Intolerant perpetual motion machine

Timothy Snyder's experience highlights medical bias, echoing broader systemic prejudices in America.

Last week, historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder spoke to CBC's Matt Galloway in Vancouver. The conversation available online is mostly about his works. But what really stumped me was an anecdote from his own life. When his appendix burst, he was misdiagnosed, which led to sepsis, a life-threatening situation. While he was admitted to the ICU, a physician friend stayed with him. But instead of improvement, it worsened it because the physician-friend was black, and Dr Snyder noticed the emergency staff instinctively made choices quite opposite to her recommendations. Just because a doctor was black, her sound medical advice could be disregarded, leading to the patient's life-and-death struggle. I am no stranger to medical misdiagnoses because my own heart episode was exacerbated by the young on-duty doctor's refusal to diagnose my situation as a heart attack in the absence of test results despite my ECG and echocardiogram results showing changes. I sat writhing in pain for nearly six hours before the lab released the results, and I was cleared to be admitted, saving my life but leaving behind serious tissue damage. So, I am not new to misdiagnoses and medical incompetence. But, before Dr Snyder's interview, I had not heard of prejudice playing such a significant role in the medical profession outside a combat zone.

What frightens me, dear reader, is the mushroom growth of hate and prejudice as a cottage industry in this age. A day before his rally at Madison Square Garden unearthed a truckload of bigoted, racist, sexist and xenophobic garbage, Trump sat down with Joe Rogan for a three-hour-long interview. Since he speaks in a peculiar, intense way, it has become customary for the media to mischaracterise his talks as deranged. While some of his thoughts were really objectionable, on balance, it was one of his saner talks. For once, he did not even mispronounce VP Harris' first name. In this interview, Rogan brought up the matter of Trump's appearance on ABC's long-running show The View during his first campaign. He noted how warmly Trump was welcomed and introduced on the show before the machine (read the system, the societal structure that modifies an individual's behaviour to conform to the conventional norms) turned on him. Don't be surprised by the claim that Trump is somehow the anti-establishment, anti-system candidate. The media has been presenting him as the insurgent candidate since day one. But is he, though? He is not.

Speaking of machines, in the prescient sci-fi TV series Person of Interest, where the good guys build a super-AI called 'The Machine' to stop terror activities in the country and then use a backdoor to save potential homicide victims, the bad guys make an even more powerful system with authoritarian tendencies called 'The Samaritan' and manage to get it commissioned by the government through corruption and other deviant means. As the story progresses, it becomes an all-out war between the two machines. The Samaritan manages to recruit an army of gifted foot soldiers and installs its client politicians in important positions. The series prematurely ended before Trump began his campaign. The posture of one such politician in the series resembles that of Trump. No conspiracy theory there. Just a useful cultural reference to bolster a point I am about to make.

Prolonged wars weaken a country. While its external defences may remain rock solid, its internal fissures are usually accentuated by the sight of body bags and monies spent abroad. And if the country in question is the lone superpower, even if your enemies cannot game your system, your allies, your fellow travellers in the war sure can. I have written many pieces on the efforts to present Muslims as the permanent enemies of the US and the West and the inevitability of a clash in the past. You will have to read Spencer Ackerman's glorious book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, to learn that a host of Trump's national security picks were determined by their cruelty in the war on terror. The 9/11 era broke America. While many blame Trump for unleashing the worst trends in society, we shouldn't forget that the door backwards was actually pushed open by his Republican predecessors, George W Bush and Richard Cheney, whose daughters have now disavowed the end product.

It was in Bush and Cheney's time that the Patriot Act became law, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) was created, and from a nerdy outlier, Fox News became a mainstream xenophobic hate machine. When you are racially profiling people, do you think racism is going to go down in the country? Old divides were bound to be thrown into sharp relief eventually. If you want to know how ICE works or how Trump's promised mass deportation may unfold, don't leave it to the media. Just read John Grisham's fictionalised version of The Rooster Bar. The irreversible creation of ICE, the militarisation of police, dissatisfaction with the first black president and the right-wing media echo chamber created a second machine, a second establishment, a second system which brought Trump into power in 2016 - a perpetual motion machine which keeps feeding into more hate, anger, rage and division.

Trump is a known quantity, but the movement he took advantage of is not. So that you know, I am excluding ordinary voters and supporters from this charge. I mean, only Trump surrogates and policy wonks. Last time, they were all caught off-guard by the surprise victory in 2016 and the surprise loss in 2020. Even then, they managed to install three Supreme Court judges who, after throwing out the Roe v Wade precedent through the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling, have now empowered the US presidency with the powers that autocrats may envy. This time, they have done the homework. It is all in the 900-page Project 2025, and while Trump has distanced himself from the document, his surrogates have not.

I know the dark charisma of a second Trump term appeals to many, but America's status as the "shining city on a hill" should worry you in such a situation. America is still the alpha dog of the world order. What it does reverberates around the world. Imagine if the American government were to police or condone policing of women's reproductive health issues by private citizens, how would that play out in the more misogynistic parts of the world? If America were to carry out mass deportations, what impact would it have in more bigoted and xenophobic nations? If the US government were to send its army after local dissidents, what chance would dissent in the less democratic societies have? This perpetual motion machine will never stop. And imagine our helplessness in watching the world sleepwalk over the precipice.