Following Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election, the deeply divided American public has been inundated with politicians' calls for national unity and healing of broken relations between political dissenters and communities.
The question is, however, what is meant by this unity and healing? Voting in the just concluded elections was unequivocally a vote of division and exclusivity. During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump spoke clearly and often about the fact that many US residents are the "wrong people" for him.
For those marked US citizens, these elections mean indifference and fear - now and in the future. How can these citizens ("they") respond to the call for unity? How can their political "wounds" be healed when they fear that the worst is yet to come?
Donald Trump's first presidential move does not sound encouraging to many. Namely, according to the instructions of the newly elected president, his transition team of the Environmental Protection Agency will be led by Miron Ebel - one of the most famous skeptics regarding climate change.
How can anyone in the US pretend that the events of November 8th are "just politics" and nothing more? How to accept some form of national unity that claims to rise above the words and deeds of the person that that nation has just elected as its president? How can they now, after months of insults and threats, agree to "fuck it, it doesn't work" and the promise that there will be a president in the White House who thinks differently from that flushed and vengeful charlatan from the election stages all over America?
Finally, who are these “wrong people”? We can judge this based on the political platform and ideological matrix on which Trump won. That platform and matrix, he said during the campaign, excludes undocumented and exploited immigrants, Americans who practice the Islamic faith, same-sex families, people who cannot have health insurance due to previous health problems, and survivors of sexual assault from the American collective being. , as well as black youth who are afraid of the police, and some others.
The fact that the newly elected president did not lose a significant portion of voter support after his racist, xenophobic, and misogynist attitudes became common knowledge suggests that such feelings and attitudes may have deep roots in American society? One gets the impression that the voters in the USA, after decades of denying the power of their own worst instincts, chose the epitome of those very instincts as their president. Paraphrasing Farid Zakaria, who recently asserted that Donald Trump is "a cancer on the body of American democracy", it can be said that the voters have decided to send something to the White House that can destroy that democracy. The election of the new president legitimized all the anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, sexist, misogynistic and isolationist messages and slogans that were heard at his pre-election rallies, but also established voters' expectations that these messages and slogans would be translated into political decisions. This, I think, is the realization that produces the greatest fear.
Any and anyone's sincere call for post-election national unity must rely on clear and public criticism of the rhetoric of division, intolerance, fear of differences, and disregard for democratic institutions and procedures. In other words, it must rely on a critique of the rhetoric that opened the door to the White House for Donald Trump. History, however, teaches us that this kind of criticism will not happen, so the current calls for bridging differences and healing social divisions remain only empty political rhetoric.
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