Will America's deep divide ever heal?
On Saturday, August 29th, 2020, a man was fatally shot in Portland, Oregon at a cruise rally. His name was Aaron “Jay” Danielson. This marks yet another person who lost their lives as a result of ongoing protests recycling the messages of social justice, social reform, and black lives matter.
The victim was identified to be a far-right-wing ‘Patriot Prayer’. The rally was organized by an Idaho native inviting supporters decked out in Trump paraphernalia promoting his campaign for a 2nd Presidential term, as stated by The Rolling Stone.
Portland had been a hotspot for civil unrest, hosting nightly protests sparked by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement asking to defund police and amnesty for marginalized racial groups unfairly incarcerated.
The movement hopes to undo the dreadful effects of the Jim Crow laws in the 20th Century and ongoing police brutality that’s gone on ever since, which have escalated with L.A. riots in 1992, the shooting of Treyvon Martin in 2012, and most recently the shooting of George Floyd in 2020.
The latter has particularly fired up the movement more than ever before due to video footage of the incident going viral at the time of a global pandemic that was keeping millions of people at home and left to be with their own devices.
So far, the Trump administration has only wished to quell the protests.
His Attorney General, William Barr, has already cracked down on multiple protests and riots in every major city, which resulted in 150+ arrests and 500+ FBI investigations opened, at a time when US mass incarceration has been at an alarmingly high rate.
All this has happened in the aftermath of individual cases spanning Breonna Taylor, a Kentucky native was fatally shot by three officers who’s investigation is still pending, to the tragedy of Ahmaud Arbery who’s murderers were never convicted until 3 months later despite having access to video footage of the incident.
Each of these incidents are contaminated with controversy, and for good reason. Every social movement since Occupy Wall Street in 2011 has been irreparably magnified by the internet and social media. Baltimore’s riots in 2015, San Jose’s rally in 2016, or even the recent protest in Kenosha, WI have all been epicenters of violence, clashes of beliefs, and emotional reactions on a national scale.
It is much more than Democrats and Republicans, white people and black people, patriots and anarchists, north and south, it is a psychological struggle any individual American can experience.
Is nationalism the heart of the issue?
Trump’s America is a beacon of patriotism, and by extension, nationalism. But American propaganda and pride has existed for years, it was only reignited by his campaign on a large enough scale the rift between Trump supporters and non-Trump supporters has expanded perhaps beyond repair.
Trump is not even a true Republican, evidence enough was the divide he created in Congress following his election in 2016. He is much more of a Nationalist than a Republican. His campaign pushed a love for America, a nationalist pride in how great the country is. Being a New Yorker, you can’t exactly blame him.
But one marginalized group after another would combat Trump’s campaign for this very reason. For their ancestors, America is more akin to a house of horrors than a nation of glory.
The conversations revolving around these issues question the morals this country was founded on since its inception, so by extension it questions the morals of the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of modern day white patriots who are just as much infatuated with their family history as the minority groups calling them out.
Is it fair to blame either group? A person today cannot possibly take responsibility for centuries of injustices while simultaneously a person today cannot accept the current injustices plaguing the country. It is psychological warfare intensely perpetuated by media coverage every time an instance of injustice is committed.
For this reason, more and more individuals can realize the sins of the US’s history and inevitably the flaws in its current state of government. Thus counter-movements to the Establishment, (e.g. see The New Yorker) the term used to scapegoat dominant - or ‘elitist’ - groups in power that use their authority to control the country.
These movements often turn out to be some form of anarchy or radical socialism, either one presenting a reasonable ideology of revolution that’s especially captured the hearts of young people.
Is nationalism truly a bad thing?
Some would say nationalism was birthed after the French revolution, due to how infectious French nationalism was to the people, so much so that the provinces that would later make up Germany and Italy would start vying for unification and a call for a ‘nationalist’ identity.
These ideas were romanticized through the years by the shared languages, customs, beliefs, and history of the people that would soon form ‘nations’.
To this extent, while the conflicts that were caused by nationalism were bloody and filled with turmoil, they resulted in the birth of new countries that could better represent a greater population and culture, and this cycle of independence would spin like a rotary through each and every decade leading to 2020.
The 90s saw 14 republics spring free from the Soviet Union, the 2000s saw the rise of newer Slavic countries, and the 2010s brought about the Arab Spring, South Sudan’s split, and Catalonia’s vie for independence. The 2020s could perhaps see the birth of Kurdistan and/or Kashmir as a result of heated conflicts in the areas that have been escalating greatly in the past 5 years.
For many, these movements for independence have sparked an overwhelming sense of pride for the denizens of these new born countries, offering new futures, new opportunities, and hopefully a better way of life. At least, at first glance.
Many countries have struggled ever since their independence, especially in places like Venezuela or Afghanistan which have been miserable even since their independence. For this reason, it makes sense why certain individuals could identify these movements as a bad thing, especially when some of the collateral effects of these movements resulted in al-Qaeda, the Hezbollah, the Islamic State, etc.
How did this eventually evolve to Trump’s nationalism? Easy answer is that the same pride possessed by the ethnic & social groups comprising the first nationalist movements in Europe is the same pride possessing Trump’s followers. The man even demanded a ‘patriotic education’ in US schools, via the Politico.
In a country that put a man on the moon, won two world wars, became the uni-polar power in the world following the Soviet collapse, and has policed the world globally since the United Nations became a thing, it is very easy to taut the country as the greatest ever.
Even if it means to overshadow a history of the civil unrest the streets of the country are seeing right now, the Trump administration understands the great powers, empires, and unified powers in history could only be successful so long as they won the hearts of the people.
Instead, the country is more split than it's ever been since perhaps the Civil War in the 1860s, to which it could escalate further without anything to bridge together the sides at war with each other right now, conflicted by the beliefs and values of a melting pot of different cultures.
America has successfully developed its own Balkan powder keg.
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