“American society seems so close to us and accessible that we sometimes tend to believe that we can understand the political phenomena that we observe there without having to make the effort to decipher the cultural specificities of the country”, writes Pierre Martin. For this political scientist from the University of
Montreal, however, this sense of familiarity is deceptive. American history and society are complex; to understand them requires an analytical look that goes beyond immediate topicality and peremptory judgments.
This is the exercise
Martin in America under pressure (Les Éditions du Journal, 2022,
312 pages), a rich collection of his chronicles and notes published in The Journal of Montreal since 2015, that is to say, essentially, during the Trump years.
Martin, like the vast majority of Quebecers, judges very severely the reign of the last Republican president, which he equates to “plutocratic populism”. With Trump, writes the political scientist, “power is exercised symbolically in the name of the people and the marginalized, but concretely in the service of the interests of a minority of powerful owners”.
Defender “of center-left policies that really make a difference in people’s lives” and that he finds among the Democrats, Martin is often accused by Quebec supporters of Trump of lacking the neutrality expected of a political scientist. .
However, in front of Trump, he explains, this neutrality no longer holds. “One can be objective, writes Martin, and take sides for democracy, for peace, order and international security, for lasting prosperity, without forgetting the interest of one’s fellow citizens. We can therefore, he concludes, find that the Democratic candidates are objectively preferable to Trump and his disciples.
The political scientist says he understands that the victims of globalization have been seduced by the national-
Trump’s economicism and he criticizes, in passing, while relativizing his influence, the left woke democrat who, through his militant abuses, feeds the Trumpist extreme right. The problem, he says, is that the whimsical Republican president has diverted legitimate social recriminations to the benefit of his personal interest by fueling xenophobia and political polarization.
To understand Trump’s astonishing success, Martin borrows the highly original thesis of writer and journalist Kurt Andersen. According to the latter, “to be an American is to have the right to believe what you want and whoever you want”. The whole history of the United States is characterized by this claim, which sometimes comes to counterbalance the cult of science and technology.
The 1960s and 1970s marked a high point in this phenomenon. On the left, hippies and intellectuals challenged the “dogma of reality”. On the right, religious fundamentalists reject rationalism and science. Television, at the same time, imposes an imaginary where everything is permitted, a cocktail that becomes explosive when ideology gets involved, even more so in the age of the Internet. Trump, under these conditions, can lie as he breathes, we have the right to choose to believe him if we think it is in our interest.
In The Delirium of the American Empire (Les Éditions La Presse, 2022, 270 pages), Alexandre Couture Gagnon, political scientist from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and Alexandre Sirois, editorial writer at The Pressboth fine connoisseurs of the country, engage in a very stimulating dialogue on the state of current American society.
Although he remembers with emotion the hope aroused by the arrival of Barack Obama in power in 2008, Sirois describes Trump’s election, eight years later, as “a black eye for the United States”. . When he looks at the country’s great polarization — even vaccination is politicized there — the tampering with electoral rules that threatens the right to vote of millions of Americans, the scandalous social inequalities and the rout of American leadership on the international scene, Sirois does not hide his concerns in front of “this sick country” that he loves.
Without contradicting the observations of his interlocutor, Couture Gagnon, who has lived in the United States for years, warns us against the temptation of caricature. Yes, she says, what Sirois says is true, but the “positive elements” are not lacking in the United States. She mentions in particular the effective separation of powers, the accessibility of education to undocumented minors, the open-mindedness of young people and the increasingly widespread desire among citizens to put an end to the polarization maintained by politicians.
Clear and lively, this conversation between two Quebecers who are friends of the United States offers an instructive and pleasant look at our fascinating and cumbersome neighbour.