Abortion, carrying weapons: the United States is backtracking and asserting its marked difference from the rest of the developed world.
Racism: a tragically different history, a decisive past of slavery, clashes that have never been resolved, resentments that have remained alive since the Civil War are causing, 150 years later, regressions unimaginable elsewhere… visible in particular in restrictive electoral laws that target minorities, and repeated police dramas like the George Floyd case, just two years ago.
This country is cut in two between an urban population whose societal choices on fundamental themes resemble what we see elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Quebec, and a rural and peri-urban population, a large part of which refuses and actively fights markers of modernity.
” Cut in two ” ? In fact, it is mathematically inaccurate. Several polls across the country give majorities, ranging from 55 to 75%, in favor of a marked right to abortion, gun control or even the maintenance of the United States as an immigration country. .
However, on these themes, the political forces that advance and set the tone for the debate – if one can speak of “debate” – are part of the opposite camp. The Republican right occupies a disproportionate field compared to its share in public opinion (in the range of 40-45% with, it is true, the historic peak of 47% for Donald Trump in the presidential election of 2020).
The explanations for this gap are multiple: state power, rejection of the “tyrannical” federal government, overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate, decisive presence of the “hard” right on the airwaves and social networks.
We can add, since the Trump presidency, a Supreme Court that has completely shifted to the political field. With, in four years, three appointments of ultra-conservative judges (out of nine).
This now makes this politicized and partisan Court an almost automatic ally of the Trumpian right (Thomas and Alito, to whom Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett were added between 2017 and 2020 – the conservative John Roberts, faced with this shift which horrifies, having decided to go to the left).
On the right to abortion and on the bearing of arms, it is she who will have the last word, and will decide for example shortly, if we are to believe the leak of Politico of May 3, to invalidate the judgment Roe v. wade from 1973.
As for the tragedies that have become repetitive, almost ritual, mass killings in schools and public places, they no longer move political lines. Their effect of horror is decreasing on an anesthetized opinion, and would even rather tend to anchor the fanatics of the Second Amendment – a text of 27 words with ambiguous wording, written in 1791, which has become a veritable talisman – in their armed certainties.
Here, the blockage is clearly in the Senate (where the 50 Republican senators – out of 100 – represent approximately 43% of the population) and in the Supreme Court. Two allied institutions, on this subject as on others, to block or roll back any attempt to control, even minimal, firearms.
The originality of the United States, in its programmed regression on such questions, is due to a dysfunctional democracy, to the distortions of representation, to the blocking of institutions, allied to an active minority which has decided to make the most of it.
On bearing arms and abortion, this minority is superior to the corresponding minorities found in other Western countries… but it is a minority all the same.
Never mind: you don’t need to have 50% support, in a referendum or in the number of political representatives, to get your views across… Which means in concrete terms: to impose restrictions on the majority of women that they object. Or again, to impose on the majority of citizens (66% of whom in the United States do not own arms) a regime inherited from the Wild West and, beyond that, from the early days of the colony, with all its founding myths.
Racial discrimination, now… On the “systemic racism” of the United States, the distortion comes from elsewhere: from a singular, absolutely unique and heavy history through the centuries… But also, from a cultural imperialism which intends to export its categories to the rest of the world – which too often accepts this “ideological export”, taking it for granted.
Here, the aforementioned blockages and tensions, coming from the right, are certainly present… but here is a theme where the “evil” does not come only from a radical, activist and racist right which does not say its name.
Because there is, on this subject, the importance of intellectual circles, certain major media titles and academic institutions. They have, on the subject, exported to the rest of the world their categories and their radical analyzes – often appropriate in an American context, but outraged when one claims to be doing “business” Floyd or Roe v. wade things that concern us directly, here, with the same categories.
It’s wrong. On racism, as on abortion and the carrying of arms, the United States is in the West a real world apart.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]