Metternich, the Austrian chancellor who was one of the architects of European power after Napoleon, said it first: "When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold."
At some point in the 20th century, France became the United States and Europe became the entire world, and that is why I am writing this column as if what is happening there — local elections — were happening elsewhere, or even everywhere, like in a story by Borges.
The first thing is to say that the Democrats can be considered well served: a
red wave was announced,
but nothing of the sort has taken place, and even a seat in the Senate—Pennsylvania—that no one expected has become Democratic.
It is true that too many extremist Republicans, of those who still deny the 2020 elections, have emerged victorious in their races, largely thanks to the popularity of denialism.
But the results, broadly speaking, can be considered a failure for Donald Trump: just as the former president — the only one since the Great Depression to have lost the presidency, the Senate and the House at the same time — is preparing to announce his candidacy.
That will be a sizeable sneeze.
We'll see if the cold comes.
Meanwhile, we can discuss the symptoms.
Trump's candidacy — the very fact that it seems viable to so many — is one of the most eloquent in the examination of the American malaise.
In the last three months I have been in Washington and Dallas, two cities in the United States that could not be more different, and I have seen first-hand what the problem is: the common reality has ceased to exist.
The country is divided into two experiences that do not touch, and the two main parties are now watertight compartments, like two audiences who watch two different movies in neighboring theaters of the same multiplex.
And no: the two films are not equally valid.
The mistake of false equivalencies has been made too many times, above all to avoid the accusation of partiality or sectarianism, so it must be said clearly:
in one of the rooms is a party that represents, today, the greatest threat to democracy since democracy itself, and not only in the United States, but in the entire world, so susceptible to colds.
In the other room are the Democrats.
That's how it is.
The Republican Party has become, to the disbelief of many (those who weren't paying attention when the
Tea Party), in an organization that tries to take the vote away from millions of people, that has condoned (at least) racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia, that conscientiously lies and deceives and divides, and that has made cruelty —deliberate harm to the weakest— a form of politics.
A few months ago, the governor of one of the states with the largest Latin American population, the ineffable Ron DeSantis, organized a disturbing plan: dozens of migrants tricked into several buses and a plane, and were abandoned in Democratic cities, vulgarly used as pawns in the lesson DeSantis wanted to teach liberals.
It is possible to draw a straight line between his considered inhumanity and Trump's cages at the border, which separated families with the open objective of psychologically torturing human beings,
children among them.
In the United States, a country boasted of immigrants, no one has ever lost votes by attacking immigrants.
DeSantis was one of the election winners.
What does his victory tell us?
The normalization of violence is one of the most obvious transformations of democratic life in the United States.
It has been gradual, but it cannot be said that the evolution has taken a long time;
and it is difficult to know how a society returns from the place where the American one has arrived.
The most recent alarm erupted a few days ago, when a Trump fanatic, indoctrinated in the Republican world of conspiracy theories, firmly ensconced in the room where the paranoid election-stealing film is being shown, entered Nancy Pelosi's home in San Francisco with the intention of attacking her with a hammer: he was moved, he said, by the idea of seeing her arrive at the Capitol in a wheelchair.
She was not there, but her husband was, who received several blows to the head and whose life was at serious risk.
The incident was horrifying.
a vivid proof of the depth with which a form of violence has permeated the entire society that, after the local terrorism of January 6, can only be called fascist.
You already know: the intimidation of the political rival through violence;
the physical attack assumed by the ordinary citizen, briefly turned into a militiaman, for the benefit of his movement.
A few years ago, when an unaffiliated conspiracy theorist murdered six people—Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the head, unbelievably survived—bipartisans condemned the attack.
In the case of the San Francisco attack, on the other hand, the Republican reaction was to mock the victim in real time, and some went a step further: they added to the mockery a grotesque insinuation that, the internet being the sewer that it is, gave him around the virtual world in a matter of seconds, and included the intervention of the biggest and most boorish of the boorish sons of Trump: the photo of a pair of underpants with a hammer on it.
The matter would have been unfortunate, one more symptom of the deep decomposition of that party that hypocritically always carried the banner of values,
even if the starting point of the grotesque rumors had not been Elon Musk's Twitter.
But that's how it was: hours after buying the platform that invented Trump, the vehicle of much of the paranoia and disinformation, Musk collected and reproduced the false news of a media outlet that has maintained, for example, that Hillary Clinton is dead. and the one we see is a robot.
This is how Musk decided to make his debut.
And this is also why it can be said that these elections are not like the others: not only because never before have so many candidates —from just one of the parties— defended conspiracy theories about a non-existent electoral theft;
nor because so many members of the same party have warned that they will not accept the results in case of defeat;
nor because paramilitary organizations have sent armed people to “monitor” (I put my quotes here) the polls, convinced that in 2020 there was massive fraud and Biden is an illegitimate president.
No, it is not only because of all this, but because the new owner of Twitter, the social network that has been the powerless home of these misinformation and lies, saw no problem in starting the week of the elections by saying, before his 115 million supporters, that you had to vote Republican:
I remember that in 2019, a year that I spent a large part of in New York, there was frequent talk, but without much seriousness, of the statements that Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer or fixer, had given in February before a committee of the House of Representatives .
If Trump lost the 2020 election, Cohen said, "there will never be a peaceful transfer of power."
He was right: and from now on, every election day will be a test of the mental health of the country.
Now it seems that this sick democracy still has some defenses left.
Let's hope so: for the improvement of all our colds.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez
is a writer.
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