"No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society."

“I never met a people more infantile in my life”, the black American writer James Baldwin observed of Americans while speaking to Richard Goldstein in 1984. He would certainly have been amused with Donald Trump who embodies the infantilism of an entire nation at its most sophisticated.

Innocence is one word that Baldwin uses in a way that combines pity with disgust. It is not the Christian child-like innocence that is a passport to the kingdom of heaven. It is termed innocence because of a refusal to grow; an innocence trapped in an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s actions; a dangerous kind of innocence because it devastates the lives of others with absolute conviction in its own righteousness; an innocence incapable of coming to terms with reality. It is the innocence with which David will betray himself in the process of betraying those who love him in the novel Giovanni’s Room. It is the innocence of someone who cannot have a personal life because they are incapable of being committed to themselves as persons.

‘Infantilism’ is the word that is a synonym to this kind of innocence because it prefers to see the past as utopia rather than as history. Interestingly, as a nation America celebrates that kind of innocence which is reflected in popular culture especially cinema and music. It is a culture that has no place for tragedy unless couched in consumerist fantasies of a life forever. If, according to Baldwin, “white Americans do not believe in death” it is because they have rejected tragedy. As Baldwin notes in The Fire Next Time, “Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.”

I don’t think Donald Trump is aware of that sun which is going down for the last time. I don’t think Obama was aware of the essential tragedy that lies in being caught within a temporality that limits all human power. The same goes for Reagan, Clinton, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Yet, every post-war President of the US shares in that terrible innocence that is at the heart of what being an American is all about.

In their blind rejection of tragedy, in their fear of that dreadful genre that tells us the truth of our failures as individuals and as a people, in that lack of knowledge that our public lives are doomed to destruction because our private lives are warped, Americans have condemned themselves to an unforgivable innocence. Nowhere is this innocence more clearly revealed than in their foreign policy in the third world. In no uncertain terms, Baldwin makes the point toward the end of his last interview with Quincy Troupe, “It’s the only hope the world has, that the notion of Western hegemony and civilization be contained.” In sustaining the hegemony of powerful global elites who serve as engine for corporate capitalism America is guilty of keeping alive the notion of a civilization obsessed with its own sense of racial, moral and political superiority.

A culture or civilization must have a notion of mortality in order to come out of the morbid state of innocence. Power, fame and wealth thrive as ideals to be achieved where people have an illusion of permanence. In the epic Mahabharata the demi-god Yaksha asked King Yudhishthira, “What is the greatest wonder on earth?” The just king replied with perfect equanimity: “We see death all around us; yet, we think that our life on earth is permanent.” Not only is it a response that would have pleased Baldwin immensely, but something he himself would have given if the Yaksha would pose him such a seemingly strange question.