There is no doubt that the fervent deniers, particularly in Nigeria’s February 25, 2023 presidential poll, borrowed substantially from the playbook of former President Donald Trump and his rabid supporters in their response to the latter’s failure to win re-election for a second term in 2020. Trump, who had hinted darkly in his 2016 contest with Hillary Clinton that he would only accept the outcome of an election in which he was victorious, had adamantly maintained that the 2020 election was massively rigged against him even without the slightest iota of evidence and scores of election petition cases filed against the outcome were dismissed by the courts. In the run-up to next Tuesday’s presidential election in which Trump is running against Vice President Kamala Harris, there is no indication that the former President will graciously accept defeat if he loses particularly as the opinion polls suggest a tight race in which the two contenders are running neck to neck and victory could go either way.
To those who have long respected the United States as one of the best models of liberal democracy and one worth emulating by less advanced democracies, it is astonishing that the former President who unabashedly instigated the January 6, 2021, riotous attack on the Capitol Hill with large scale destruction of property and loss of lives, is free to participate in another election and has bright chances of being re-elected to the White House. This is in addition to his conviction by a law court for a felony and his long-standing entanglement with the law over tax evasion and manipulation charges as well as allegations of sundry sexual indiscretions by numerous women. That in spite of these seeming albatrosses, Trump retains the fanatical support of at least half of the electorate illustrates just how divided American society is and how divorced politics has become from morality in ‘God’s own country’.
From its once-upon-a-time dizzying heights of fidelity to the values and principles of liberal democracy which made her the proverbial ‘shining city on a bill’, millions of Americans now share with an emergent democracy like Nigeria, a deep and destructive distrust of democratic values, principles, and institutions. More than any other political actor in contemporary America, Trump has substantially shredded the fabric of mutual trust and fidelity that is critical to democratic sustainability. In his current campaign to return to the White House, he and his Republican fellow travelers, a party he has virtually completely taken over, have not desisted from questioning the integrity of electoral and state institutions as well as the credibility of public officials.
Even more alarmingly, he has stated a readiness to utilize state power to intimidate his political adversaries while expressing admiration for the almost unlimited powers wielded by some of the world’s totalitarian leaders. Thus, some of those who served in his administration in the first term have described him as a fascist while others fear the gross retardation of the country’s constitutional democracy should Trump be re-elected.
Of course, the delinking of American politics from its ethical moorings did not begin with Donald Trump. Its seeds were sown over time among others by Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam in the 1950s to early 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal that resulted in his impeachment, President Ronald Reagan’s Irangate scandal, President Bill Clinton’s salacious’Monica Lewinsky’ affair and President George Bush’s war against Iraq under the false pretext that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction.
Large numbers of Americans had over time begun increasingly to distrust members of the political class across party divides. Matters were not helped by the periodic worsening of the capitalist economic crisis despite its demonstrated capacity to bounce back from periods of recession and record momentary expansionary booms. Donald Trump did not just accidentally happen on the American political terrain to undertake a hostile takeover of the Republican Party as well as seize the country’s politics by storm. The grounds for the emergence of such a figure to fill a vacuum in American politics had been laid for quite some time.
In his book, ‘Capitalism’s World Disorder’, published in 1999 by Jack Barnes, long-serving national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, he traced the roots of political demagoguery in the country long before the political ascendancy of Donald Trump. Focusing particularly on the 1992 presidential election between Bill Clinton and George Bush, Barnes points out how Ross Perot, an independent candidate, and Patrick Buchanan, an outflier Republican candidate, both men from outside the political mainstream, had garnered relatively significant votes in that election.
Commenting on the appeal of Perot’s candidacy, Jack Barnes writes, “Perot taps into a conviction growing among millions of people that the established bourgeois politicians are incapable of addressing the social crisis. More and more people are open to the suggestion that these figures are at worst plotting conspiracies; at best they are immoral, not fit to be in office. Millions are convinced that the government is rotten; Washington and all it represents is morally degenerate; the parliamentary and democratic institutions under capitalism are cesspools where thieves and bureaucrats and maneuverers hide. And more and more believe that something radical must be done to break through this spreading corruption”.
Continuing, Barnes writes, “But Ross Perot got nearly 20 percent of the vote – 4 to 5 percent more than predicted on the basis of those who said beforehand they would vote for him. The Perot vote registers the growing view that no established Democratic or Republican Party candidate will ever be any different”. As for Patrick Buchanan who contested on the platform of the Republican Party, he stressed the imperative of using the U.S Army and National Guard units to win the war “for the soul of America”. He told the Republican Party convention in 1992 that “And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities and take back our culture and take back our country”. Was this not a foretaste of Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ and anti-immigration rhetoric that has formed the fulcrum of his campaign?
But then, this is the trend in major democracies and advanced economies across the world where anti-immigration sentiments are having a major influence on the direction of politics. It does not matter to those who harbour such sentiments that, as Teresa Hayter put it, “People need to migrate for two main reasons: first to improve their economic situation, and second to escape from wars and persecution. Imperialism bears much responsibility for both needs. It has created extreme polarization of wealth internationally. When European expansion began in the 16th century, the levels of prosperity and technical development they encountered in what is now the Third World were often more advanced than what then existed in Europe. The Europeans plundered the Third World, destroyed industries, and reduced much of it to levels of poverty and malnutrition which had not previously existed”.
Unfortunately for Kamala Harris, she was the immigration Czar under the Joe Biden administration during which large numbers of immigrants are believed to have entered the country and a fact that Trump is harping on. Although some experts contend that the American economy is holding on well within the context of global inflation and war-induced disruptions in international trade, not a few voters will agree with Trump that massive immigration is partly responsible for their economic woes.
It would also appear that in championing abortion (reproductive rights) and sexually deviant behavior such as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights including taking prayer out of public schools, the democrats have moved far from the Jeudo-Christian foundations of American politics and values thus alienating a not insignificant section of the populace. As a leading Christian conservative thinker, Charles Colson, notes on abortion, for instance, “Abortion has always been about more than abortion. It is the wedge used to split open the historic Western commitment to the dignity of human life. In 1973, when pro-life proponents warned that Roe was taking us down a slippery slope to all manner of horrors, they were mocked as alarmists. Later events proved them prescient”. Given his first term record, it seems that Trump will be less militarily adventurous in his second coming than a democratic administration and it would appear to me that American institutions are too firmly rooted for fascism or tyranny to thrive in that country no matter who emerges as the next President.
