By the time you are reading this article, the 45th President of the United States is likely to be already known. This denouement to the fractious campaign to elect the candidate to what is arguably the most powerful position in the world — yes, it matters to us Indians as well — would have finally arrived.
It was a remarkable election season this time around. It even began promisingly. The Democratic primaries featured a self-described “democratic socialist” in Bernie Sanders who performed creditably but ultimately lost to the history-making Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump trumped about 16 other aspirants on the Republican side. The Democratic primaries saw substantive debates that promised some new thinking and action on climate change, on the U.S. role in trouble-ridden West Asia, the need for a better minimum wage, a focus on affordable higher education, and even a rethinking on the pervasive role of money power in U.S. elections.
But many of the issues discussed saw no or little play once the primaries ended. The discourse shifted to the Right, and some attention was spent on national security, immigration and trade policies. Larger focus was brought to the persona and character of the two candidates.
Low road to high officeThe electoral process, in the end, turned out to be quite a poor advertisement for U.S. democracy. Partially, this was because the discourse was dragged down to the gutter by the presence of Mr. Trump who, in any other rational universe, would have never been close to being a presidential candidate in the second largest democracy in the world. Here was a former reality television “celebrity” and a real estate businessman reliant on an inherited fortune who was openly xenophobic, who was caught on tape boasting about sexual assault and getting away with it, had a history of acknowledged racist and misogynist behaviour, and was clearly someone who had the temperament of a school bully and the knowledge equivalence of an ignoramus on world and public affairs.
His campaign surrogates and advisers featured politicians who were self-confessed adulterers (former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and ex-mayor of New York city Rudy Giuliani), a serving Governor facing serious investigations on corruption (Chris Christie) and spokespersons who could peddle any falsehood to suit their candidate. It was somewhat rich of these surrogates to pitch their candidate as the rightful alternative to the “corrupt” Ms. Clinton.
Talk show host Stephen Colbert used a particular term, “truthiness”, during his previous avatar as a faux-right-wing conservative to describe how U.S. politicians could use “instinct” or gut to suggest things that are contrary to logic, reality or “facts”. What was a satirical take to describe an ongoing farce adopted by many right-wing politicians became mainstream in the Trump presidential campaign after the Republican candidate embraced “truthiness” in a full-blown manner.
Mr. Trump denied climate change, calling it a Chinese-created hoax. He called for building a “great wall” to halt illegal immigration, suggesting that this was the source of crime in the U.S., and uttered so many other falsehoods that the neutral fact-checker PolitiFact found that 70 per cent of the statements he made (and that were analysed) during the campaign were lies, and 17 per cent among them bald-faced “pants-on-fire” ones.
Decoding Trump’s tractionIt is a worthwhile exercise to understand how this man became such a powerful challenger despite severe flaws. One could point to the chilly aftermath of the financial crisis in 2008 and its impact on the blue-collar working class and small businesses that were tired of the two-party establishment and chose to favour an outlier.
We could also suggest this as a reactionary counter-attack from people Ms. Clinton described as the “basket of deplorables” — those who viscerally hated the fact that an African-American was President of the U.S. for two terms and who found in Mr. Trump the perfect antithesis of the suave, progressive and intelligent Barack Obama. One could also suggest that this was the outcome of the long-ranging culture war promoted by right-wing conservative networks such as Fox News and the radio airheads who could spout any theory or opinion unencumbered by fact-checks. The tenacity of his campaign could also be attributed to the substantive financial backing provided by the uber-rich (such as the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer).
Or perhaps, the rise of Mr. Trump could be explained as a cumulative consequence of all these reasons, added to the fact that the undue attention given to his maverick candidacy gave him an outsized advantage over his other Republican rivals.
Ms. Clinton’s unpopularity, in part, was fuelled by years of antagonism from the rabid right wing and being part of the crony capitalist establishment, but also due to her close associations with the mandarins of finance capital, who are rightfully seen as those who engendered the economic crisis through their greed. It is, however, false equivalence to put these flaws on the same pedestal as Mr. Trump’s, but that is precisely what this campaign managed to do to a great extent.
All said and done, it would have been much more meaningful to have a democratic battle of ideas among an avowed social democrat like Mr. Sanders, a centrist and an “incrementalist” like Ms. Clinton, and a true right-wing economic conservative from among the Republicans. But the role of money power and its consequence — the lack of a level playing field — twisted what is otherwise a robust formal process of establishing choice into something Kafkaesque and farcical as was seen in this election cycle.
Hopefully the end — the election of the more capable and qualified of the two main candidates — would have justified the means (the campaigns and the electoral process) by the time you read this piece.
srinivasan.vr@thehindu.co.in
