Philippa Kaur

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    What Happened to Trump’s Big, Beautiful Wall?

    One of the best-known of Donald Trump’s many campaign promises in 2016 was that “he” would build a “big, beautiful wall” along America’s southern border with Mexico to prevent illegal migrants from “shithole countries” crossing into the United States. And the best thing about it? The Mexican government was going to pay for it. Not entirely surprising to anyone with even a little sense of reality, the Mexican government was not completely sold on the idea, perhaps because it had not been consulted beforehand.  

    As a German, I know something about walls. After all, for decades in the postwar period, Germany was divided into two states — the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) — separated by a beautiful and highly efficient wall. Ironically, one of the great icons of American Republicanism (the party, not the constitutional order), Ronald Reagan, at a moment of complete mental blackout, thought it would be a good idea to tear down the wall. Or so he called upon his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, in a well-known speech held in West Berlin in 1987.

    The Psychology of the Wall

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    The Berlin Wall was built in the early 1960s, first in Berlin, then along the whole of the inner border between East and West. It was a great wall, a monument to the ingenuity of West Germany’s government to get its counterpart in the East to build an impenetrable barrier preventing millions of desperate, poverty-stricken Easterners from invading the West in order to take away jobs from hardworking West Germans and take advantage of the FRG’s lavish social welfare benefits. And the best thing? The East Germans built the wall and the East German government paid for the whole shebang.

    Now, that’s what you call the art of the deal. Unfortunately, in 1989, the party came to an abrupt end. On November 9, the wall was demolished, Easterners flooded the West, bringing with them not only xenophobia and racism, but an entitlement mentality which has cost and continues to cost unified Germany billions of euros. Not for nothing, around a quarter of West Germans wished, according to representative surveys, that the wall were rebuilt.

    Of Wall and Facts

    Trigger warning: Those of my readers (if there are any) who have been brainwashed by Fox News and the Murdoch empire, be warned. My rendition of what caused the building of the wall across the two Germanys is fake news, or better, an attempt at irony. West Germans always loved their sisters and brothers on the other side of the border, always yearned for the day the two parts of the country would be reunited. The East German government never intended to build the wall but was forced to do so in order to keep Western imperialists out of East Germany’s workers’ and peasants’ paradise and protect the great socioeconomic advances the GDR had made under the wise leadership of the East German Communist Party. Or so the story went.

    Now, to get back to the main topic of this article, what about Trump’s wall? First, some facts. The border between the United States and Mexico extends over more than 2,000 miles, around two-thirds of which consists of the Rio Grande River. Only about 700 miles are on land. Even before Trump took office, most of the land border between the two countries was fortified by fences, thanks to both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As Obama stated in 2009, “I think the American people, they appreciate and believe in immigration. But they can’t have a situation where you just have half a million people pouring over the border without any kind of mechanism to control it.”

    Embed from Getty Images

    Both Bush and Obama were pro-immigration. Both understood, however, that a significant number of Americans were not entirely sold on the idea. Surveys show that Americans are generally well-disposed toward immigrants, certainly better disposed than Europeans. At the same time, however, there are also considerable concerns. In 2018, about half of respondents thought that immigrants represented a burden on local communities “by using more than their share of social services” — a proposition supported by three-quarters of Republican respondents, compared to merely a bit more than a third of Democrats. The extension of border fortifications along the US-Mexican border was supposed to alleviate the anxieties and fears of those hostile to immigration while soliciting support for a comprehensive overhaul of immigration policy.

    Immigration reform never happened. Instead, one administration after the other tinkered with a system, increasingly seen as dysfunctional, particularly with regard to the question of undocumented immigrants, without ever seriously addressing the misgivings of large parts of the American public.  This allowed Trump to promote an extremist solution to an issue that had been smoldering for decades. This was largely in line with a larger political agenda aimed at transforming the republic into a form of ethnocracy, defined as a “government or rule by a particular ethnic group,” in the US case by Americans of European descent, or what is generally known as white supremacy.

