When we at last awake

Moral disgust can be liberating. It opens eyes, clarifies, makes the stakes clear. When a President circulates a clip depicting President Obama and his wife as apes, one hopes that the scales at last drop from the eyes of his supporters. The fact that he refused to apologize or admit to a mistake makes it clear that it was an exercise in ‘dog whistle politics’, deploying racist tropes, leaving them up on Trump Social long enough to evoke an echo from the darkest places in his support base.

Trump is the sort of politician for whom going too far is the point. He has long survived moments of shame that would have destroyed others. His luridly sexist remarks about women in 2016 did not sink his candidacy. This time, one hopes that moral disgust remains in American minds and former supporters free themselves from his malign hold upon their souls.

If, on the other hand, he gets away with it, millions of Americans may feel as if long painful years of struggle to free the United States from the curse of racial hatred will have been for nothing.

For America’s overseas allies, disgust at his conduct gives them a dilemma. They have to distance themselves from Trump, reduce their dependence on American power, without giving up on America itself. This is a difficult balancing act. When the President remarks that America’s allies in Afghanistan didn’t really do much of the fighting, the Danes, Canadians and Dutch, who lost soldiers there, ask themselves why they should bother to sign up for America’s next military exercise. But they also know that building a defense alliance that frees them from abusive dependency is no easy task. When Canadians hear themselves referred to as the ‘51^st state’ a liberating sense of fury takes hold, only to be balanced by sober awareness of their dependence on the US market.

What complicates disgust for America’s allies is the hold which America once exercised on the imagination of the whole world. It was for the United States, above all, that Joseph Nye of the Harvard Kennedy School invented the term ‘soft power’ in the 1990’s. America was the only hegemon who had any. With the passing of the Soviet Empire, the soft power of Russia and Communism, vanished altogether. As for Putin’s Russia has it ever attracted a single foreign soul, voluntarily, to its bosom?

As for China, it is busy buying up Chile’s lithium, Brazil’s soya beans, Canada’s canola, Iran’s oil, but are any of these countries enamored of China’s model? Do any of its citizens wish their countries were more like China? Do any of their people think Xi Jing Ping is the quintessence of leadership?

For a period that began with Woodrow Wilson’s arrival in Versailles in 1918 and ended with the second Obama Administration in 2016, America was unique among hegemons in its power of attraction. Its unruly democracy appalled but also attracted. It strayed into disaster in Vietnam, but it seemed to have a capacity to redeem itself. Its capitalism was cruel but in junking old industries and inventing new ones, it created awe among its rivals, and its popular culture, the friendliness of its people and their optimism, smoothed the exercise of its hard power. America could persuade allies rather than having to compel them, and thanks to this, it built an alliance structure that spanned the globe and encircled its competitors.

In the heyday of American soft power, it was easy for non-Americans to think that Louis Armstrong, the sublime jazz trumpeter, personified America, and certainly when he toured Africa people did greet him as the incarnation of the American dream. Latterly, it was possible to think of Bruce Springsteen as a personification of America too, with his raunchy love of country, loyalty to his New Jersey roots and his beautiful and melancholy music. Such were the positive and sentimental personifications of America that America’s foreign audiences believed.

The allure of America, though, exacted a psychic price from its allies. They surrendered their agency and even some of their sovereignty to a hegemon whom they believed had their interests at heart. In Trump’s second term, America’s allies have awakened to their abandonment and have had to realize that they had better start relying on each other. As Martin Wolf of the Financial Times recently pointed out, the countries Mark Carney called ‘the middle powers’ in his Davos address, account for 40 percent of global imports. It’s liberating for them to realize that the two ruling predators dominate less of the global economy than they think. If middle powers—Europe, Brazil, India, Canada—can use their market power to create a free trade zone for themselves, they can lift themselves out of dependence on the predators.

Disgust at Trump makes coming awake from the spell of American soft power easy. It enables her allies to recover the agency, sovereignty and determination they frittered away in decades of dependency. But moral disgust has snares and traps as well. The President certainly wants the world to believe he is America, but it would be a mistake if America’s former allies allowed themselves to believe it. Fortunately for all of us, he is not. The country is bigger, in all the moral senses of the word, than he is.