you were one of the few voices that warned that Trump should be taken seriously.

Why did you know you could win?

R.

First, because of the system we have, the electoral college system.

It is the way in which a candidate who does not have a majority of votes can win the presidency.

But I felt there was a lot more support for Trump than the polls and the press were saying.

And what turned my optimism to dread was the Brexit vote in England in June.

I thought if it could happen there, it could happen here.

It is a similar part of the population, nationalistic, white, hostile towards immigrants, fearful of the other, and angry at considering itself ignored by the general culture.

There are many people who feel this way, here and in many parts of Western Europe.

Only here the numbers are very large.

Q.

Why do you like Trump?

A.

Because it makes them feel good about themselves, and the Democrats make them feel bad about themselves.

It's a crude way of looking at it, but it's understandable.

That is why they vote for him.

Just like Hitler made some Germans feel good about themselves.

It is angry and resentful hostility to a changing society.

America is a country of immigrants, of people of all origins, skin colors, religions, cultures.

Many of us celebrate that diversity, but others do not.

Q.

In your latest novel,

4321, you

portray the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. How have you experienced the recent mobilization for racial justice?

A.

It has restored my faith that America may be beginning to reexamine itself.

And this is good.

The protests were the longest and most massive in the history of this country.

Most importantly, many white people began to wonder, for the first time in their lives, what it would be like to grow up as a black person in this country.

Whether this is sustained and becomes part of a lasting national conversion remains to be seen.

But it has been great.

It cannot be ignored.

It is one of the most powerful things I have ever seen in my entire life.

Q.

Can the United States return to normal after these four years?

A.

Things have changed forever.

The world in general, and America in particular, are in crisis.

We have the real big problem that we all have to face, which is climate change.

It's coming fast.

It is like a tremendous asteroid that comes from space and is going to destroy large parts of the Earth.

If we don't act now, it will be too late.

And the suffering in the generations you sell is going to be horrible.

We already see the first signs in this country, the worst fires and the worst hurricanes that we have had in our history.

And it's only the begining.

It is going to involve a new way of life.

People get angry about wearing masks in the pandemic, imagine the kinds of changes we will have to make to reduce emissions.

Then there is the American capitalist system, which has created a society so unjust and so inclined towards the rich, that unless these issues are addressed, the country is going to continue to get worse.

All of that needs to be addressed.

And there is going to be continuous setbacks.

It will not be easy.

But I believe that if the Democrats come to power, and the Senate becomes a democratic institution, many laws can be passed that begin the process of fixing some of the most egregious injustices in the country.

Q.

How did the Democrats lose the ability to appeal to the working class?

A.

They have not given you any reason to vote for them.

They are angry and resentful, and the Republicans make them feel better.

But what they feel better about has nothing to do with how life is going.

They simply reinforce the superiority that many feel over immigrants, dark-skinned people, and their white label alone gives them superiority over other people.

P.

Should we find the roots of part of this in the Obama presidency?

A.

The problem with the Obama Administration was this.

He had eight years in office.

The first two, in which he had the Democratic majority in Congress, he dedicated to carrying out a health plan.

That's what he wanted to do first.

It may be debatable that it was the best strategy, but it was definitely an important issue, one that no president had ever been able to resolve.

He pulled it off without a single Republican vote.

That is striking.

Many of us were excited and inspired by the fact that America had elected Obama and we had a black president in the White House.

Think of the symbolism.

But I would say that for a third of the population, this was probably the most horrible thing that had ever happened.

They were horrified and angry.

So bitter that immediately after Obama was elected, right-wing groups began to create something no one talks about anymore, which is the Tea Party.

The Tea Party was an offensive by the far right to oppose Obama and the Democrats.

And in 2010 they won a majority in Congress, so Obama couldn't do anything.

He could not carry out any law.

And the truth is, the insults they gave him, the lack of respect… it seems as if they have grabbed a black man and tied him with ropes.

They blindfolded him, put a handkerchief down his throat, and kicked and punched him for six years.

Six years of beating him.

So it wasn't his fault.

It was the reaction to him that unleashed racism in this country, which I did not think was so profound.

It revealed the geological faults of our country.

And it fueled that culture war that Trump has been leading these five years, since he began his presidential career.

P.

Is the result two irreconcilable sides?

A.

The country is so dangerously divided that it is difficult to imagine how the two sides can even speak.

There is no more dialogue.

It is as if we were in 1861, when the Civil War began, because the hatred between the two parties is colossal.

Q.

Racism is always the force behind everything ...

A.

Yes. Everything in the history of the United States always returns to racism, it is the mortal flaw of this country.

Slavery was legal from the time the colonies began.

To build a country after the revolution, we had 13 colonies.

In some there was no slavery because the economy did not depend on it.

In the south, of course, the economy depended on slave labor.

And so that these states could join the union and be part of the United States, they asked for certain concessions from the north, among them that slavery was not declared illegal, and that although they had smaller populations, they could have more representation in Congress counting to the slaves.

They were counted as three-fifths of a human being.

It was a disgusting compromise.

And we've been paying the price ever since.

Until we can confront it, our country cannot be cured.

In Germany there are Holocaust museums, there are no Nazi flags.

In the United States there are Confederate flags, and for me it is no different than a swastika.

Represents the same.

That is why these protests inspire me, because it seems the first time that white America, or part of it at least, has grasped it.

But until it is universal we cannot be less divided than we are.

Q.

How about Joe Biden?

R.

Biden is a moderate Democrat.

It has been in public life for half a century.

I have never particularly liked it.

I think a lot of the things he's done have been stupid.

But I know that he is basically a decent person.

It has no criminal tendencies.

I mean, a criminal is ruling us.

We have a criminal in the presidency now, a liar and an abominable human being.

Joe Biden is decent.

I think he sees himself at a great time in American life and bearing the weight of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he came to power in 1933 in the middle of the Depression.

So far I think you've done a pretty good job.

He went months without saying anything and was fine.

I was saying to Siri [Hustvedt, writer and his wife]: "The Democrats could present a tree stump against Trump, and the stump would win."

I think Biden, acting just like a log, will do better than if he's out there yelling and waving his arms.

Now, the important thing is to remove Trump and the Republicans.

We'll worry about Biden later.

Q.

"Writers are well positioned to defend democracy," he writes in the Writers Against Trump presentation.

In what sense?

A.

If we writers are good at something, it is at expressing ideas in clear and concise language.

Writers are citizens, and many of us understand how important these elections are.

So we decided to come together as a group and discuss what we can do to help defeat Trump.

We decided it was too late to try to persuade anyone, so we concentrated on mobilizing people to vote.

Because it all comes down to voting.

There were 95 million people who did not vote last time.

It's amazing.

We wanted to focus on progressive young people who are not very happy with Biden and Harris.

We want to persuade you that not voting is voting for Trump.

If you want to pressure them to be more progressive later, fine.

But we have to make them win first.

We started with 80 writers and now there are more than 1,700.

Q.

Is this the time in your life when you are most involved in politics?

A.

I have always been involved, but never as actively as I am now.

Because I feel like the entire future of America is at stake.

If Trump remains in power, any semblance of democracy will disappear.

And we are going to be a different country, an authoritarian country.

It's a very ugly possibility.

And I try to do what I can so that it doesn't happen.

Subscribe here to the

newsletter

about the elections in the United States

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-10-28

You may like

Life/Entertain 2024-02-27T05:13:22.634Z
Business 2024-03-09T04:58:58.046Z

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.