    In the Trumpian nativist narrative, the wall was of central importance. Better still, it had the appearance of a relatively simple fix to a highly complex issue, which goes right to the heart of American identity and self-understanding. It might be appropriate in this context to recall the inscription etched into the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” This is the claim. Reality has always been somewhat different. Over the past several decades, Americans have been increasingly less than welcoming to the world’s poor huddled masses, particularly if they happened to come from south of the border. Again, this is nothing new. Not long after the establishment of the republic, American pamphleteers charged European governments with dumping their poor onto the shores of the new nation.

    Unkept Promises

    Ironically enough, while the wall was a central selling point in Trump’s 2016 campaign, Americans were less than convinced. In a Gallup poll from January 2017, a mere quarter of respondents thought it was “very important” that Trump kept his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border. This was way below repairing infrastructure, reducing income taxes for all Americans, raising tariffs on foreign imports and deporting illegal immigrants who had committed a crime. Each one of these issues had majority support. In short, most Americans could care less about Trump’s big, beautiful wall, perhaps out of recognition that walls are hardly ever beautiful. In fact, they are just depressing, as anyone who had visited Berlin during the Cold War can attest.

    This might explain at least in part why the wall never really got off the ground. In fact, during the roughly four years of the Trump administration, only 15 miles of new barriers were built. The rest were repairs and replacements of already existing structures. None of this has come even close to a big, beautiful wall. Nevertheless, the illusion was being kept up, making for some rather grotesque displays along the southern border. They remind one of the last remnants of that other great, beautiful wall on exhibition for curious tourists to admire a few hundred meters along a river in what used to be East Berlin, the former capital of the GDR.

    The wall is just one, albeit an eminently symbolic one, of the many unkept promises scattered around Trump’s four years in office. Not that he failed to remind his adoring fans of his determination. The pinnacle, at least with respect to the wall, was probably his proud statement a year ago at a rally in Pittsburgh that his administration was “building a wall in Colorado,” a “beautiful wall, a big one that really works, that you can’t get over, you can’t get under.” Presumably, the wall was supposed to keep those crafty New Mexicans from stealing jobs from the good people of Colorado, or perhaps their marijuana. No wonder, New Mexicans came out in favor of Joe Biden; but then, so did a majority of voters in Colorado. Apparently, Hannibal Lecter was right, gratitude does have a short half-life.

    Perhaps Donald Trump should have taken seriously what American voters expected from him. It might have dawned on him that repairing America’s infrastructure was significantly more important for most voters than building a wall in the middle of nowhere. One year after Trump assumed his office, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) accorded America’s infrastructure a grade of D+. For those not familiar with the American grading system, a D+ is not good. Students that get a D+ are awarded the grade for showing up in class. In 2019, the ASCE estimated that the US needed “to spend some $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the country’s roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure.”

    The Trump administration did little to nothing to reverse America’s infrastructure crisis. As one commentator put it in 2019, Trump’s claims were just that, getting “Americans nothing. No money. No deal. No bridges, roads or leadless water pipes.” As Marie Antoinette might have put it, let them take private jets or helicopters.

    Under the circumstances, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that last week, Donald Trump lost his bid for a new four-year term. As a result, he might never see the completion of his life’s work, that big, beautiful wall, a tribute to man’s determination to accomplish the seemingly impossible, to do the right thing, against all odds, even if it is completely ludicrous. To quote that great inspirational movie from 1978, a time when things were still hunky-dory and even the most outrageous college dropout could aspire to become a distinguished member of the US Senate: “I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part! We’re just the guys to do it.”

    Unfortunately for Trump, a majority of American voters were unimpressed and decided that one more wall in Colorado was one wall too many. And, to heap injury upon injury, once again the Chinese, with their Great Wall, have gotten the better of Donald Trump.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    Will Joe Biden Succeed With America’s Second Reconstruction?

    After four days of agonizing vote tabulations, interminable political commentary, overwrought election dissection and national public angst, Joe Biden has been declared the winner of the 2020 election as America’s next president. Biden partisans are entitled to some celebration. It was a hard-fought win against what seemed like impossible odds at the beginning of the year. But the politician who began his public life 50 years ago as a Wilmington, Delaware, councilman will now take on the biggest challenge of his life and of the nation he will lead.

