Today is Thanksgiving in America, a day of gratitude and feasting. Legend has it that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation first celebrated it in 1621 with the Native Americans to thank them for helping them with grains and lessons in corn growing. Ever since, Americans have celebrated this annual feast, memorialising the original expression of gratitude between the European immigrants and their hosts. 

November has also become the cruellest month for many Americans this year with Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election. The morning after the election, many of my female colleagues looked haggard and tearful. They said that it was not just that a woman had lost her chance to be the first female president of the United States, but that Americans had voted a misogynist to the highest office and rolled back their gains.

But many men and women all over America also celebrated Trump’s surprising victory. Contrary to the election forecast, exit polls showed that more college-educated whites voted for Trump (49 per cent) than for Clinton (45 percent); 53 percent of white women voted for Trump against 43 percent for Clinton. Even though women taken together voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, Trump’s demeaning portrayal of women had little effect on his white women supporters.

Countless contradictions

The 2016 presidential election represents the deep contradictions at the heart of the American republic. As President Obama has often said, the US has been an imperfect union marching toward perfection. Inevitably, many backward and forward steps dot its journey. The duration of these contradictions, however, has been painful for many. 

America has been torn between the high ideals of its founding fathers and the violence and vulgarity of slavery; between the ideal of equality of all humans at birth and the reality of racism and extermination of indigenous peoples; between life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of its citizens and the screams of its victims; between Walt Whitman’s embrace of optimism and

multiplicity and the hateful rhetoric and deeds of white supremacists; between the welcome of “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and xenophobia; between Morrison’s and Faulkner’s celebration of memory as a site of healing, restoration and coming to terms with the past and the instant gratification of consumerism and mass market page-turners; and, not least, between the solace and poison of churches and the safety and injustice of guns. 

One can, thus, go on and on making an inventory of contradictions at the heart of the American enterprise. A Trump victory, propelled by white fear of racial and economic marginalisation, right after the term of the first black president, comes as the latest contradiction. But to consider it just as a result of a “whitelash,” as some have dubbed it, would diminish its symbolic gravity. 

Surprise, surprise

The American public, you can say, has been incomparably generous, idealistic and compassionate even as it is paranoid, gullible, racially conscious and many even cruel. While God and Deist founding fathers pull Americans in one way, racialist modernity pulls them in the opposite direction. And in times of crises and downturns, both these tendencies fight to break out to the surface. 

If the turn of the 19th century Gilded Age produced the Robber Barons, the turn of the 20th and first decades of the 21st century boom-and-bust has seen the rise of kitsch. Trump seems kitsch personified; and to his credit, he has successfully marshalled his advertising skills to sell himself to the American public. Look at the personalities of Obama and Trump. One is gentle, dignified in his bearing, measured in his speech, thoughtful in his judgement and restrained in his actions; the other appears vulgar in his speech, like a kidult unable to control his impulses and glitzy in his taste. One unfailingly appeals to the high ideals of the American republic; the other reads and rides over the fear and baser instincts of the populace (the white nationalists have already begun celebrating Trump’s victory with “Hail Trump!” shouts and the Nazi salute).

Who had thought in 2008 that Americans would elect a black man with a funny name to their highest office?  In South Africa, the vice chancellor of a university told us in no uncertain terms, ‘“They” will never let Obama be president.’ I had heard the same in Kathmandu. Even the American blacks did not believe it was possible in their lifetime. But Americans surprised them all and themselves by voting Obama to victory—not just once but twice. You wonder how the same people elected two men of such opposing impulses, tastes and views to the same office one after another. 

But the 2016 election itself was fraught with this contradiction. While Trump won the electoral votes, Clinton’s popular vote count (as of Tuesday) has risen to 63.7 million to Trump’s 62 million. Like a raw, confused stripling, America does not seem to know its mind.

Nonetheless, Trump’s rise and victory have come as a composite effect of Jerry Springer culture of spectacle and disneyfication of society where fake news, social media, advertising, WikiLeaks, Russian hacking and FBI bungling play as much a role as the genuine grievances and identity politics of the American voters.

Who knows

Trump has become president in the age of what Benjamin Barber, an American political theorist, calls jihad v the McWorld, where jihadi fear and nativism clash with the globalism of corporate finance capitalism, where the noise of migrant beneficiaries of the knowledge economy drowns out the pains of jobless hillbillies of the rust and coal belt, as JD Vance persuasively recounts in his book Hillbilly Elegy, and where sexual vulgarity and its laundry washing in public that began in Bill Clinton’s presidency manifest in Trump’s alpha-male reduction of women as nothing more than their genitals.

But as a political scientist colleague posted on Facebook on November 9, as America survived many traumatic events in its history from Valley Forge, the Trail of Tears, slavery and the Civil War (600,000 plus Americans died), the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam, Watergate,  and 9/11, to name just a few, it will ride out this one, too. America and Americans have always bounced back, picked up the pieces and marched forward. The American South, the site of slavery, Jim Crow and racial violence in the past now houses the Carter Center and the Southern, Poverty Law Center, two of the vanguards of world peace and fight against white supremacy and racism respectively.

Even though the early signs do not appear promising, all is not lost.  There is an in-built check-and-balance mechanism in American institutions. Many ranking Republicans opposed Trump during his campaign.

They may rejoice in the Republican presidential victory for now, but if Trump goes haywire, the tide can quickly turn against him in the Congress. 

But Trump’s own naïve, even innocent character, as though he had emerged from a Henry James novel, is another lock to his impulses. His personal stakes may prove to be his biggest restraint. Trump loves his children, his brand name and wealth too much to become anybody’s Hitler or Mussolini. 

Who knows he can even shake up the complacency of the liberals and the conservatives alike and drain the swamp of Washington, as he said he would do, for the better. He can even try to end the nihilism of the inner cities and the economic devastation of rural America. As for seeing a Madam President in the White House, Hillary has moved the flag to the Hillary Step. The next move would be for the summit for American women.