Is the United States a barbaric nation? From the news reports that marked the anniversary of the Capitol riot—the images of Trumpist thugs in bizarre costumes that are constantly airing in the media—one could easily believe it.
However, a violent “insurrection” in this “sacred” edifice, however sensational, is not necessarily representative of the state of the American soul or of its civic DNA. Already, the thesis of a putsch organized by neo-fascists is thin. Their alleged leader’s poor powers of concentration were on full display on January 6, the day he spent the majority of the time glued to the television instead of planning the second act of his big reality drama. Admittedly, there were a few deaths among the demonstrators and the police, but in a country armed to the teeth, we can consider ourselves lucky that the assault on the citadel of the republic in Washington DC did not not turn into a massacre.
On the other hand, the disorder in the Capitol was in itself an evidence of barbarism due to the lack of organization and coherence of the instigators. The January 6 barbarians obviously had no idea what they wanted to accomplish. It is a ferocious resentment that has boiled over — what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “hating in common”.
In fact, the rawest American barbarity is often not visible; it hides all over the place in a federal system containing huge variations between regions, states and counties. To define the barbaric side of the American nation, it is better to analyze the banal figures of our daily life compared to other countries presumed to be civilized and democratic.
A key index of barbaric tendencies in society is the infant mortality rate: 5.8 deaths per 1,000 births in the United States, according to the latest statistics compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2019. This balance sheet ranks the number one superpower in 33and place among the 36 members of the OECD at the time, below Canada and Slovakia, both at 4.5, but above Chile at 7 (Japan is in the lead at 1.9). The social gaps in America are such that the OECD includes in its list the best state in which to give birth (Massachusetts at 3.8) and the worst (Mississippi at 8.6). Isn’t it outrageous that a baby born in Mississippi has more than half the chance of survival than a baby born 1881 miles north? Isn’t it barbaric that the President and Congress do not intervene to eliminate this grotesque gap? Instinctively thoughtless, the barbarians believe that universal health insurance is a plot of the devil.
Another important barbarity: the death penalty, imposed inconsistently, almost randomly, according to the laws and political mood of each state (legal in Mississippi, but not in Massachusetts). Donald Trump shone in this regard — near the end of his term he executed 13 convicted prisoners, by far the highest for a single president since the restoration of federal capital punishment in 1988. In the United States, support for the ultimate punishment is bipartisan; as Governor and President, Bill Clinton found it very useful for his political career as a “new Democrat”, and its use remains an essential tool for cynical politicians of both parties. There, there is less comparability with the members of the OECD, among which the death penalty is rarely applied. To make a good comparison, we must turn to the true colleagues of the Americans in this field: the Chinese, the Iranians and the Saudis.
It is paradoxical that American executions, always announced by the government, are trumpeted by some, while a more widespread barbarism is displayed at the same time in silent premises, invisible to the general public. We know the sordid history of the CIA’s “black sites”, where many “terrorist” suspects were tortured in secret, as well as the horror of the prison of Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, where the torture, the rape and humiliation of detainees were openly practiced in front of military spectators. Today, despite the renunciation, in principle, of torture outside the American borders, another method of torture is at work in interior prisons with solitary confinement. The Constitution prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment”, but it has always been known that to deprive a prisoner of human society, as well as air and light, is terribly cruel.
According to a study by the Yale University School of Law, in 2019 there were between 55,000 and 62,500 people in solitary confinement – on average 22 hours a day for a minimum of 15 days – in federal and state prisons. States that cooperated with the researchers. In the 33 locations surveyed, there were nearly 3,000 incarcerated in solitary confinement for more than three years. A famous witness to this variety of barbarism was bilingual, binational, and inspired by American-style freedom—the Marquis de Lafayette—imprisoned in almost continuous solitude by Austria for three years after fleeing the Terror in France. revolutionary. For Lafayette, according to his secretary Auguste Levasseur, not only was isolation useless to reform a human being, but, moreover, it “led to madness”. At least the January 6 lunatics demonstrated their barbarity in the open, loudly and proudly.
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine.
His column returns at the beginning of each month.