    First, however, it’s important to call attention to all the things that went well for America this last week. And they’re vitally important for Americans — and non-Americans, too — to understand and appreciate as the nation and its new president invest themselves in this herculean challenge ahead.

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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    For all the Sturm und Drang in the lead-up to the election, voting came off largely without a hitch. All voters who came to vote were able to do so. Waiting times were mercifully brief. Despite plenty of hiccups in primary voting that took place earlier in the year, national election day procedures and systems performed just as they were supposed to do. Early voting as well as mail-in and absentee voting, occurring in many states for the first time to minimize the dangers of COVID-19, also proceeded with few problems.

    Delays in ballot tabulation occurred in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and elsewhere largely because Republican-controlled legislatures prohibited starting the counting process until November 3 — voting day. In the end, that may have redounded against them and President Donald Trump. Also, to minimize voters’ exposure to COVID-19, many states were using mail-in voting and same-day voter registration for the first time, accounting for further delays.

    Vox Populi

    The success of the process was bolstered throughout the nation by competent election administrators and effective election systems, manned by armies of conscientious volunteers, Republicans, Democrats and independents. Donald Trump’s predictable, sore-loser accusations of fraud and manipulation are specious and groundless. His legal claims will likely go nowhere.

    Furthermore, fears of violence or public unrest at polling places or in cities never really materialized, from either the left or the right. There were few, if any, reports of voter intimidation. The American people seemed to understand that this most sacred and honored element of their much-bruised democracy was off-limits. It was their chance to express their views, wishes and wants in the most forceful and effective way possible in a democracy.

    The world may also take heart in the level of participation in this election. The voter participation rate — expected to reach nearly two-thirds of the population eligible to vote once all ballots are counted – will exceed the previous high of 65.7% set in the 1908 elections. In my home state of Colorado, voter turnout will reach an astounding 85%, the highest in the nation and the highest ever of any US state in modern election history.

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    It may be fair to credit Donald Trump for wresting American voters from their traditional election lethargy. He unquestionably stirred deep and strong sentiments among supporters and critics alike. They responded as they should in a democratic society — by going to the polls. For America, vox populi prevailed.

    There is a related benefit to the increased voter turnout. It would be hard to find a period in recent US history when so many Americans took such a strong interest in public affairs. One could hardly go to the supermarket, walk through a parking garage, take a stroll through the neighborhood or sit in a classroom or office — at least those still functioning under COVID-19 restrictions — without hearing people talk about the political issues and the election. Political conversations — whether online, on social media, TV, radio, print or at the kitchen table — dominated like never before. Animated and even stressful at times, these are nevertheless heartening. It is essential that this communication take place in order to keep a democracy vibrant and innervated. An engaged citizenry makes for a stronger democracy.

    Finally, the much-feared tampering by outside “influencers” also failed to materialize, though not from want of trying. Federal, state and local agencies and authorities did in fact come together to ensure that these elections were largely interference-free and that the results do indeed reflect the genuine will of the people. Intelligence agencies tipped off Facebook, Twitter and other tech companies about fake social media accounts and posts in order to restrict the reach of bots and prevent the spread if false information. That was in spite of a president who has insisted for four years that outside agents had no influence in the 2016 election, when all three US intelligence agencies — the CIA, NSC and FBI — concluded otherwise.

    The upshot of the 2020 election process is that the core component of America’s democracy — the expression of the people’s will — proved strong, healthy and resilient. It worked.

    Now the Hard Part

    Despite that success, however, American democracy faces enormous pressures. The nation is plainly divided into two near-equal camps. Each seems unable and unwilling to listen or reach out to the opposite side, viewing the other as enemies rather than political adversaries. It is unhealthy and unsustainable. Democracy without compromise, almost a forbidden word in the rival camps, leads to stagnation and collapse. It will be President-elect Biden’s task to start the process to bridge this gaping chasm in American public life.

