As the new editor of the Friday Bulletin, I had hoped to write something else today to introduce myself to the CPT community. But it hardly seems appropriate not to comment on the aftermath of Trump’s inauguration.
He sounded like a buccaneering imperialist. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts”, he said, as he threatened Panama and Mexico. He spoke of sending back “millions and millions of criminal aliens”, of sending troops to the border to “repel the disastrous invasion of our country”, of revoking birthright citizenship, and promised to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”. His climate policy is three words: “drill baby drill”. In the lobby outside, a man in a ten-gallon hat smiled ear to ear.
While exonerating militiamen and suspending federal workers hired in “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” positions, Trump has declared a “Golden Age”. But he hasn’t so much turned the page as dropped the fig leaf. As Tom Stevenson puts it, what upsets the old guard about him is his “withdrawal from the justificatory ideology of American power. When you give up on the dishonest profession of respect for norms, rules and order you give up the game itself.” In other words, this has been there all along; Trump has simply stripped the veneer, and granted pardon to peoples’ basest instincts.
There’s a lot of talk about the return of fascism, and it’s hard not to be dumbstruck by an image of the world’s richest man giving that salute, or by the attendant guest-list of European populists harnessing racism to reverse engineer our societies. But many of us know that this is entirely consistent with what went on before. In my years living in Lesvos, Greece, working with CPT’s Aegean Migrant Solidarity team, you could discern signs of this in the dispassionate faces of the prosecutors who pushed for life sentences against migrants, people who, whatever the justificatory rhetoric, were on trial for simply daring to enter Europe. This is just what it looks like when justification is no longer needed.
We cannot make sense of this resurgence without first acknowledging that our societies have functioned as normal alongside infrastructures that dehumanise, so long as this only applies to some, so long as it happens in the dark. To recognise thatwould mean holding up a mirror. The task at hand is to find new eyes with which to see. As I step into the role of Communications Associate, I hope these bulletins can be a space in which we find ways together of doing just that.
