The insurrection of January 6 in the US has unleashed a wave of condemnation of Donald Trump and the mob he commanded to storm that country’s Capitol.
Unfortunately, the impulse to condemn has blunted the thirst to learn. The discussion that followed the chaos has been less about lessons and more about accountability.
The champions of punishment must not prevent us from thanking Trump for the lessons he has enabled us to learn.
The first lesson, which has eluded those eager to celebrate the decline of the US, is that American institutions of democracy are actually more robust than most people thought.
We were all shocked by the chaos of January 6, but which institution collapsed before or after the chaos?
In SA, where we have experienced no electoral violence in recent times, we are still battling to rebuild institutions that literally collapsed under state capture. Which one collapsed in the US?
Imagine what would have happened if a mob tried to invade the National People's Congress in China.
Think of Tiananmen Square in 1989. To this day, the Chinese government permits no-one to tell us how many people were mowed down that fateful day, but estimates are in the thousands.
Two countries on different continents experienced electoral violence almost at the same time: the US and Uganda. In the US, a country of 330m people, only five people died. In Uganda, a country of 46m people, security forces opened fire and killed 50 supporters of opposition leader Bobi Wine.
But why must we thank Trump for triggering an insurrection? His madness has made it possible for us to see what happens when democracy in the US is stretched to its limits. Regardless of what has happened, a new administration will be inaugurated on Wednesday.
The second important lesson that Trump has presented to us is that barbarism is not an exclusive preserve of black people.
When the Black Lives Matter protests turned violent, there were millions of white people who watched the chaos and felt haunted by the presence of a “black element” in American society.
Even though white people have visited the worst of barbarism upon other humans in history – from murderous religious crusades and slavery to colonialism and the Holocaust – a tendentious revisionist morality, projecting white people as a civilised race and black people as barbaric, had almost attained the status of conventional wisdom in Western societies.
In SA, the racialisation of barbarism had reached the highest point where its proudest champions – such as Helen Zille – were now emboldened to advertise their nostalgia for colonialism.
Thanks to Trump, January 6 has displayed the barbarism of white people for the whole world to see.
The protest of exceptionalism – that “not all whites are like that” – is as dismissible as the fruitless efforts of the black voices who have for centuries been trying to convince white people that “not all black people are barbaric”.
We now know that barbarism knows no race. Armed with this “new” knowledge, it should now be possible for all forces of civilisation, regardless of their skin colour, to join hands in a genuine search for a truly deracialised civilisation.
The acknowledgment of the omnipresence of barbarism in the rest of humankind must not be construed as egg on the face of America, but, more importantly, it must be understood as a wake-up call for us all to always be vigilant against an ever-present barbaric element in our midst.
When we enjoy moments of tranquillity, however long and lulling they may be, we must never be tempted to preen and market ourselves as a model of progress. We must keep in mind that regress is always immanent in progress.
Hopefully, the current season of condemnation will not eclipse the vision of scholars who are trying to discern the meaning and place of Donald Trump in history.
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