    Just how is America divided? Some argue, rather eloquently and persuasively, that it’s a conflict of classes. In one corner is a wealthy, entitled, well-educated and aloof stratum of elites divorced from and insensitive to the needs of what is essentially a working class. This working class, in the opposite corner, provides for the elite’s essential services, contributes the manual labor to build and maintain their glass-encased office complexes and luxury homes, grows and processes their food, makes and maintains the cars and machines they depend on, cleans their cities, operates and maintains the transportation networks, and fights and dies in their wars.

    The latter point bears elaboration because it is particularly illustrative of an apparent divide. Since 2001, America has been at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which continue today. US forces remain present, though in fewer numbers today than five or 10 years ago, in both countries as well in other countries around the world. A recent study by the Council on Foreign Relations showed that 83% of American military recruits come from families or neighborhoods whose median incomes fall below $85, 850. Only 17% came from income levels above that.

    The median household income in the US was $68,703 in 2019. People of color are disproportionately represented in the enlisted ranks of the Army, Navy and Air Force (African Americans) and the Marine Corps (Hispanics). In fact, black Americans are far more likely to serve their country in uniform than their white counterparts.

    The United States turns to its middle and lower classes to defend itself and fight its wars pretty much like every civilization throughout history dating back to the Roman Empire. But none of those were democracies. So-called elites, who benefit substantially more than their lower-income fellow citizens in terms of legal protections, opportunity, privilege and rights, bear fewer of the burdens of defending and sustaining that system of rights than those who arguably profit less from it. One does not go to Harvard, Stanford or MIT in order to enlist or even seek an officer’s commission in America’s armed forces.

    Class or Geography?

    However, it is another statistical nugget in the CFR study that may allow one to argue that, in fact, it isn’t class that divides America. It’s geography. Data of state-by-state contributions to the enlisted ranks of the military indicate that states of the southeast, which are less affluent, are overly represented. The more well-off states of the northeast are underrepresented.

    With that in mind, consider the state-by-state electoral map. With the exception of Georgia, whose growing metropolis of Atlanta belatedly delivered the Southern state to Biden, the Southeast was Donald Trump territory. The Southeast and the Midwest, which also went for Trump, are disproportionately rural and host fewer large cities than the states along America’s two coasts, which gave their electoral votes to Joe Biden.

    Embed from Getty Images

    America’s electoral map has changed little since the end of the Civil War. The electoral maps of 1880, just 15 years after the war, and 1908, over 40 years afterward, are illustrative. (Note: In the 1880 map, the colors used to designate the parties is reversed from what it is today — Republicans were blue and Democrat states red.) There is one important consideration that dramatically altered the party alignment in the South. With the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Southern Democrats switched to Republican. Richard Nixon cleverly played the race card in 1968 at the height of the civil rights movement and again in 1973, cementing Southern loyalty for the Republican Party for the first time. It isn’t class that is at the heart of what divides America today. For one thing, Americans never bought into the old Marxist-Leninist argument of class warfare. It was an outmoded and unrelatable Old World argument. It didn’t apply to them.

    Classes most certainly exist in the US, and Americans know it. Except for the Native Americans, all US citizens find their roots among immigrants who came overwhelmingly from lower classes. Most immigrants who came to this country through the 1970s were poor and seeking the kind of opportunities not available to them in their countries of origin. What they sought, later defined as upward mobility, was in America where class may have existed but wouldn’t matter. Most Americans, with the exception of blacks, Native Americans and other people of color, believed that class warfare could not exist in their country. Their problems, like everything else about America, were different.

    The real division in America is urban versus rural, supplemented with a healthy dose of race. Two recent books make persuasive cases for class versus the urban-rural arguments. Michael Lind, in his well-researched “The New Class War,” makes the case for social class divisions in America. Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” makes the case for what I would describe as American tribalism, an almost political Hatfields against the McCoys. Only it’s Republicans versus Democrats. In her review and comparison of these two excellent publications, Professor Amy Chua writes that Klein’s categorization embraces religion, race and geography.

