A year of self-discovery for the United States

December 29, 2016 12:24 am | Updated 12:24 am IST - WASHINGTON:

Statuettes depicting the presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Statuettes depicting the presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

At the beginning of 2016, Donald Trump was one of the 12 Republicans left in the nomination race, running a chaotic Twitter campaign that pundits judged was aimless and inconsequential. Many believed his campaign would not survive the first primary in New Hampshire in February. He won.

“I continue to believe Mr. Trump will not be President.. And the reason is that I have a lot of faith in the American people,” said President Barack Obama in February.

As the year draws to a close, Mr. Trump, now the President-elect, has upended long-held U.S. policies around the globe and at home on a host of issues, all in 140 characters each.

Keeping up with the tweeting changes in the country is not easy for an intelligentsia that lived in a cocoon of imagined exceptionalism, unaware of the turmoil that surrounded it.

“2016 proved to be a year of self-discovery for Americans. We have learned much about the causes of our political polarity. We have found ourselves a more deeply divided nation than we had imagined, as much split by culture as by economic differences... As Americans we have come to understand how the grievances felt by half of our electorate run so deeply that they can occasion moral and ethical blindness. Above all, we have learned that for all our talk of American exceptionalism, we are susceptible to many of the same demagogic appeals as any other people,” said Marvin G. Weinbaum, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois.

“The U.S. is in a state of suspension, with Mr. Trump vociferously tweeting various irrelevant policy prescriptions. They mean nothing until a group of people can encode them in a policy, but there are contradictory signs as to what they will consist of,” said Stephen P. Cohen, Senior Fellow at Brookings Institution.

Coming to terms

While American exceptionalism may be under a cloud, the realism that characterises its elite has not been dented. Everyone is quickly coming to terms with the new reality of the impending Trump presidency and the Republican traditionalists that once scorned him are falling in line without a murmur.

Mr. Trump appears to be assembling a team of three disparate groups, according to Thomas Wright, Fellow at Brookings. “…the America Firsters, the religious warriors, and the traditionalists — each of which distrusts the others but also needs them to check the third,” he said in a recent article.

The first group has a narrow view of American interests, the second one believes that the world is caught in a civilisational rivalry between Christianity and Islam and the third group supports the continuing American role and leadership in global affairs.

All the 140-character seeds sowed this year could grow into massive shifts for the U.S. next year. Its relations with China, Russia, the countries in West Asia — are all set for unprecedented changes. “Clearly, his signals on South Asia are mixed, but he will have to either balance the major antagonisms or move towards a dialogue — but the latter is unacceptable to India... The region could lurch into a conflict that no one wants now, but which may be inevitable,” said Mr. Cohen. Domestically, a new Supreme Court judge that Mr. Trump will appoint in the first weeks in office will, in all likelihood, overturn an array of laws that in recent years promoted equity and social justice.

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