The United States of America did not know about radical cultural transformations related to the identity of its elected president, but with the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House, the sharp polarization between the progressive liberal forces on one side and the conservative religious forces on the other hand expanded, and Trump played a central role in fueling this conflict and benefiting from it.

The internal cultural issue has become a fiery struggle between liberal forces that adopt a progressive agenda, versus religious conservative forces that adopt a traditional agenda.

The cultural conflict emerged to cast a shadow over important economic, social and political issues.

Steve Bannon, a former Trump campaign manager and former White House strategic advisor, confirmed - in a seminar attended by Al Jazeera Net - that as long as there remains a cultural war that divides American society, President Trump's victory is certain in any elections he is running.

Intellectual history

And the American writer and critic Carlos Lozada recently published his book "What We Were Pondering: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era."

To prepare the book, Lozada - a book critic who works for The Washington Post - read about 150 books to evaluate Donald Trump and his presidency, to write a work of immense value that examines the controversial problems of American society today.

In his report, which was published in the American newspaper "The Washington Post", writer James Kloppenberg said that Lozada seems annoyed by the fact that the vast amount of works centered around Trump did not add a richer intellectual dimension to the influence of his decisions and actions, because many of these books mainly focused To lay out the daily abuses that Trump committed during his presidency rather than assessing their impact.

Literary works

Lozada, a Pulitzer Prize winner in the Criticism category for 2019, concluded after reading a wide range of books that "the most important works about the Trump era rarely revolve around him."

With the exception of works that focus on White House machinations, scandals and political controversies, Lozada believes that the most important literary works today focus on white working-class struggles, protests, immigration, race, and damage to the presidency and the American system in general.

Trump during a tour of the British Westminster Abbey (communication sites)

Although Lozada admits that he cannot see all of the works on the Trump era, he picked up the books he read.

He provides compelling arguments that the recent valuable books on American public life go beyond mere reasons for Trump's election and reasons for his adherence to him.

According to him, the white working class that several authors talked about may have helped Trump win the elections, but it has also become a literary and social tool that provides political interpretations to writers and intellectuals who suddenly have become focused on this group.

New American literature

After Trump's victory, the progressives created a new literary genre that Lozada categorized as part of the book "How Bad I Felt Election Night."

While books of resistance literature that have appeared in some cases have attempted to fight Trump with a progressive extremism that matches his hard-right actions, some conservatives have praised Trump and his policies generously, ignoring his worst inclinations.

In a chapter of his book "Beyond the Wall," Lozada provides a detailed analysis of immigration and highlights Erika Lee's work, "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States," to emphasize that anti-immigrant sentiment is entrenched in American society.

Lozada's work included a quote from a book by Sukito Mehta in which he referred to the loved ones that every immigrant has to leave behind, and made clear that people do not leave their homes on a whim, because they do not like it, or to get rich.

Lozada believes that migration is a compensation from colonialism for the resources it looted, and for the environmental and economic damage it caused to the homelands of these immigrants.

The Roots of Discrimination

The writer noted that Lozada's handling of the issue of identity and gender policy is of particular value in this work, as he touched upon the vast amount of studies centered on the extent to which black and white identities are superior to provide insights on their history and the present moment.

For women, the Trump years exacerbated a long history of hate and sexual harassment and launched the "Me Too" movement that encouraged women to speak out and stand against abuse.

In this context, Lozada says, "Among the enduring results of the (Me Too) movement, women have acquired a renewed ability to say everything out loud and find each other," affirming that "the memories of that era reveal the extent of the rotten foundations on which American society is based." Even if you are not able to topple the rickety regimes. "

Regarding the continuity of democracy in the Trump era, Lozada believes that we still lack intellectual assessments and solutions, because scientists and analysts who write such books are still so far diagnosing the ills without proposing solutions.

Although the challenges to democracy persist, books linking Trump to this long history "seem especially necessary now."