    But electoral politics suggest that geography, and not just on a national scale, may be the culprit and what really defines America’s current challenges. Even within predominantly Democratic states, rural counties typically were drawn to Donald Trump. Overwhelmingly Democrat California and New York — and Texas on the Republican side — illustrate the point. America’s differences on just about every public issue today — race, gender, abortion, guns, big government, religion, taxes … you name it — can almost always be sorted by the urban versus rural criteria.

    America’s Second Reconstruction

    How does Joe Biden begin to fix that? Judging from his 50 years in politics, he may be fairly well suited. He’s not an ideological iconoclast. Nor is he vindictive. He won’t launch a campaign to vanquish his opponents in the fashion of Donald Trump. His campaign rhetoric and post-election commentary all suggest that he’ll follow a moderate political course and look for compromise. And Biden comes from America’s working classes.

    That is all necessary. But it’s far from sufficient. Biden needs a second Reconstruction. The ideological brainchild of Abraham Lincoln following the American Civil War, reconstruction sought to bring the South back into the American fold, promote economic reintegration and development, eradicate the vestiges of slavery, and incorporate the freed slaves into American society. It was generally considered to be successful despite Andrew Johnson’s, Lincoln’s successor, efforts to weaken it. A pro-Reconstruction, Republican-controlled Congress and President Ulysses Grant ensured steady progress. Nevertheless, it was tragically cut short, sacrificed in the political horse-trading to win Southern Democrats’ support for Republican Rutherford B. Hayes following the disputed 1876 election.

    With it went a united nation, with black Americans finally getting a taste of the forbidden American fruit of opportunity and upward mobility. Jim Crow, segregation and lynching became the order of the day, effectively slavery without the formal system. Also lost were the South’s opportunity to capitalize on what would soon explode in the North and elsewhere — the Industrial Revolution. Like the Great Emancipator, his noble dream of Reconstruction followed Lincoln to an early grave.

    Reconstruction remains unfinished business in America. And not just in the South. Rural areas throughout America need reconstruction. They need capital, infrastructure, better health care, improved schools and opportunities, especially jobs. This must especially include areas of concentrations of black, brown and Indigenous Americans. To capitalize fully on its great bounty, America’s rural communities need to connect to their urban counterparts.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Donald Trump may have correctly read the frustrations and anxieties of rural America. But he manipulated those earnest feelings to advance the Trump brand. He offered no solutions. Instead, Americans heard verbal palliatives that made rural Americans feel that someone in Washington was finally listening. But the frustrations of being outside America’s prosperity are still with rural citizens and people of color.

    Biden will have to find a way to earn their trust and then begin a new reconstruction. His Build Back Better program, starting with coming to grips with the pandemic and getting it under control, may offer the broad outlines for a new Reconstruction. To earn that trust and start the healing process of his country, Biden may wish to refer to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. With a large dose of humility, grace and forgiveness, President-elect Biden must listen to rural Americans, especially to those of color, all of whom want not only to share in America’s bounty but also to preserve what is important to their cherished lifestyles. America’s diversity is an unquestionable strength of its democracy. That must include its urban-rural diversity, too.

    It may be historical irony that to heal a deeply divided nation, the newly elected president must look back to another president who sought to heal the much deeper divisions of a broken nation. This time, it must be made to work. The country’s future may depend on it.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    The Future of the Semi-Victorious Democratic Party

    New York Times reporter Astead W. Herndon introduced his post-election interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by reminding readers how the ebullient progressive Democrat has dutifully played the role the Democrats requested of her during the presidential election campaign. “For months,” he wrote, “Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr as he sought to defeat President Trump.”

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Good soldier:

    A metaphor applied to anyone who obeys even ill-conceived orders commanded by an abusive authority and who will be valued not for their valor as a solider or their integrity as a citizen, but only for the number of enemies they have killed.

    Contextual Note

    Herndon’s choice of metaphor perfectly sums up the attitude of a party that, since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, has consistently glorified war. It is also a party that increasingly celebrates billionaires, Rhodes scholars, intelligence officers and generals while marginalizing the lowly, which includes bartenders, bus drivers and other “deplorables,” as well as its own loyal foot soldiers.

