How the US can rid itself of Trump and the mobs
The facts around America’s 2020 presidential election are now patently clear. Joe Biden garnered 290 electoral college votes (20 above the 270 needed to win) and not less than 78 million votes, thus winning the closely contested poll fair and square to become the 46th President of the United States.
Despite the emphatic victory, the 2020 vote reveals America as a badly divided nation. The ideological chasm between the liberal and conservative wings is edging towards the acrimony and bitterness of the Civil War era.
The US post-election hiatus bears resemblance to the uncertainty, chaos and anarchy in weaker and immature democracies where elections have become the main threat to security and political stability. Trump and the Republicans assert that the election was rigged through widespread voter fraud and have filed as many as 12 lawsuits, which were duly dismissed by the courts. Attorney-General William Barr stoked controversy by calling on federal prosecutors to examine allegations of vote fraud before the final results are certified.
Despite these claims, the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (GCC) Executive Committee declared the 2020 election “the most secure in American history”.
Former President Barack Obama accused senior Republican figures of undermining democracy. And Biden has vowed to be a “President who seeks not to divide, but to unify”.
But the impact of the US post-election mayhem on the presidency and democracy within America and globally is dire. By refusing to surrender power peacefully, Trump has breached the doctrine of peaceful transition, one of the cornerstones of stability in democracy.
The big question is: how did America produce Donald John Trump and the angry gun-bearing mobs now stalking the country’s political landscape? Suffice it to say Trump is a legitimate product of America’s archaic political system, itself a product of the pre-industrial age and America’s ideological and political anti-colonial Revolution between 1765 and 1783.
Therefore, the greatest threat to stability and global security today is the failure of America’s liberal elite to institute far-reaching reforms in the superpower’s outdated political system.
To be sure, long before Trump came to power, Francis Fukuyama of the End of History fame audaciously declared America was suffering from political decay.
The gist of the argument of America’s top public intellectual was that an unholy trinity of its constitutional system of checks and balances, partisan polarisation and the rise of well-financed interest groups produced a “vetocracy”, which rendered the government dysfunctional as a promoter of the common good. The hallmarks of this paralysis are recurrent budgetary crises, stagnating bureaucracy and a lack of policy innovation.
Trump’s “America First” doctrine, characterised by isolationism, protectionism, anti-migration and anti-globalisation, completely eroded America capacity to provide global public goods, leaving the field to emergent China as the new champion of globalisation.
It was Charles Kindleberger, one of the intellectual architects of the Marshall Plan, who argued that the disastrous decade of the 1930s was a result of America’s failure to provide global public goods after it had replaced Britain as the leading power. The Trump phenomenon is also a product of the discord and blame-game in America’s political theater.
One of my intellectual friends compared Trump’s America to the Weimar Republic in Germany after the First World War. With its hopes of becoming a world power dashed in the war trenches, the factions of post-War German political class blamed each other for the ignominious defeat.
Trump tapped into the fountainheads of this malaise and discontent to popularise the catchphrase: “Making America Great Again”. His followers blame the liberals for the decline. In turn, the liberals dismiss this as mere populism and a passing cloud, depicting Trump’s ‘base’ as merely ignorant – just like Adolf Hitler’s “Brown Shirts”, the Storm Troopers or Nazi Party militia that helped him rise to power.
Despite the hype around capitalism, markets and democracy as a happy trio, in reality they are locked in perennial tension. This inherent tension within the liberal order hastened the production of the Trump phenomenon.
By the end of Trump’s term, this tension had morphed into a triple crisis that contributed to his defeat. Besides capitalism’s own failures (including widening poverty and inequality gaps, unemployment, stagnating incomes and concentrated wealth), an environmental crisis loomed even larger and America faced the full wrath and severity of the coronavirus pandemic, which Trump awfully mismanaged.
As Trump’s America burned, its intellectual luminaries gave pride of place to external threats. For instance, with the rise of China, Graham T. Allison popularised the “Thucydides Trap”, which predicted a rising power (like China) would inexorably lead to a cataclysmic war with the established power (US).
Trump is not the first US president to refuse to hand over peacefully. John Adams, the country’s second president, refused to hand over to Thomas Jefferson when he lost the election on March 4, 1801. However, as soon as Jefferson was sworn in, the office simply left him.
Despite Trump’s intransigence, Biden will be sworn in as America’s 46th President by midday on January 20, 2021 – and the office will leave Trump.
But without far-reaching political reforms of America’s decaying political system, Trump and the mobs are here to stay.
_________________________________________________________________
Peter Kagwanja is Chief Executive Africa Policy Institute
