One of the most famous American journalists and political scientists, Walter Lippmann, who passed away in 1974 at more than eighty years of age after having profoundly influenced the first half of the twentieth century with his ideas and having crossed the entire political and cultural horizon of the country, invited us to investigate every reality without stopping at the surface. «The hypothesis that seems most fruitful to me – argued Lippmann – is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to report a fact, the function of truth is to bring hidden facts to light, to relate them to each other and to give a picture of reality that allows men to act. The news does not say how the seed is germinating in the soil but it can tell us when the first sprout appears on the ground.” More than an appeal, a forerunner of today’s alarm caused by the so-called fake newsLippmann’s words seem to sound like a wise warning regarding what we believe we know about what we sometimes observe without asking ourselves the problem of a necessary in-depth analysis. On the eve of the American presidential elections on November 5, the feeling that there is a lot of discussion around things that, ultimately, we know very little about, is anything but negligible.
A LACUNA which can be at least partially remedied by consulting some recent works, often arriving in bookstores precisely in view of the vote for the White House, and which allow us to take stock of some basic themes that characterize the social and political situation of the United States even more than the current election campaign says. Among these, the profound differences, but also the unitary arguments, which nourish the daily life of the over 300 million inhabitants of a country that exceeds 9 million km² in extension, the extension and depth of the social differences between a reality and the other, the emergence of the new right-wing cultures that led to Donald Trump’s first mandate (2017/2021), the legacy of the old democratic guard, in many ways linked to the figure of President Joe Biden, and the new face of progressive world, embodied not only by the candidacy of Kamala Harris.
In the first of the texts examined here, although in extreme synthesis, the theme of the profound and intrinsic differences that define the “space” of the United States is affirmed right from the ways in which the work was created. Born from an idea of the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, Fabio Finotti, the volume signed by Maria Teresa Cometto and Glauco Maggi for Neri Pozza (This isn’t New Yorkpp. 264, 20 euros), collects the travel notes collected by the two well-known journalists, who have lived in the USA for some time, along the stages of as many coast to coast itineraries to “discover deep America”. The spirit of the project, which the work of Cometto and Maggi gave substance to, was precisely that of investigating what “divides” and what instead “unites” Americans today. A question that is anything but anodyne, given that the legacy of the fractures that emerged, for example on the occasion of the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, the dramatic event with which the Trump presidency ended, has not stopped, and reason, to discuss to this day, especially since the Tycoon is once again underway for the leadership of the great country.
In their research, the authors moved along two directions, a first time to the North, in the footsteps of the pioneers, from New York to Oregon, and a second time to the South, from California to Alabama, partly following the relief of Appalachia. If the diversity inherent in the realities crossed, and in the many encounters made, is in some way evident, less so is one of the considerations that Cometto and Maggi entrust to readers by explaining what emerges from their tour of the “Other America”, “the one that elites of the two shores call flyover country, i.e. that part of the country that “important” people only see from the plane when they fly between Manhattan and Los Angeles” However, these are “also the states to which many American families have moved in recent years in search of a better quality of life, in terms of safety, clean air and… lower taxes”. In this sense, add the two journalists, despite the alarm about an imminent civil war that has already been ringing for a few years, “going so far as to hypothesize the end of democracy”, “what we saw with our own eyes left a strong impression on us that Americans are really not as divided, polarized and angry at each other as we see on social media and mainstream».
BUT IF POLITICS It therefore seems to divide the country less than one would think, but the same cannot be said about the economy. In his new investigation, Princeton University sociologist Matthew Desmond, former author of Evicted (La nave di Teseo, 2018), the largest investigation into the housing crisis involving millions of Americans – interviewed on these pages on 30 June 2018 – draws a dramatic portrait of the social inequalities that push a growing number of its citizens to the threshold of survival fellow citizens. In Poverty in America (just released by La nave di Teseo in the translation by Carlotta Ventura, pp. 382, euro 24) Desmond explains how in the richest country in the world, «if the poor founded a nation, it would have a population larger than Australia or Venezuela ». In fact, continues the scholar, “almost one in nine Americans, including one in eight children, lives in poverty” and “there are over 38 million people who cannot meet their basic needs and over 108 million who make do with a annual income of $55,000 or less, stuck somewhere between poverty and security.” This, not to mention that more than a million of “public school students are homeless, living in motels, cars, shelters and abandoned buildings.”