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began her wage-earning career as a bartender before demonstrating her talents as a political strategist. At the same time, she capitalized on her budding stardom by accepting to play the foot soldier for the Democrats. In the interview, she recounts her forays against the Republican enemy during this election campaign: “I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help.”

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    Mainstream Democrats see Republicans as their rivals and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as their enemy. And not only her, but the majority of Democratic voters, who polls tell us clamor for single-payer health insurance and free college. In the interview, Ocasio-Cortez tries to warn her colleagues that “their base is not the enemy.”

    Ocasio-Cortez exposes the fundamental issue both parties will have to deal with after Joe Biden’s victory: redefining their base. Do they even have one? Donald Trump proved that something resembling a base existed on the right side of the spectrum. He gave it a forceful voice. It appealed to xenophobia and a rejection of what might be called urban values in favor of an illusory small-town and suburban ideal that has always occupied a sentimental place in America’s imagination. How ironic that it was a wealthy Manhattan real estate mogul who managed to mobilize those energies. The Democrats have not even tried to define their base, hoping that people will assume it’s the working class.

    To the question, “What can we expect from you in the next four years?” Ocasio-Cortez replied: “I don’t know. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.” The party has shown no interest in understanding what it claims to be its working-class base. She expects the party to continue its “smothering approach” to anyone who seeks to respond to the increasingly evident needs of the base. She describes its effects: “It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.”

    In his victory speech Saturday evening, Biden promised to unify the nation: “Let this grim era of demonization in America begin to end here and now.” How about unifying the party? Will the party under Biden’s leadership end its demonizing of its own most dynamic members? Biden ended his victory speech with this idea: “Spread the faith.” “Spreading” — the faith, the truth or anything else — in Latin is “propagare,” from which the word “propaganda” is derived. Is that what Biden is proposing for the next four years: faith instead of action and moderate mainstream propaganda to replace Trump and Pompeo’s populist right-wing agenda?

    Historical Note

    Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wonders “whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost.” History tells us that’s unlikely. The experience following the 2016 election revealed the Democrats’ chronic incapacity to conduct an honest autopsy of their defeats. They condemned Donald Trump’s personal bombast and vanity. But the Democratic Party as a whole shares those vices. It targets different enemies, but its methods are similar. The vain and bombastic never admit past mistakes. Instead, they always seek someone else to blame for their own failures.

    Donald Trump set the tone when he began his first presidential campaign in 2015. He blamed the Mexican people for everything that was troubling a nation still reeling from a crisis engineered and precipitated a decade earlier, not by Latinos, but by the financial wizards of Wall Street. Once elected, Trump chose a new bugbear: Muslims. He did this even while kowtowing, on his first foreign visit, to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the despotic ruler of the oil-rich kingdom that had supplied 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers. Finally, when a global pandemic wreaked havoc on the US economy, threatening his prospects for reelection, Trump blamed the Chinese.

    Trump’s consistency in blaming other groups of people manifestly inspired the Democrats. Taking the hint from Hillary Clinton after her ignominious defeat to the least qualified candidate in the history of American elections, the Democratic Party claimed that all the fault could be laid at the feet of the Russians. That produced three years of media and courtroom drama, culminating in a farcical impeachment that essentially revealed the inanity of the entire exercise and the futile absurdity of the Democrats’ strategy.

    Nothing beyond the anecdotal justified either Trump’s accusations against the nation of his choice or the Democrats’ demonization of Russia. Worse, this voluntary blindness allowed both Trump and the Democrats to avoid using the existing evidence to seek a deeper understanding of the weaknesses of the nation’s political culture. They preferred to deflect blame by promoting the blanket judgment of an entire nation, people or race.

    Embed from Getty Images

    In Saturday’s speech, Biden proclaimed: “The refusal of Democrats and Republicans to cooperate with one another, it’s not some mysterious force beyond our control. It’s a decision. It’s a choice we make. And if we can decide not to cooperate, then we can decide to cooperate.”

    Has the president-elect’s absence from politics after his eight years as vice president and his retreat into the basement in 2020 blinded him from the reality of the growing instability within both parties? Defining the nation according to a simple binary opposition of Republicans vs. Democrats is a worn-out heritage of the 20th century, when people accepted and even clung to those labels. Both parties are now clearly divided, if not fragmented. The labels have lost their meaning.

