Barack Obama's presidency was supposed to mark a great leap forward for the United States. But, as Omar El Akkad discovered as he travelled across America this year, the election of Donald J. Trump has turned the country against itself. Scenes from a divided nation
The college town of Oxford, Miss., is home to one of the finest bookstores in America, Square Books.
This May, its owners invited me to speak about my debut novel, about a fictional second American civil war. I wrote the book two years ago and never intended it to be about the United States in a literal way, but its publication in 2017 nonetheless coincided with the death of both irony and analogy in American public life.
Over the course of a six-month book tour that will cover almost every region of this country, I find myself fielding questions not about any allegorical merit my book may have, but whether in writing a novel in which Americans take up arms against one another I was taking a stab at predicting the future. I come to peddle the fictional to a country whose reality has leapfrogged fiction.
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That angry, torch-wielding men feel comfortable conducting new-age Klan rallies in America in 2017 is chiefly the product of a right-wing conservatism that coddled and abetted white supremacism. But in the rebirth of open, uncoded racism in this country's public discourse, there is also evidence that mainstream American liberalism has never been particularly liberal – rather, just a comfortable insularity lacquered with niceness.
One of the most infuriating things about living in America this year was watching countless well-meaning liberals point at the logical conclusion of centuries of systemic discrimination and say: "This is not us." In reality, the rise of the country's 45th President is exemplary of the most honest version of the American dream: a man who, by virtue of the colour of his skin and the magnitude of his wealth – and absolutely no other qualification – transformed his utter contempt for all rules of nominally decent behaviour into a limitless personal empire. The story of Donald Trump is a uniquely American story.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/omar-el-akkad-donald-trump-american-civil-war/article37267643/
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