The Legend Died

Yesterday the legend of the United States died: the land of freedom, the champions of democracy. Yesterday the people of what had been the most powerful country of the past century handed the presidency to its greatest enemy of the past seventy years, Russia.

It is difficult to know which is more shocking: that Americans allowed another country to manipulate their election, or that the winner of that election was a man accused of sexual assault, of raping at least one minor, of fraud and tax evasion, and who is openly racist, sexist, and xenophobic.

The dysfunctional electoral system of the United States allowed someone with a minority of the votes to win the election, three million fewer votes than his opponent. The level of repudiation directed at the election's winner, not only by the country in question but by the entire world, is unprecedented, perhaps comparable only—as many have suggested—to Hitler's rise to power. All of this had been known since the election result, and no one did anything; no authority, no agency, no political group managed to stop the disaster.

Perhaps Mexico is not the only country of “nothing ever happens.” Yesterday the United States demonstrated that beneath its guise as a liberator, beneath its progressive mask, it is a country as weak, vulnerable, and defenseless as any other.