    Large swaths of Americans now perceive both parties for what they are: two clubs of privileged oligarchs and moneyed interests that have acquired the habit of sharing the same resources, managing them in their common interest and disguising their collusion by bickering petulantly in public over trivialities. They thereby create the impression, exploited by the media, that they are dealing with serious issues. This political pantomime enables the parties to agree on “reasonable compromises” designed to obscure the real issues, at best papering over problems rather than addressing them. At worst, it means applying King Solomon’s justice literally by cutting the baby in two while offering the contending ladies their blessings and then wishing them better luck after the next election.

    Nothing today indicates that Joe Biden will even try to mobilize the resources and the political will needed to solve the pressing issues he has himself promised to address. Whether it’s COVID-19, the plight of working people in a crippled economy, climate change or racial injustice, the compromises Democrats and Republicans habitually make have long been the source of these problems rather than their solutions.

    The two parties are prisoners of a system of their own making that aggravates crises. And the crises listed above are all coursing toward a tipping point beyond which systemic implosion looks inevitable. Sudden collapse can no doubt be avoided, and Joe Biden should be better at avoiding it than Trump. But it can only be achieved at the price of acknowledging that collapse is actually threatening. That is something neither party will accept to do. 

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    America Gets Rid of Trump, But Not Trumpism

    The degree to which about half the US electorate supported Donald Trump in this presidential election, following a steady stream of outrages over the past four years, is a sad testament to how small-minded a significant percentage of the American public remains. The partisan battle lines have only grown stronger and appear to be insurmountable, at least in the short term, as blue and red America seem perfectly content to lash out at each other in perpetuity. The Founding Fathers would be spinning in their graves if they could see what America has become.

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

    READ MORE

    I published an article in July 2016 stating that I believed that Donald Trump had narcissistic personality disorder, and tried to warn America what would be in store for it if we elected him president. Exactly four years ago, on the eve of the US presidential election, I wrote an article predicting that Trump would win. My view was based largely on the belief that Hillary Clinton’s intended “coronation” was premature, that she was a flawed candidate, and that Trump had succeeded in tapping into an important vein in American political culture — the neglected blue-collar voter. I published that article at 3:00 the morning after the election, one of the very first to have acknowledged the birth of Trumpism.

    In that piece, I wrote:

    “It is doubtful that Mr. Trump will be able to heal our terribly divided nation, which he so handily and successfully contributed to. Now that the battle lines are drawn — between those who cling to an ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ vision of America, in which everyone is white, conservative, straight and Christian, and those who recognize and accept the multi-racial, ethnic, religious and sexual orientation of this great land — there is no putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, certainly not with a leader hell bent on fanning tendencies toward divisiveness, rather than unity. While we are certainly not all going to be joining hands together and singing kumbaya, no matter who is president, we are not going to get there by having a Divider-in-Chief at the helm.”

    We have seen the result of four years under his thumb. America has rarely been more partisan or divided. Those who yearned for an Ozzie-and-Harriet vision of America have become more emboldened four years later, apparently believing that America can once again become a bastion of white conservatism, replete with racism, bigotry and misogyny. That is unlikely to happen. America has become too diverse, and sufficient progress has been made toward equality to revert to that sad vision. The partisanship will surely only continue to get worse in the coming four years. The question is, can we ever return to a time when bipartisanship reigns?

    It was of course just a generation ago when that was the norm. I’d like to believe that Joe Biden can take us some ways in that direction, but what will probably be required to return to that era is sustained leadership by someone who has not spent decades with their snout in the trough inside the Beltway. Biden is not that man, but neither are the majority of politicians in Congress who have made being a politician a way of life rather than a temporary service to their community, state or nation.

    To achieve that, America will need a wholesale change in how it is governed in Washington, complete with cleaning house, term limits, mandatory accountability pledges and an end to special interests, lobbyists and corruption, among other things. There’s little chance that will be happening any time soon. It appears that we will have to settle for just heading down that road, which would be a victory in itself, knowing that America has saved itself from perhaps insurmountable damage of a second Trump term.

