Donald Trump's election to the U.S. presidency in 2016, which placed control of the government in the hands of the most racially homogeneous, far-right political party in the western world, produced shock and disbelief for liberals, progressives, and leftists globally. Yet most of the immediate analysis neglects longer-term accounting of how the United States arrived here. Race and America's Long War examines the relationship between war, politics, police power, and the changing contours of race and racism in the contemporary United States. Nikhil Pal Singh argues that the United States's pursuit of war since the September 11 terrorist attacks has reanimated a longer history of imperial statecraft that segregated and eliminated enemies both within and overseas. America's territorial expansion and Indian removals, settler in-migration and nativist restriction, and African slavery and its afterlives were formative social and political processes that drove the rise of the United States as a capitalist world power long before the onset of globalization. Spanning the course of U.S. history, these crucial essays show what the return of racism and war as seemingly permanent features of American public and political life is at the heart of our present crisis and collective disorientation.From Chapter Five,"The Present Crisis":
Writing in the late 1990a, the philosopher Richard Rorty offered prediction that, immediately following the election of Trump, many commentators invoked as if stumbling upon a lost prophecy. Rorty, along with others, recognized that one economic consequence of the globalization of trade and industry was the substantial loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs for American workers with no more than a high school education. He warned that inattention to the declining fortunes of this group, particularly among professional, college-educated suburbanites, would lead to a reactionary working-class revolt and the election of a divisive and dictatorial 'strongman' to America's highest office. He largely ignored the fact that the most creative and ambitious movement organizing during this period brought together trade unionists and environmentalists in opposition to institutions like the World trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund (culminating in the 1999 protest on Seattle) and sought to challenge forms of globalist governance on the ground of their erosion of labor rights, living standards, democratic accountability, and environmental protection.Id. at 152, 155.
Let's face it, American's hate the "others."
