On the 20th of January 2025, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America, will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America.
That reality is an extraordinary, in-your-face development that has been much catastrophised, a nightmare so dire it was never meant to happen. The end of American democracy, the prophets had screamed. The destruction of all the principles and institutions laid down by the Founding Fathers.
The sky has not fallen since the announcement of an election result that was ultimately not a competition but a perfect rout.
Much has been said about the personality of Donald Trump by writers, including this one. His personal and moral deficiencies stick out a mile. He would be unsuitable for public office even in a prototypical ‘banana republic.’ The prospect that he might, once again, become the most powerful man in the world and the leader of the ‘Free World’ left many totally aghast. A convicted felon, docked on issues ranging from bribing a prostitute to suborning an insurrection. A man without grace, who could not accept defeat or stay to hand over to his successor in the required tradition of American leadership. A man who had tested all the structures of the state and stretched them to their elastic limit.
Analysis in the aftermath of the Trump election victory was brutal, and it essentially put the people of America themselves in the dock. A malign right-wing party had lost its soul, and a supposedly great people had been sucked into the cult of one man.
Lately, there has been a growing realisation of the need to look at the camp that lost the election and why they received such a damning electoral rebuff.
Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister and a prime advocate of ‘The Third Way,’ a movement within Liberal Democracy that is supposed to pitch in the centre, catching the benefits of right and left political tendencies, has for several years been expressing worry about the rising attractiveness of populism coalescing around ‘strongman’ leaders who are able to cut through the mush and deliver results to their nations, or so it seems. In his view, whenever it happens, it is a failure of the Centre.
From such an out-of-the-box perspective, Trump did not win the election. Joe Biden and his camp lost the people. And that loss may be part of a disturbing trend across the world.
“The sky has not fallen since the announcement of an election result that was ultimately not a competition but a perfect rout.”
Liberal democracy is a form of government that combines democracy with liberal political philosophy, which encompasses elections, separation of powers between different branches of government, the rule of law, an open society with universal suffrage, human rights, civil liberties, and political and religious freedom for all citizens, including minorities.
A core part of the justification for American leadership in the world, apart from its military prowess, is a moral authority derived from being the embodiment of these values and a right, even a duty, which it appropriates to itself, to spread them across the world. It is also the basis for globalisation and multilateral institutions.
The election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of America rode on the back of the assumption that these values define the best state of man everywhere and that they represent the loftiest attainment of society.
It is generally understood, unfortunately, that a backlash against Obama’s presidency led to a movement that resulted in the presidency of Donald Trump, with the unleashing of primordial racism and bigotry that is yet to abate.
President Joe Biden sees himself as the embodiment of the Liberal Democratic ideal and has pushed the boundaries of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at home and abroad. If the current state of America is a culmination of that effort, it is incontestable that several fallacies, mistaken assumptions, and inconsistencies have emerged. How much ‘freedom’ is too much freedom? Are all minorities equal, with equal entitlement to be propagated and centralised in culture? Is defending the rights of people with gender dysphoria of equal merit with defending Blacks against slavery? How much of the past can be retrospectively expiated without bringing the roof crumbling down? What is the received composition of the human family? At what point does life begin, and who has the right to terminate it? How much more immigration can the immigrant nation of America absorb before its character is changed forever?
Unfortunately, the ‘liberal democratic’ USA of the Biden era has ended up with positions on some matters that a majority of its constituency are uncomfortable with.
Even abroad, Liberal Democratic assumptions are not beyond question. Is untrammelled globalisation truly the ideal? Are the interactions between states determined by Democratic values or national interests? Should the Ukraine war be sold to a gullible public as a challenge to democracy when it is founded on a quid pro quo that allowed the Berlin Wall to be pulled down and when a civil war had been raging in the land a decade before the Russian invasion?
Where is the DEI about the Gaza killings, which most of the world calls genocide?
Does liberal democracy need to moderate its pretensions and draw some boundaries around its commitments?
President Joe Biden, a nice, kind man, will be judged harshly by history as a wishy-washy ditherer on the key issues of his era, which called for leadership. There is no evidence a Kamala Harris succession would have been different. The world was sleepwalking into World War 3 over Ukraine, and a hundred years of ‘Biden-ism’ would not have created a ‘2-state’ solution in Israel.
The narrative is not to justify populism in America or to imply that things will be better under Trump, although they may well be! It is to understand why America pulled the plug on ‘Liberal Democracy,’ at least for now, and why Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President, come January 20th.
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