A situation that makes this issue the true heart of the country’s social reality. To the point that Matthew Desmond himself indicates it without hesitation as the element from which a true transformation of the United States can start, comparable, right from the language through which it is described, to that which in the second half of the nineteenth century led to abolition of slavery. «To put an end to poverty in America – reiterates Desmond – new laws and changes in political parties will be necessary. But this process will also require each of us, in our own way, to become a “poverty abolitionist” and refuse to live as an unwitting enemy of the poor.”
NO NEED of great foresight to imagine that there will be issues such as the differences between life in the metropolises of the two coasts, rather than in the centers of the “deep country”, or the incessant growth of poverty and its consequences on health, education and “the security” of American citizens to influence the vote on November 5th considerably, and in any case much more than international issues. A perspective which obviously poses many questions to “politics”, or rather to the way in which the two large parties that dominate the scene in the country, and which express the candidates for the White House, are able to intercept the moods and needs of the society, to meet the movements that express themselves there, to imagine a future for hundreds of millions of men and women.
ON THIS ELECTION EVEtwo essays examine respectively the impact of the new right-wing culture that is expressed at an international level and that pushes Trump in the USA, re-proposing a logic to be culture wars as perhaps it hasn’t happened for decades, and the legacy of the Biden presidency from which Kamala Harris’ candidacy was born.
In The reactionary spirit (translation by Luca Briasco, minimum fax, pp. 288, euro 18) Zack Beauchamp, a young scholar of right-wing populism, investigates the traditional guidelines of the American right (to then also examine the reality of Hungary, Israel and India) and then delves into the further anti-democratic hyperbole that the Republican Party experienced during the Obama presidency, where “racial” and immigration-related issues became synonymous with the denunciation of a possible disappearance of white America. The infernal crucible from which Donald Trump’s candidacy finally emerged with the prospect of a concrete change to the rules of American democracy. In this sense, although it remains an open question for the author, the possibility or otherwise that a second Trump administration will be able to “really put the federal government under its control”, that a vote in its favor paradoxically responds to an anti-democratic plan, shared in the leaders as well as in part of the base of the right, it is now a certainty.
In the same way, that is to say with equal determination, Franklin Foer, a significant figure of liberal journalism, former director of The New Republic and corresponding time ofAtlanticdedicates a volume to the fact that, in his opinion, with Joe Biden “an era is ending”. The last of the politicians (translation by Paolo Lucca, Longanesi, pp. 438, euro 24) is not so much and not only a tribute to a progressive president whose mandate has perhaps not been examined so far with the necessary attention, but rather a reflection on the fact that that The art of mediation and discussion that has long characterized the American political system has been definitively shattered under the blows of aggressive Trumpism.
WHAT FOR suggests at the end of an old-fashioned investigation that follows the steps of the Pennsylvania politician in his four years at the helm of the White House, after eight as Obama’s deputy, is the idea that behind Biden’s moderate tones there is actually accomplished a sort of rescue of the country’s democracy threatened by one of the most powerful waves of resentment and racism in its recent history. As also emerges from Kamala Harris’ autobiography (Our truthsThe Ship of Theseus, 2021), who was Biden’s vice president, to understand America, its society and its politics, there is little point in dwelling on what can be grasped at first sight. The current Democratic candidate herself, using an example full of symbolism, explains that her first name means “lotus flower” – she is the daughter of two civil rights activists who arrived in the country from India and Jamaica respectively -, a important symbol in Indian culture: «The lotus grows underwater and its flower emerges from the surface when the roots are well planted in the bottom of the river».
