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The report describes the disturbing emotions that exist both on the right and on the left; how minority groups, especially African-Americans on a daily basis, experience racism on the skin and how right-wing supporters feel that American core values and themselves are threatened. People who fear each other and are angry. What we see unfolding before our eyes are tensions so strong that it runs the risk of exploding into serious violence. Judges sometimes speak of the dangers of civil war in the United States, one of the most important and richest democracies in the world.
There is nothing wrong with highlighting the face of racism or the impact of President Trump on the state of tension when we talk about what is happening now; there are two aspects that partly explain the tumult.
But there is a dimension that often disappears when we try to understand what is happening. I am thinking of the longer time horizon of a society that has incorporated so much injustice into its system that fewer and fewer of its own citizens believe in the cohesive putty of its own model of society. The system has become so uneven and so relentless for so many that fear of the future dominates daily life. A system where the rich have diamonds for their dogs and the poor do not have enough food to satisfy themselves.
With extreme inequalities comes competition for the remnants left to people further down the social chain, and there are both blacks and whites. Two groups whose history and relationship with the United States, on the other hand, are essentially separate from each other and previously fraught with tension.
The American dream has long been eroded, and therefore it is also the foundation of stability. The idea that previously claimed that if you worked hard enough, the opportunities were there, has now been changed by the feeling that nothing is possible no matter how hard I try. The dream has become a nightmare for a significant number of Americans. In the past four decades, prosperity in America has been increasingly distributed in favor of the super-rich. With Reagans Tax reform in the 1980s, the tax for people with higher incomes was reduced from 50 to 28 percent. It was a huge reorganization of resources. The sea change in the 1980s also broke a rule of the American model: that it would be worth working even if the world was not fair or welfare increased as in Europe. It should be noted that it is not only the poorest, but also the middle class and the lower middle class, whose faith in the future has been crushed and anxiety has increased. Add to this a political development in which the influence of major corporate interests has outstripped the voice of ordinary citizens, so trust in democratic institutions has also eroded.
Today, one in ten politicians trusts Washington, fifty years ago it was eight in ten. Somewhere there is a limit to the amount of inequality a society can tolerate. Perhaps the United States has reached its?
Now, it is not the case that there are not also profound differences in ideology, outlook on life, and values between different parts of the United States and between different groups. And that these in themselves create tension. What we are witnessing now is, of course, also part of the search for a way forward in a country that relies entirely on diversity and has always fought for what is most important. There are great differences in the way people relate to society between those who live in the city and in the countryside, between different levels of education, racial affiliation and gender. But a society like the United States that relies on all these variations has managed to handle this in a reasonable way as long as people have felt confident about the future. As long as they have believed in the basic idea of the society that everyone is a part of, in the promises that anything is possible for all who try.
When that hope falls, all other differences become clearer, as does the fear of “the others.” And in the end, injustices take on expressions such that struggle becomes a more reasonable means than relying on political change.
