The 'enemy within' stalks the US, but who is the real enemy?

There are lessons from Mount Rushmore we British need to heed. Donald Trump went recklessly to the foot of those famous statues on July 4 – American Independence Day – to deliver what the White House called some "remarks" appropriate to the occasion and date. Reckless, because to hold a mass rally in the midst of a highly infectious and sometimes fatal epidemic was culpably to put lives at risk. But at the core of his address was one fundamental truth and one fundamental falsehood, and both are relevant this side of the Atlantic.

First, the truths. The United States is a great society which has been a bulwark of freedom and fount of prosperity from which whole world has immensely benefited. And the world needs it to go on being so. Those four American heroic giants carved into the South Dakota mountainside did indeed stand for the noblest ideals of each generation they came from. They made modern America, and to repudiate their achievements is to invalidate not just its past but its present.

Those elements in his remarks which underline this point were eloquently made – the speech writer certainly knew his trade – and deserved to be carved in stone, though perhaps with a little less bragging at the expense of other nations which might also have made some small contribution to the birth of modern civilisation. America demeans its own greatness by such immodest boastfulness, which may arise more from insecurity than from arrogance.

But the falsehoods loomed larger still. His claim was that there was afoot in America a widespread and semi-organised conspiracy to downgrade or even dismiss all the core values of American society, which are in all truth the core values of any decent society. He called this movement left-wing fascism, and its visible manifestation was the campaign in many parts of America to pull down statues of those previously regarded as local or national heroes, but who are now seen to be the perpetrators or accomplices of slavery. 

Thus America, he claims, is in the midst of a cultural civil war, indeed a cultural insurrection, whose short term purpose is to destroy all those public icons which are linked to slavery, to which you and I might respond “so what and why not?” but whose sinister ultimate long term aim is the undermining of all those principles and institutions on which American society depends. It says, in effect, that America itself is a racist enterprise, and therefore has to be overthrown. 

There are two things happening here. One is the repudiation of the possibility of any reasoned and sensible critique of American history, recognising that the harmful legacy of slavery and “Jim Crow” still casts its shadow. An exercise designed to identify and correct the national heritage of racism should not be discarded and rejected as left-wing fascism. A “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” approach to American history, which President Trump seemed to be urging, is an attempt to construct a sterilised phantasy in place of historical reality. 

The second more subtle phenomenon, which an outsider it may spot more easily, is a subconscious element of paranoia in the American psyche - that there must be enemies lurking in the cultural undergrowth plotting to take away everything Americans hold dear. This notion of an “enemy within” was manifest in the McCarthy era, but is still widespread. And Mr Trump is trying to revive it, as the main vehicle on which he hopes to proceed to a triumphant outcome in the November presidential election. But in fact the enemy within is much closer to home – he is it, himself. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and Mr Trump is busy dividing America against itself as hard as he can.

The lesson for the British in all this is, first, not to lose sight of the good things that Britain has contributed to world civilisation. The fruits of colonialism are to be seen on the multiracial streets of London, possibly the most racially integrated and ethnically harmonious city on earth. Let us not forget that the United States itself was a British offshoot, but so were Canada, Australia, and half the nations of Africa. And Ireland, dare I mention? 

There is a clumsy reading of British history that only reads the stories of its several empires through disapproving modern eyes, within a contemporary framework of moral outrage. Parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, the English language, not to mention football, rugby and cricket, were British gifts to the world alongside such questionable commodities as white supremacy, class consciousness and Protestant nationalism. And the Savile Row suit. What a rereading of British history requires is discernment above all: why did people act they way they did according to their moral insights, which are not necessarily ours? I think people are increasingly aware of this.

But the sort of paranoid fear of left-wing fascism that Mr Trump was trying to whip up at Mount Rushmore is alien to the British temperament. He must not be allowed to obscure what is true, valuable and decent in the Black Lives Matter movement, either here or there. It is about the opening of minds, not closing them.