Hillary vs Donald

Enough wallowing in the past, I woke up this morning with an urge to fast forward and react to today's reality which is assailing me left and right. My current circumstances, workwise, are that of a college lecturer, teaching English translation and Anglo-saxon civilization to French students. These days, when I switch on an English or American TV channel, I often find myself watching either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or the two together on the same TV panel tearing at each other. In the past week, the election campaign has taken a nasty turn; criticisms are getting personal. There is nothing typically American in this resorting to dirty tricks and digging in the opponent's past; unfortunately, it has become a standard feature of most election campaigns in democracies – I guess it implies freedom of speech – ever since, under the growing influence of the internet and the gutter press, privacy ceased to exist.

However, as a French citizen, living in a centralized country where, not so long ago, one could tell what every school kid of the same age-group was learning at a given time of the day, what stikes me most when I hear replublicans argue, is their absolute fear of the State. The federal state is seen by possibly a majority of Americans as a monster – it reminds me of the bank portrayed as an inhuman monster in John Steinbeck's masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath – a monster which is out to get them and deprive them of their sacrosanct freedom. As if a state run by an elected government was not yet considered by Americans as a more evolved political framework than the mere juxtaposition of self-governing groups of people.

A few days ago, on CNN, I chanced upon a TV show where Paul Ryan was answering questions from American citizens to encourage them to vote for republicans. Paul Ryan who seems to be a civil and balanced individual -I can't help wondering why he, rather than Donald Trump, is not the republican candidate to run for president- was doing his best to convince a citizen that all that mattered now was to stop those dangerous democrats to regain a majority of seats in the Senate. To prove his point, he did not have any theoretical arguments but he gave the example of a smallish American town in his constituency through which twelve gangs used to spread terror. Apparently, a handful of citizens worked out some sort of scheme by which redeemed gang members acted as mentors for active thugs and, as a result, local violence had much abated. He concluded with those words: "They did it by themselves, they did not need the state to tell them what to do." And here I thought that it was a strange way of reasoning. First of all, why did that town have twelve gangs raging in it in the first place? Then, why do Americans have this strange notion that doing it all by oneself is better than a government making decisions for everybody?

One example of what I mean is the issue of childcare. In a recent article published in the New York Times -Oct. 14, 2016- Pamela Druckerman claims that she might have thought America's parenting misery was inevitable if she hadn't moved from the USA to France (one of the rare countries apparently where parents are slightly happier than non-parents)! I'd rather quote her given that she is American and thus cannot be accused of boasting: in France, she writes, "The government offers high-quality day care, billed on a sliding scale, and free preschool for children 3 and up. Older kids have subsidized after-school activities and summer camps. On average, college costs less than $ 500 a year." She adds that Americans seem not to realize how terribly they are being treated. And you might think that income taxes must be over the top but this is not so, only slightly higher than in the USA. And to those who would immediately retort that at that price, you can't provide top quality education, I'll answer that France has had its fair share of Nobel prizes over the years, especially in economics, mathematics and literature. So, it can't be all that bad!

Perhaps it is high time Americans left behind a way of thinking inherited from the Pilgrims and the first settlers, a time when communities had to do it all by themselves, and it's high time they started trusting in the institutions underpinning the country. It might be a step forward to stop perceiving the federal state as the Arch-enemy, a substitute for the English monarch of yore.