Reader Edit | Make America home again? Expats in India wonder

On 8 November, 2016, two remarkable events simultaneously unfolded halfway around the world from each other in most powerful democracy in the world, as well as its largest and youngest. In the former, Donald J. Trump was on his way to becoming the President-Elect of the United States, while in the latter, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the shocking announcement that the Government of India was demonetizing all 500 and 1,000 rupee notes. As I witnessed both events unfurl at the same time in my chilly room in Roorkee, it became painfully obvious to me that just how misguided any democracy is which is so deeply shaped by capital. This is because it risks ceasing to serve the very people in whose names it is meant to "trickle down" and serve.

As reports of dire hardships, even deaths, have been reported by middle and lower class citizens in the aftermath of demonitesation of the rupee notes in India, countless instances of racist and xenophobic violence have exponentially erupted throughout the United States. Many of us are left asking why the most vulnerable souls – the poor, women, the LGBTQ community, people of color – of these two great democracies are most suffering. How could this have come to be, and in the same moment? Perhaps most disturbing for me at this historic moment is how particularly entrenched capital has become in our postmillennial societies over the past couple of decades. I am increasingly shell-shocked by how viscerally materialism and monetary abstractions of humanity today define our planet. Democracy and its "elections," increasingly so, seem consigned to shady, backroom deals rather than bringing out into the light the voices and agency of disenfranchised and historically-exploited peoples.

Many have expressed shock over Trump's jolting ascendency to the most powerful position on earth. But should we truly feel shock? Rather, in retrospect it seems that we should have accepted the signs of impending upset and braced for it many years ago. As a U.S. citizen who registered to vote in the election who lives and works in northern India, it seems that both of these synchronized, tectonic shifts inaugurate a key shift in the relationship between contemporary democracy and neoliberalism. This shift arguably seems to be intensifying, with greater magnitude, around the concept of "home" where its domestic configurations orbit around the justifying rhetoric of exclusion while its international scope obsesses with the indigenous fantasy of a "homeland."
Indeed, this is the dangerous trajectory which had arguably been inaugurated many years before with the transatlantic, tag-team destruction of social services promoted by Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom from the early 1980s. Reaganomics and Thatcherism were part and parcel of a transatlantic, "special relationship" between the two dominant empires of the Anglosphere that endures even today.

Domesticity and democratic inclusion of the nation allows those in power to exercise control over those within in and at the borders, namely those who are different, by right of citizenship. This intensified policing of "home" is the most frightening turn in U.S. politics that I have ever witnessed in my lifetime. Thatcher's raised everyday Britons' alarms when she apocalyptically warned that the U.K. would be "rather swamped by people of a different culture," and it is this very marshland of otherness that Trump promises to "drain the swamp" in America.
But blaming it all on the xenophobic arrogance of Trump would be at best a naive simplification. We need only look hard into the mirror to reckon more deeply with how Trump reflects back to Americans the smug arrogance that the rest of the world recognizes in our eyes each day. Trump is the consolidation of "the Ugly American" at every level: he is, in mild terms, a climate-change disbelieving, p*ssy grabbing, Islamaphobic, sexual predator whose non-existent political platform instead whipped up frenzied xenophobia, queerphobia, ableism, and misogyny into a toxic brew that unleashed the latent resentment and hatred of millions of (mainly white) Americans. Have no illusion that he is the antithesis of democracy.

Indeed, with two weeks of reflection behind us, it is clear that the U.S. popular vote, with over 1.7 million votes in favor of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, alongside a staggering number of disenfranchised voters evinces that citizens in great democracies are becoming increasingly "homeless" within the very throes of the hard-fought rights of suffrage in both postcolonial countries. This assault on nation-as-home in the U.S. includes the weaponization of religion, the normalization of xenophobia and its conflation with patriotism (as shockingly demonstrated by Brexit and Trump's election, which I have elsewhere dubbed as "Amerexit"), and the manipulation of voting numbers through voting obstruction.

India arguably witnessed and is still reeling from the blood-soaked impact of the first Brexit -- Britain's careless exit from India, after the "Jewel in the Crown" ceased being profitable. The Partition of the subcontinent resulted in the largest migration of human populations in world history – two new homelands "swamped," if you will, by westward and eastward migrations mired in rivers of blood. The genocide of natives of India is a relatively recent historical tragedy compared to the widespread genocide of the "other Indians" – the indigenous, native tribes of North America whom are today fighting against the invasive expropriation of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Clearly, their homelands are secondary to corporate profit, and go hand-in-hand with the agenda of neoliberal capitalism in the new millennium.
       
This assault on nation-as-home in the United States enfolds gerrymandering, voter intimidation, open-carry gun laws, odd polling hours, redlining, archaic and uneven U.S. voting laws, the Tea Party and birther movements, the dominance of Super PACS and the hegemony of Citizens United, "homeland" security – in short, the institutionalization and policing of who exactly is allowed to access the spaces of "home" and how that access if related to capitalist profitability rather than the contributions of the sum assets of humanity. While it is fairly clear that Trump is "the worse of two evils," we must not exonerate Clinton for her wholesale embrace of black incarceration, support of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), coziness with Wall Street, and other alarming policies. While America's new Emperor has no clothes, even Hillary's pantsuits contain formidable stains. The fact that 53% of all white women voters enabled Trump's victory challenges the pedestrian assumptions that identity politics are always loyal as it demonstrates how vital the traditional stewards of maternal domesticity, reproduction, and child rearing – in a word, "home" – were in mandating the outcome of this election.

What is path the way forward? I would assert that America does not need to "be great again," but rather it needs to become home again. The United States, like India, is already a great place with an extraordinary diversity of peoples, cultures, topographies, languages, and potential. Its universities are among the world's greatest, and it has been a global destination forged by the hopes and dreams of immigrants. This greatness only becomes multitudinous when we refuse to buy into the divide and rule tactics around "home" that both nations inherited from our erstwhile colonizers. These old colonialist strategies of the Britishers, which today punctuate India's geo-political woes as they puncture the hearts of friends and relatives across the border, stick to both nations like a persistently-dark, residue of hatred. Yet we are by no means helpless when we together resist bigotry and hatred.
The dawning of a new millennium, tainted by the horrors of September 11th and the despicable attack on Mumbai in November 2008, holds far more potential for healing and reconciliation today with respect to "home" than we are always aware of. There is no doubt that the United States must re-think the antiquated Electoral College, and must moreover sign into law a federal statute that binds Electors to take into account the popular vote mandate versus party loyalty. Voting in both great global democracies should be compulsory, a required responsibility of one's civic duty. Labour unions must be resurrected to reflect the diversity of the working class in the Midwest as well as the coastal areas rather than the deceptive "white working class" brand that Trumpism has capitalized on. Bigotry must be identified in all its veiled forms, and excised from the institutions of all serious democracies.

These prescriptions are a solid start on the road to making America home again.

The writer is Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging and Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the IIT, Roorkee.