To my Mexican friends

By: Jeff Jarvis*  

To my Mexican friends,

I am sorry as an American that we have sent you Donald Trump. Please know that in the end, he speaks for few Americans — too few, God willing, for him to be elected our President. He is merely an aberration of the moment, a fluke, a freak, a phenomenon we can only hope will never be repeated. But in the meantime, your president invites him and you must suffer his company. I apologize.

The blame for Trump rests on many shoulders. There is, of course, Trump’s adopted political party, the Republicans, who for years has tried to reduce government by blocking its legitimate work. They have become the party of anger, finding scapegoats for every problem — most of all, President Obama but also strangers, namely immigrants and Muslims. They became the party of pessimism, declaring that America is falling into deep decline, even as the Obama Administration made great progress in fixing the problems it inherited: the economy, jobs, and wars, most notably. Thus the Republicans created a breeding ground for Trump, someone who would harness the emotions of a certain slice of America.

News media deserve a large share of the blame for Trump. First, they treated him as a carnival attraction, a funny clown who would attract audiences to their networks and pages. The heads of CNN and CBS rubbed their hands in greedy glee at how good Trump was for their businesses, which are still built on attracting masses with show business, rather than serving citizens with reliable information. My journalistic colleagues didn’t see the danger ahead and so they didn’t warn the public until it was too late, until Trump stood a step from the White House. Media have become his willing accomplices, treating his offensive and insane pronouncements — for example, that a wall blocking Mexico will solve our problems, that Hillary Clinton is a bigot — as serious topics that should be discussed for hours on end rather than disproven, ridiculed, and dismissed with facts and reason.

Journalism also failed badly at reflecting the concerns and problems of Trump’s core: underemployed, angry white men from the center of the nation. If media had done a better job of reporting — and then informing — their worldviews, I wonder whether Trump and his promoters would have found fertile soil for their divisiveness, fear, ignorance, and bigotry. If my party, the Democrats, had done a better job of hearing and addressing their concerns, could they also have blunted Trump’s appeal?

I believe we are seeing the last gasp of the myth of the American melting pot. When I grew up, we were taught to believe in assimilation: that every American would end up sounding if not looking alike. That is the presumption of the mass (though I believe that in the suffering of publishing and broadcasting in the internet age, we are witnessing the death of the mass-media business model and will also witness the end of the idea of the mass). Rule by the majority looks good when the majority looks like you; what Trump’s troops fear is they will soon be in the minority.

Today, living in New York and teaching at its City University, which values diversity, I have learned instead how much richer America is for the many distinct identities and backgrounds that make up this nation. We are, of course, better because Mexican Americans have brought their culture, worldview, heritage, and language to the United States. We are better for having doors, not walls. Though today, many of you might wish you had a wall to keep Trump out.

Americans — myself included — still struggle to learn the lesson of diversity, to see the value that Mexicans, Latin Americans of many nations, and people from all around the world bring to our culture, economy, language, and daily life. In that sense, Trump is the fault of all of us, for we have not quickly enough embraced the value of embracing people we thought of as strangers.

*Jeff Jarvis, U.S. journalist and academic.