Our America: "Our America"

- By Andrea Stone

As a Canadian citizen and U.S. permanent resident—with an “Alien Number,” no less—the concept of “Our America” is, well, foreign to me. Defining nationhood in possessive terms reflects the notion that nationalism is the work of imagined possession and therefore also exclusion. If something is ours, it cannot be yours. This election has focused almost entirely on whom America belongs to. The slogan “we’re going to take our country back” implied its return to its rightful owner. But it didn’t mean a return to the people. It certainly didn’t mean taking the country back from corporations, the Koch and Walton families, from Wall Street, and the disgrace that is Citizens United. “We’re taking our country back” implied that the nation’s rightful owner who’d been shafted out of their fair share were the deserving whites, the working classes, and their families. But “taking our country back” was really about taking what everyone should have access to away from the people who need it most and giving it to those who need it least.

The “take our country back” campaign drew on the fiction that someone walked off with “your” country while “you” (and decades of successive governments of both persuasions) weren’t looking or were pretending not to look. And someone did. But it wasn’t Black Americans, Muslim Americans, Jewish Americans, immigrants, so-called illegals, Latino/as, disabled people, gay people, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people, queer people, or women. It wasn’t intellectuals. What walked off with “your America” were corporations and the 1%, and whoever wants it back is going to have to do more than draw swastikas, post hateful messages, ridicule college students, yell obscenities at people in grocery stores and on busses, and scoff at people who read, research, and write books. While both Republicans and Democrats are congratulating themselves either for having won or for having voted against the winner, the real beneficiaries of the Republican victory are silently counting their projected tax cuts and rubbing their hands ­­­together for the continuing deregulation of their corporate interests.

My personal preview of this election came nearly a decade ago now, as I listened from my living room in Massachusetts to the news that Rob Ford had been elected mayor of Toronto. You might wonder what on earth the election of a mayor to a City Hall in Canada has to do with the election of Donald Trump to the highest office in the United States. Here are some parallels: Ford came from a very wealthy family, but convinced disaffected, working-class white people and people of color as well as wealthy suburbanites that he was one of them: a regular guy who tells it like it is, who helped people in reviling the elite class (even though he’s part of it and promised tax cuts for it). A guy who hated bike lanes, he declared their very presence evidence of Toronto’s “War on the Car” (an effective slogan out of his campaign); he made outrageous promises that if elected he would cancel the King Street streetcar, which slows down driving commuters—it only transports 100,000 people per day, but sure, we’ll put them all in cars and watch traffic congestion miraculously ease; and incidentally, Ford also found himself publicly on the other end, so to speak, of the word pussy—when interviewed about allegations that he’d told a female staffer that he wanted “to eat her pussy,” he responded that he was “happily married and [had] more than enough to eat at home.”

Another parallel with Trump: Liberals didn’t take Rob Ford and his supporters seriously. In the end, Ford’s opponent, former Liberal member of Provincial Parliament and Ontario Health Minister, once nicknamed “Furious George” and the “attack dog,” and the favorite of downtown Toronto lost to Ford, a city councilor from the suburbs who managed to dictate the terms of conversation during debate, who made his outrageous promises and behavior the centerpiece of the election, and who took his office from the person whose election it was to lose. I’ll also mention that, though Ford was elected to only one term, many firmly believe he would have been elected a second time had his health not failed him. 

There was a time when Americans shook their heads at this. I remember one smug couple in an eye doctor’s waiting room reading news about Ford on their cell phones and saying, “God, what’s the matter with Canadians?” An interesting comment after two terms of George W, I thought, but didn’t say anything. Well, at last the U.S. has got its Rob Ford, and in The Donald’s own words, “It’s gonna be huge.”

During Ford’s tenure at City Hall in Toronto, Canada also had a right-wing conservative federal government. Before the last federal election (one Prime Minister Harper and his government feared losing—and in the end did), they saw the results of a study that reported that Canadian expats don’t usually vote conservative. Soon after, the government passed legislation stipulating that anyone who has lived outside Canada for more than five years is ineligible to vote. Citizenship, be damned. Just like that. I, and many others like me, now neither can vote where we hold citizenship nor where we reside. When I tell Americans this, the first thing they typically ask me is whether I’m still paying taxes in Canada. Seriously? Didn’t the U.S. dispense with property ownership and taxation as the basis for enfranchisement a while ago? But people don’t want to believe that enfranchisement can be yanked so easily, especially not for middle-class professional people like me. . . like them. More frightening, though, is their willingness to believe in (possibly even accept) the logic of disenfranchising non-taxpayers. Then again, given that neoliberalism understands citizens as consumers, the logic holds. Why should I be able to vote in a nation-state where I am not a customer?

Immediately after the recent presidential election, many Americans looked north to Canada, mostly through rose-colored glasses. The Canadian immigration website crashed from over-traffic on November 9th. By contrast, I had no trouble whatsoever checking on my eligibility for U.S. citizenship on the United States immigration (USCIS) site. Right now I don’t “have” a country that is “mine,” literally. But Americans have to think about what “Our America” means and, perhaps more importantly, who it means. The problems are far deeper, greater, and longstanding than any promises to build walls or behavior as “deplorable” as unauthorized pussy-grabbing. And Canadians would do well to guard against a similar movement there. Already candidates vying for the federal Conservative Party leadership are tearing pages out of Trump’s playbook, and Prime Minister Trudeau is facing criticism for capitulating to the very corporate interests he promised to confront. As our news media becomes increasingly deprofessionalized, our sense of what is actually happening in other places is diminishing. Add to that social media’s reinforcement and affirmation of our politics—whatever they are—not to mention the polls’ inaccuracy, and we can understand the shock rippling through Hillary supporters, and likely Clinton herself, the day after.

Globally, U.S. citizens are among the least travelled, and hold among the fewest numbers of passports per capita of any wealthy nation. I can understand it. The U.S. is an enormous country with diverse climates and landscapes. Unlike Canada, which is also enormous and geographically diverse, in the U.S. you can lie on a beach in January without wearing a parka and without leaving the country’s borders. For many, international travel is unthinkable because they can barely afford to feed their families at home, let alone show them other parts of the world. Put all of this together with patriotic rhetoric that promotes spending holiday dollars at “home,” and the fact that the U.S. has among the fewest vacation days of any comparable country (also propped up by a protestant work ethic myth that benefits so many companies, if not their employees), not to mention news media that very rarely attend to international concerns (even in sports) that don’t directly relate to the U.S., and the result is a very insular nation. History has proven that insular nations are easy to control and manipulate, and they also are easy to surprise.

Many “couldn’t believe” the election results, yet we only had to look outside U.S. borders to predict what was coming, even just a little to the north (never mind to England’s Brexit vote and Tory win, Marine Le Pen and the National Front’s growing popularity in France, the Golden Dawn in Greece, to say nothing of multiple nations’ rejection of Syrian refugees, and the list goes on). Trump is not just an American phenomenon, and his supporters are not unique to the U.S. If we want to conceive of “Our America” as anything other than a hotbed of increasing corporate power, swells of hatred and political exclusion disguised as patriotism, and the growing willful destruction of our planet, we’re going to need to take a hard look around at the rest of the world—before the world is taken away from all of us, irrevocably.