The American Dream is coming to an end. It's as if we feel Trump telling us: "Europeans, go home". All the cinematic appeal, all the epic of the conquest of the West, of the cities of skyscrapers and houses with swimming pools, rock'n'roll and Fordism, of immigrants who carve out a future for themselves, the self-made man and the Statue of Liberty, the melting can... What remains of all this? The land of opportunity is rapidly becoming the other side of the coin: racism, hatred of difference, deportations, closed borders, expulsion and barriers to entry of talent, isolationism, fear, crisis, polarization. From dream to nightmare. Trump is making dystopia a reality, destroying what remained of the mirage.
The United States was not and has never been a nation of flowers and violas, the individualistic drive and wasp (white Anglo-Saxon protesters) has been the other side of the coin of liberalism. However, for three centuries a society has flourished that, despite the internal contradictions so often exposed, has been extremely dynamic, open, and rich, and has managed to ward off the dangers of fracture (racism, McCarthyism) and decadence. Dangers about which Hannah Arendt, an adopted American, one of those who fled European anti-Semitism, never ceased to warn. It is inevitable to think of her when today we see the United States, one of the cradles of democracy, faltering. checks and balances (constitutional checks and balances), when we see the systematic distortion of information and when we witness the obscene fusion of economic and political power.
With this terrifying prospect in mind, the Valencian editor Gustau Muñoz (Afers) has very opportunely recovered and translated Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's essay himself. Hannah Arendt's Relevance: The Origins of Totalitarianism and the 21st Century, Written in 2006, Young-Bruehl (1946-2011) was a disciple and biographer of Arendt (1906-1975). Half a century after the death of the author ofThe origins of totalitarianism, always cited for the concept of the "banality of evil," we see how in the United States, the great victor of the Second World War, and in Israel, a country created as redress for the gruesome role of the Jews as great victims, Arendt's warnings are coming true. In both Washington and Tel Aviv, power is in the hands of grotesque and dramatic figures, the value of democracy and, in the case of Netanyahu, he has adopted the totalitarian path of extermination, ghettoization and the massacre of the Palestinians, so well described by Arendt. in the United States of America, from where the German thinker focused on the latent endemic hatreds, of old concepts rooted in our brains. the "human condition." What else is Trump? It's done through the algorithmic means of social media, or the use of the educational system for ideological indoctrination, which Trump is imposing in both schools and elite universities. These are two classic totalitarian methods, as is undermining civil liberties, if necessary by bringing the army into the streets. People without an autonomous or critical perspective. The denial of the individual and plurality.
