My weekly posts have become almost fortnightly posts because I am distressed by the events happening in the USA and I can’t focus. Since the beginning of the year I am having serious difficulties to concentrate and read books; the very few I have read (Kidnapped and Catriona by R.L. Stevenson) are novels I needed to know to help one of my doctoral students. I thought that space opera could help me to escape for a few evenings the appalling historical moment we are going through but I didn’t choose well. James S.A. Corey’s latest novel The Mercy of Gods narrates, as far as I have read, the brutal alien invasion of a human colony, beginning with the extermination of one eighth of the population.
What is happening in this week is that patriarchy has returned to the US Presidency with a vengeance, bent on destroying all the class, gender, and race advances of the last sixty years, at least, if not the US Constitution itself. It is still to be seen whether President Trump and his broligarchy of tech billionaires will be able to implement the harsh measures of their electoral programme, inspired by the fascist Project 2025, but they are moving fast. The USA is, as we know, on the brink of political collapse, with democracy at risk of being destroyed to make room for a dictatorship. We, nerds, have seen it all before: Senator Padme Amidala was the one to lament in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith that “So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause” when fellow Senator Palpatine stages the coup that makes him Emperor of the whole galaxy. No wonder that Mark Hamill, who played hero Luke Skywalker, is one of the most popular voices in Bluesky, as he was on Twitter. And, yes, Elon Musk appears to be Darth Vader, though the role seems split among the power-hungry broligarchy members. The Jedi Democrats are so far disoriented, knocked out and unable to abandon gerontocracy to offer a new leadership. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, you’re our only hope…
Much has been written about these matters from a strictly political point of view, but I need to focus here on what concerns me, which is academia. A few days ago, Stephen King posted on Bluesky a brief message: “My advice: As best you can, ignore him.” As you may image, there was a barrage of indignant replies, including mine, which I completed with a photo of PM Neville Chamberlain shaking hands with Hitler. It is clear enough that no US inhabitant (I was going to write citizen but the US has many non-citizens, too) can ignore the orange menace as another Bluesky member called him. The question is what are we supposed to do outside the USA and who are ‘we’.
From an intersectional point of view, I’m both a concerned EU citizen and a specialist in English Studies. As an EU citizen, I’m in the same category as, to begin with, 48 million fellow Spaniards, and 449 million fellow Union-Europeans (the total population of Europe is 742,3 million, including Russia). It’s funny how we tend to think that the EU is less populated than the USA, but in fact we are many more: they are 335 million. The first question is, then, why should the choices of that minority in the context of the whole world dominate us, and what kind of resistance should we put up. Can a responsible EU citizen switch off the news and, as King advised, ‘ignore him’?
The obvious answer is ‘no’, if only because all of Europe is now falling in the grip of the right wing that has taken over the USA, as the local elections in each country are showing. If VOX is today not really a serious contender for the Spanish Presidency, this is only because PP has adopted many of its extreme right-wing policies, as we are seeing in the communities it rules. So, contradicting Mr. King, my message is ‘Pay attention, and ignore him only at your risk’. Make yourself personally responsible for any damage that might come to your community, your family, your person. Vote responsibly and do vote. Monitor what your chosen politicians do, and protest.
As an EU citizen, I am indeed very much concerned, worried sick that one day the European Commission may fall into the hands of the right-wing politicians already dominating some European countries. As an English Studies specialist who makes a living out of teaching UK and USA culture, I am sad, disconcerted and appalled. Being a specialist in science fiction, I am familiar with the many apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrations about the collapse of current civilization, but I had the hope that I would not see it happen in my lifetime. I was going to write ‘I never thought I would see it happen’, but this is not true. Anyone familiar with Orwell’s 1984 or Collins’s The Hunger Games (or, as noted, Star Wars) understands how easily democracy can collapse and tyranny begin. And, hey, I’m a Spanish national, very well informed about the loss of the Republic in 1936 and the ensuing 40 years of Franco’s harrowing tyranny, the type of regime that VOX aims at reinstating.
As a Spaniard (and a Catalan, of course) I used to approach Anglophone culture with respect, even with awe. You don’t choose to spend your life studying and teaching a foreign culture unless you find something fascinating in it. I grant that this fascination might be the product of ignorance, for the horrors of British Imperialism were as present in 1984, when I first registered as an undergrad in the Licenciatura in Filología Inglesa, as they are now, in 2025. Well, I’ll correct myself: they were then much better disguised. I don’t know how our young students feel when they knock on our doors but I assume that they do like Anglophone culture beyond their interest in the English language. Anglophone culture is still producing, naturally, an impressive stream of high-quality works at all fronts, but the ‘greatness’ we naïve 1980s undergrads saw in the UK and the USA has fully evaporated.
