‘… as we are seeing in America, democracy feeding on itself is ugly to watch.’
THE race is on, so to speak, for the US presidency with the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week. And while the election to be held on November 5 is a national one, with voters casting their ballots from Maine in the east to Hawaii in the Pacific, the quirky nature of the Electoral College really focuses the Trump and Harris campaigns on six or seven battleground states, whose results will determine who will win the 270 electoral college votes needed to occupy the White House on January 20, 2025.
I am, and have been, biased towards the Democratic Party since I first became conscious of US politics as an elementary school kid at UP and a fan of John F. Kennedy. I remember being conscious of party politics in 1972, and closely followed the Carter-Ford clash in 1976 followed by the Reagan landslide in 1980. While following the elections in 1984 and 1988 I read more about my idol JFK’s squeaker of a victory in 1960 — it apparently came down to Illinois — and was amazed that the losing candidate, Vice President Richard Nixon, refused suggestions to file an electoral protest.
I felt the same way in the year 2000 when outgoing Vice President Al Gore submitted to the will of the US Supreme Court, whose decision on the count in Florida handed victory to Republican George W. Bush.
Things seem to be so different in America now. As president, it seems you can pick up the phone and demand that your party representatives try to find you more votes so you can reverse your loss in a state — at least that is what the US Supreme Court seems to have said in their decision in the case of The United States vs Donald Trump.
In the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — in fact, up to the year 2016, American political parties accepted the people’s will, conceding defeat once they’ve lost. But since 2015, Donald Trump has single-handedly changed the tenor of politics by consistently claiming that “the system is rigged” and that he can only lose if he is cheated.
And if that’s not bad enough, millions believe him. Perhaps 40% minimum of the electorate.
I suppose over the last two or three decades, something’s happened in America. Segments of its population slowly became alienated from the progress that other parts of the country were feeling; the divide between rural and urban and industrial and agricultural and the less educated vs. the highly educated deepened further. Add to that the arrival of social media and it was easy to stoke the anger and the fears of the disenchanted and the disenfranchised to make them distrust “the system” and anything and anyone connected with it.
So that’s why America is as divided as it is today, like never before. And that is why the division doesn’t play out civilly many times and why violence such as that seen on January 6, 2021 is no longer a one-time thing.
We, foreign observers, should note and learn from this because what is happening in America can already be happening in our societies. And as we are seeing in America, democracy feeding on itself is ugly to watch.
And it is destabilizing in a manner that can only elate those who wish to see democracy collapse.
We must learn from America.
