As I write this Saturday, November 07, 2020, triumph by the contender, Joe Biden, in the USA presidential election, over the incumbent, Donald Trump, is really becoming a long drawn out affair. The election held on Tuesday, with a substantial part of the results released the following day, yet three or four days after, with as few as a handful of states outstanding, there is yet no closure.
The whole world has been left on tenterhooks watching how this encounter would conclude. But for us here, why all the fuss about this election holding in that faraway land?
Julius Malema, the stormy petrel of South African politics, very much spoke my mind when he commented on the American election in a video that went viral recently: “We ordinarily are not interested in the the USA election because it is one party contesting within itself. USA is under a political party called the Republican Democratic Party. They are one, the ideology is one, the mission is the same, put America first, conquer the world…either way Americans are the same. They only care about themselves. Why should we care about them?” I admit that we can ignore the USA, but one cannot wish away its pervasive and many a time its insidious influence around the world.
I guess since it played the decisive role in World War II to route German and Japanese forces seeking to dominate the world, the trajectory of its influence has been on the ascendancy. It attained the top dog position when its later day competitor, the Soviet Union, and its surrogate communist states, collapsed in the early 1990s. Since then the USA has been the unrivalled policeman of the world. This, and the attractions of the ideals of its democratic political system has given it an aura which radiates around the world. But many of us have never been truly bought over. Many have always regarded the USA as an overbearing bully around the world. Its role in the Middle East, particularly its blind support for Israel and the wanton destruction of citizens surrounding it, so that the Zionists can survive and supplant, is an ignoble act that rankles.
As young undergraduates in the early 1970s, we had ranted against the US role in Vietnam, the wholesome support they gave apartheid regimes in Africa and their subversive activities in Chile, Cuba and other countries with progressive leaderships.
The presidents that emerged in the US, particularly since Ronald Reagan caused an upset in the 1980 election, replacing President Jimmy Carter, have been war mongers. President Reagan’s two terms notched up the policeman role to a higher degree, creating wars here and there. His Vice President, George Bush, who replaced him in 1989, continued in the same tradition, giving the world the first Iraq invasion. His son, George W Bush, who caused another upset in the 2000 election to beat the Democratic Party candidate, Vice President Al Gore, gave us more unjustified wars by causing the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
These were all presidents who won elections on the platform of the Republican Party. In contrast, the presidents coming from the Democratic Party in recent years, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and lately Barack Obama, have always come away in comparison – conciliatory, liberal and looking saintly. It is probably in the domestic affairs of the US that the shade between the two parties becomes even deeper. Here is a society that inherited a long history of slavery and the subsequent fight for equality by disadvantaged groups. The champions of the disadvantaged groups from our observatory towers here have always been the Democratic Party – at least they gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which outlawed discrimination on the basis of colour, race, religion, sex, among so many other benefits.
It is this Civil Rights Act, strengthened by subsequent legislations, that has over the years made it possible for the American society to be patterned in the more positive way we see it now. It is the gains made from the liberal policies of the Democratic Party that are always at stake in the rounds of elections since then. The emergence of Trump as the 45th president three years ago really complicated matters because his brand of politics has put all those gains at risk. Besides, it also puts him squarely at odds with most countries of the world, including their traditional allies in NATO and elsewhere. He was ready to go against the grains in the international organisations in his brazen bid to put America first – whatever the consequences. He trod on toes with his uncouth language that did not befit the stature of the president of a country like America. He is on record dismissing African countries in terms so lurid that I cannot bring myself to repeat here. But it is his domestic policies that sowed the seeds of his final undoing. He is a divisive president so patently racist and openly championing the causes of the majority against the minority and underprivileged.
Many will wish to see Trump lose. And as I conclude, words are going round that he has definitely lost. I can already hear loud laughter and clinking of glasses in many parts of the world.
