Profiles in discouragement

New York—Some specialists in the life sciences say that no one is ever fully cured of any injury or disease, because our cells forever retain traces, memories, of even the slightest attacks on the body’s integrity. So it will be with the United States.

One day, America will turn the page on Donald Trump. But it will never recover completely from the wound that his presidency’s baseness, bull-headed stupidity, and puzzling passivity in the face of China’s global ambitions have inflicted on its culture and international standing. Is Trump a symptom? Or a terminal disease?

Demoralization and defeatism have not spared the Democrats, as I found in New York and on a recent visit to Chicago to address a seminar at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. At the home of the Iranian-American Nazee Moinian, whose Manhattan apartment recalls the patrician abodes of the members of the Algonquin Round Table, the assembled elites are in agreement. Trump, by not backing the Kurds in their bid for independence from Iraq, committed not just a moral error but also an irreparable political mistake. He betrayed his Kurdish ally. He strengthened his Iranian adversary.

The German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt might say that Trump had confused his friend and his enemy, dealing with the former as he should have dealt with the latter. Inexplicably, Trump sacrificed (once again) a crucial US national interest, this time by abandoning the sole force in the Middle East (outside of Israel) on which America could safely and seriously rely.

How does one respond to such a forfeiture? With what resources? Was there really no way to counter the club of bad neighbors who refuse to countenance any discussion of Kurdish sovereignty?

Some Democrats swallow their national pride and say that France’s young president, Emmanuel Macron, newly crowned by Time magazine as king of Europe, is in a better position to step in and stay the hand of Iraq and Iran. Older Democrats express not the slightest reservation about the use of US power during the Cold War. But here they are, paralyzed, disarmed, when the time comes to raise their voice—merely their voice!—against the sinister but motley gang of four (Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria) blocking Kurdish independence.

At Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue, the most beautiful synagogue in New York and one of the largest in the world, I was recently interviewed by Pamela Paul, editor of the New York Times Book Review. The conversation again turned to Macron. I tried to explain that his trademark phrase, en même temps (at the same time), which tends to be heard here as an expression of American-style pragmatism, may instead be one of the most visible traces of his doctrinal proximity to the French Protestant philosopher Paul Ricœur. Far

from reflecting careful deliberation over an ambiguous choice, “at the same time” is the credo of someone suspended in fear and trembling before the unsolvable and terrifying mystery of the double nature—physical and spiritual, mortal and resurrected—of the tormented body of Christ.

But very soon we arrive at the question of anti-Semitism in America. On one hand, it is to be found in that horde of nativists, white supremacists, and neoconfederates who descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August to break some black and Jewish heads. On the other hand, it is seen among leftists on US campuses who have caught the fever of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions), the global campaign against Israeli products that is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from a quasi-overt campaign against products and businesses that are just plain Jewish.

In this sense, are we living in the époque of Trump, in which his revival of the “America First” slogan of the American Nazis in the 1930s has encouraged a loosening of bigoted tongues? Could it be that Trump himself, despite his officially pro-Israel positions, is a closeted anti-Semite?

The truth is that the question of Trump—the enigma of the man and even his very name—takes up much too much space in public debate. The truth is that in spending time wondering whether he is insane, or, like an overstuffed and obscene Hamlet, he feigns madness to confuse his adversaries, we are all falling into the trap of a narcissism that, here in the United States, is the new face of nihilism. Project Syndicate

Bernard-Henri Lévy is one of the founders of the “Nouveaux Philosophes” (New Philosophers) movement. His books include “Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism,” “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” and most recently, “The Genius of Judaism.”