At last, I can see a way out of America’s darkest era

Welcome to Trump’s America, The i Paper’s World Insight series presenting the sharpest, deepest thinking on an era-defining shift in history and politics, investigating how Donald Trump and his administration have changed the US and the world – and where we go from here. • The hidden crisis of overqualified Americans who can’t get jobs• ‘We never changed, Trump did’: Maga’s insurgency against its own leader• The more America spends on healthcare, the sicker it gets It is difficult to love a country sliding into authoritarianism, crackpot militarism and state-sanctioned xenophobia, to name but three of America’s maladies. We have more guns than people. We think in bombs. Thomas Jefferson dreamed of a republic free from the “standing armies” and “exterminating havoc” of Europe. The Founding Father and third president of the United States thought America would lead the world in ways of peace and rational diplomacy. Donald Trump’s America would be his living nightmare. The US currently sits at 134 out of 163 nations on the Global Peace Index, an annual ranking of “peacefulness”, having fallen 31 places in 10 years. America accounts for nearly 40 per cent of military spending worldwide, and around 50 per cent of the world’s civilian-owned firearms. America has been moving in this direction since the 1970s, when Richard Nixon’s attorney general bragged that “this country is going so to the far right you won’t recognise it”. Trump isn’t the first to have sold division as patriotism and racial prejudice as a return to our roots. What is new is the style, the vulgarity and the open contempt for constitutional norms. Preoccupation with the style has fatally hindered the Democratic response – until now. Trump’s first presidency was strange enough for Americans to write him off as an anomaly, and to mount a patriotic defence against a reign of chaos. Former president Joe Biden reclaimed the flag and spoke of restoring “the soul of America”, as if it had all been a terrible mistake. Left-wing Democratic leaders AOC, Ahmed el-Sayed and Bernie Sanders. We now have a generation of leaders on the left who are neither patriots nor anti-patriots, writes Dominic Erdozain (Photo: Sarah Rice/Getty) But a second term for Trump, delivered in part by Biden’s belligerent and inflexible foreign policy, has forced the nation to deeper remedies. When steadying the ship meant bankrolling Israel’s war machine, younger voters were driven to despair and ultimately revolt. Trump’s return has revealed the weakness, even the tragedy, of Biden’s politics of affirmation and reassurance. It has also opened the door to a politics of hope. We now have a generation of leaders on the left who are neither patriots nor anti-patriots; neither hostile nor nervously wedded to the symbols of American power. These leaders want to serve their country without being corralled into its pathologies. In New York City’s Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and in Texas and Michigan’s James Talarico and Dr Abdul el-Sayed, the Democrats possess something like the antithesis of the melting pot, with its dreary demand for assimilation and conformity, and something more like the bristling mosaic that Jimmy Carter considered a worthier metaphor for a diverse and vibrant nation. More than that: these are thinkers who have broken out of the crippling pragmatism that has defined their party, showing that big ideas and unapologetic beliefs can indeed get you elected. It is here, not in some anodyne retelling of the American story, that I see a way out of this dark age of American democracy. Take Mamdani – Muslim, immigrant, socialist, and now Mayor of New York City. He smiles. He names streets after footballer Thierry Henry. He jumps into swimming pools wearing a suit and tie. He wears an Arsenal-themed kurta to Eid al-Adha celebrations in the Bronx. And he delivers, securing a rent freeze, childcare funding and closing budget deficits in his first few months in charge. Moreover, the 34-year-old is prepared to stand up for what he believes, without worrying what it will cost him politically. As recently as October 2023, Mamdani was arrested and put in handcuffs for his part in a protest held outside the apartment of Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. He now runs the city, enjoying a 58 per cent approval rating as he pushes through a buoyant agenda of affordability and accountability. In July, Mamdani stared into a camera and called Benjamin Netanyahu – a man routinely feted in Congress and the White House – a “war criminal” and the “architect of a horrific genocide” before calling for his arrest. This is new. Mamdani is showing that there is another America beneath the extremism of the Republican Party and the timidity of the Democratic establishment. He is shattering the myth of “electability” and the belief that Democrats have to trim their sails to Republican winds to stand a chance. He is also breaking apart the belief that the culture war and the Maga movement represent deep and historic fissures in American life, rather than a largely ephemeral and media-assisted rage. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani participates in Eid al-Adha prayers in an Arsenal-themed kurta (Photo: Selcuk Acar/Getty) Leaders like Mamdani and his “inspiration”, AOC, are calling bluff on the culture war and the notion that there is some hard and innate conservatism beyond which no serious contender can tread. They are showing that what we have come to live with in America – from foreign policy to healthcare – is a scandal and an absurdity, not something wired into the national character. Mamdani and AOC are hardly patriots, in the traditional sense. They champion human rights, not American prerogatives, on the global stage. But they represent the best of a country and a political system that is still open to talent. The same is true of Sayed, a Rhodes scholar and son of Egyptian immigrants, who overcame a tsunami of corporate spending and hostile messaging to clinch the Democratic nomination for the US Senate in Michigan, with a winsome appeal for healthcare above warfare; Medicare for Americans, not bombs for Israel. House Speaker Mike Johnson raved that such policies would destroy our status as a “beacon of liberty” and “the envy of the entire world”, but America is waking up. An opinion poll conducted shortly before the nation’s 250th birthday this summer found widespread cynicism toward the old nostrums about America as the home of democracy and the land of opportunity. Forty-four per cent of Americans under 30 believe there are better places to live than the United States. Only 22 per cent say the American Dream still holds true. Depressing as that may sound, it might help to explain why the likes of AOC and Mamdani have a chance to defeat Maga and remake the political landscape. Mamdani’s father, Mahmood, tells a story that captures some of my own experience of this puzzling country and gives me hope for the future. Riding a bus from Las Vegas to Taos, New Mexico, as a student in 1964, Mahmood asked the driver if he might pull over so that he could pray. Intrigued by the request, the driver got on the loudspeaker to ask the other passengers what they thought. “Folks, we have a Muslim with us,” he said, according to the New Yorker. “He wants to stop for 10 minutes so he can pray.” When he asked for a show of hands, every passenger raised a hand in approval, forming a circle around the young student as he knelt and prayed. A lot has changed since 1964, but that spirit still lives. The bigotries that Trump has so expertly unleashed can be unlearned. James Talarico is running for the US Senate in Texas (Photo: The Dallas Morning News/Getty) One man who understands this is Talarico, a left-leaning seminary student running for the US Senate in Texas. Against all punditry and political wisdom, he is gambling on a different Texas and making waves. He is calling out the connection between religion and exclusion, and showing that it’s possible to be religious without beating others over the head. The message has struck a chord. During the First World War, a young intellectual called Randolph Bourne wrote a blistering polemic in the Atlantic Monthly against “the melting pot” and the demeaning dogma that immigrants must be moulded into our way of life. Not so, protested Bourne. America is a nation of nations; it needs variety the way fire needs air. It is the outsider who can see the motes in American eyes, maintained Bourne. Bourne would have been thrilled by the genial firebrands sweeping through the Democratic Party in 2026. He would consider this America coming of age. Sometimes it’s the least patriotic person who does the most for their country. America is on the turn. Shorts