I have always been critical of imperial glory in my Victorian Literature subjects, as I have been critical of US economic imperialism, yet I feel now that criticism is not an adequate response. These days, fans of English fantasy author Neil Gaiman have been horrified to know that he has been for many years a monstrous sexual predator and he is being cancelled among much disgust and desolation. I am beginning to feel similarly about my two former idols. The UK of Keir Starmer is not as terrible as the UK of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak, but since Brexit (now five years ago) I have a much harder time admiring the UK than I used to have. I do know that not all Britons voted for Brexit and that if a second referendum took place they would vote to return. In the same way, I do know that only 77,284,118 Americans (23% of the population) voted for Trump, but I wish right now I could cancel the US and not have to worry about their politics or culture. Ignore him if you can.
Having established that I can’t ignore Trump as an EU citizen, then, the question is whether I can ignore him professionally. Well, I certainly could if I devoted my energies to some area of English Studies that has nothing to do with the contemporary or if I focused on literary theory. My next book, for instance, is going to deal with the secondary character in the 19th century European novel in a variety of languages (Bleak House will represent English). This, however, is a project I have undertaken while I decide whether I should abandon for good Gender Studies, which is truly my main focus of research. This is a discipline heavily intertwined with US academia, from which 90% of the theory is coming. The repression and oppression that my Gender Studies peers are now about to face in the USA (the defunding of programmes and Departments has already started) is going to condition what we do in English Studies all over the democratic world. My publishers (Routledge, Palgrave) are American or have American partners; my newest publisher, UK’s Bloomsbury, almost lost its trading agreement with Amazon last week. Add to this that I publish about patriarchal masculinity from an anti-fascist angle.
As a woman, I am terrified as I have never been in my life. I thought I had seen the worst in my lifetime with the situation of women in Afghanistan and in Iran (a country that has just passed a law allowing children as young as nine to be married), but the USA is now on the path of The Handmaid’s Tale combined with 1984. Or, going even further, Burdekin’s Swastika’s Night. The patriarchal onslaught, of course, goes beyond misogyny. Yesterday, a Bluesky member asked what is the word for a genocide against the lower classes committed using disease, in reference to Robert Kennedy’s anti-vaxxer policies, and I offered ‘genusmorbicide’, which is not very pretty but might make sense. Another Bluesky member wrote that the only explanation he could find for Trump’s behaviour is that he has made a pact with the Devil and needs to make massive human offerings. His spiteful ill-treatment on X of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, after she asked him in her sermon to have mercy of the undocumented migrants and the LGTBIQ+ community, seems to confirm that he is no Christian, and a total psychopath.
I’m telling everyone who’ll listen that many persons are going to die cruelly and unnecessarily in the USA in the next four years. Many will commit suicide, others will be assaulted by right-wing whackos and militias, others will be killed by the justice system, thousands will die for lack of health care and, what is worse, many children will be murdered if the public vaccine programmes are suppressed. What Trump’s voters have failed to understand is that they are not safer than the rest, at least in matters of health. The USA has already withdrawn from WHO, now that avian flu is so strong in that country that there is a scarcity of eggs. Trump has also withdrawn the USA from the Paris agreement against climate change and given freedom to oil prospectors and any other polluting businesses. There is a fury in all this that goes beyond his personal hurt at having lost the 2020 election to President Biden. I just fail to understand what the ultimate plan is, for the broligarchy already rules the world though its invasive technology, and it won’t help to deplete the economy of the undocumented migrant workers already putting up with a heart-wrenching degree of exploitation.
In these circumstances, how are we to teach and research US culture? So far, this is being produced mostly by defenders of democracy, but it is easy to imagine a time when all traces of diversity will be eliminated from Hollywood films, and when non-white, non-male authors of any type will be cancelled by the regime. Do recall that Trump has already suppressed all federal DEI programmes. We might end up with a new regimented white supremacist culture enforced in all universities, so that calling yourself an Americanist will be akin to calling yourself a fascist. Even worse, it might well happen that the word ‘fascist’ is respected and that not calling yourself a fascist is punished.
I would lie if I said I’m not scared. To give you an idea, every time I read the obituary of a well-respected person these days (like Jimmy Carter), the first thing that comes to my mind is ‘lucky them, they won’t have to go through this horror.’ Good luck to all of us.