Paul Murray: How George Floyd’s death and subsequent protests have exposed the US as sick and divided

Why would anyone be surprised by the scenes of chaos and hatred emanating from America over the past week? It’s not just about the death of one black man and a nation scared witless by a rampaging virus. This eruption has been brewing for centuries. When you mix normalised violence with ingrained inequality, a history of unpunished extrajudicial killings of black men by police, bilateral deep racial distrust and the necrosis of addictive drugs that destroys whole inner-city neighbourhoods, expect social disintegration. Add in the constitutional right to bear arms which creates a national mentality that weapons and violence have a role to play in a civil society. Any nation that feeds its citizens on an electronic diet of aggression and violence for several generations should expect to see it bear fruit. When young people are indoctrinated with apocalyptic visions as popular entertainment, it is likely to breed adults with a nihilistic outlook. The problem for us with this American plague is that they export it to the world. We reap what we sow. The world witnessed in the past week a broken America. Once the envy of civilised people everywhere, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, the United States is exposed as a sick and divided nation. Donald Trump did not cause these riots. His election was a symptom of the sickness and he certainly does not offer the solution. Once again he has been humbled by a crisis that can’t be fixed with his limited armoury of bluster, business acumen and distraction. By tweeting the racist slogan “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” he lost any authority he had in this crisis. No decent leader threatens his people — not even its criminal class — with indiscriminate slaughter. Many want to blame Trump for the savagery in the streets. In doing so they just contribute to the ongoing failures because he is only a sign of the infection, not the sickness itself. And if the civil disobedience continues, he could end up being the beneficiary of it as white middle-class America fears for its future. It is easy to be distracted by the opportunists who have taken advantage of the legitimate protesters and who have done so much damage to their cause. Looters have been an unfortunate parasite on these protests for many decades and represent personal greed as much as disadvantage. But the anarchists like Antifa not only trashed businesses and neighbourhoods, but harmed the legitimacy of those who sought to right the injustice of another senseless death at police hands. Antifa has been allowed to flourish in American cities with so-called progressive administrations that were powerless when the thugs turned against those who have previously appeased them. I’m old enough to have been affected by the hope that sprang from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives, which began in 1964. When Johnson took over the presidency in tragic circumstances, he confided in two trusted aides: “You know, when I went into that office tonight and they came in and started briefing me on what I have to do, do you realise that every issue that is on my desk tonight was on my desk when I came to Congress in 1937?” They were civil rights, health insurance, federal aid for primary and secondary education and anti-poverty programs. Any way you view it, the efforts of American democracy in these areas have been plagued by failure. Who in the Congress this week would be as honest as LBJ? Not the Republicans, who have been too keen to provide the benefits of American prosperity to too few. And not the Democrats, who were happy to harness the black vote, but failed to deliver on the promises made to get it. At its heart, the thing that eats away at America is its inability to solve differences based on race. America’s first black president got a Nobel prize for imperceptibly advancing world peace, but he made no progress in the race war that tears apart his country. What we see in America should be sobering for Australians. We have our own unresolved racial problems. America has been unable to fix the cancer that slavery introduced to a young colony four centuries ago. We have yet to come to terms with the lasting legacy of two centuries of colonialism that dispatched many indigenous Australians to an underclass from which they see no escape. No one in Australia should feel comfortable as they watch America burning.