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    As for Trump, he will surely not be going quietly into the night. We can expect that he will challenge the results of the election for days and weeks, if not months, to come, his fragile ego refusing to acknowledge that he is the ultimate “loser.” While he toils and writhes in egomaniac agony, he will be planning his next act, which may be some combination of reality television or radio show, creation of a media empire or planning his own political comeback in 2024. Donald Trump has made an undeniable, indelible mark on the American political landscape, for better or worse, and his ego will not allow him to simply walk away as George W. Bush did.

    As for his followers, surely they will not be changing their political stripes or beliefs any time soon, nor should they be expected to. From their perspective, they have found a political voice, so Trump will have a loyal legion of fans supporting him no matter what he decides to do. That ensures that America will be in for many more years of Trumpism, and his legacy will of course live on in the Supreme Court for decades.

    America got the leader it deserved for the past four years, but for the first time since 1992, it has decided to reverse course after Trump has served a single term. Let us hope that Joe Biden can at least start down the road of healing this fractured nation and that whatever he is able to achieve in the coming four years serves as a useful counterpunch to Trumpism. While America can endure Donald Trump’s legacy bubbling beneath the surface, it cannot afford another four years of a Trump presidency. We have to believe that, having said no to another Trump term, America has decided that another four years of him is a price that is just too high to pay. The question is, will the answer be the same when Trump runs again in 2024?

    *[Daniel Wagner is the author of “The Chinese Vortex: The Belt and Road Initiative and its Impact on the World.”]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    America Is No Longer One Nation

    Another American election has come and gone. And, once again, enlightened pundits on both sides of the Atlantic are scratching their heads. How is it possible that some 70 million American voters would cast their vote for a boorish, incompetent, lying buffoon, a misogynist racist hypocrite, devoid of the most basic human emotions such as empathy and compassion? How is it possible that a president who not only has demonstrated a fundamental lack of concern for the safety and well-being of even his own entourage but even ridiculed those who do would be considered worthy of a second term in office? Yet millions of voters across the United States did, and are proud of it.

    360˚ Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

    READ MORE

    What is surprising is not the outcome of this election, but the surprise of those surprised by it. After all, over the past four years, dozens of books, articles, papers and blog posts have been written purporting to explain why Trump won in 2016 and why he continued to hold on to his constituency, despite everything. Yet four years later, few seem to have taken the findings to heart.

    Simple Explanations

    Unfortunately enough, in today’s world, simple explanations no longer suffice to get to the heart of things. Social scientists like simple, monocausal explanations. Rational choice theories maintain that what counts for voters is their pocketbook. As a famous adage has it, It’s the economy, stupid. Yet as Thomas Frank, in his well-known book “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” maintained in 2004, over the past few decades, among ordinary people, cultural issues have increasingly outweighed economics as a matter of public concern. To be sure, Frank’s conclusions encountered considerable opposition, but recent developments appear to substantiate his interpretation.

    Take the story of West Virginia’s coal mining community. In 2016, Trump promised to resurrect coal, that “clean beautiful coal” that had guaranteed well-paying jobs in one of America’s most depressed regions, the Appalachians. But after four years in office, Trump had done nothing to halt the closing of coal mines. And yet, coal mining communities continued to support Trump. Why? Partly because of his “America First” slogan, but also because of his anti-abortion stance and, last but not least, because he appeared to be the “only one standing in the way of the entire industry closing down.”

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    Nationalist pride mixed with cultural concerns and economic wishful thinking — this is the ideational brew that has appealed to substantial parts of the American electorate and, apparently, continues to do so. Voters in the state of Michigan are a case in point. Michigan was once the hub of America’s automotive industry, providing well-paying jobs to thousands of American workers. Detroit’s well-deserved moniker was Motor City. For a while, Detroit was also known for a new sound in music, Motown. Motown moved, the automotive industry collapsed, people fled the city. In 1950, Detroit boasted a population of 1.8 million, the fifth-largest city in the United States. By 2019, its population had declined to a bit more than 670,000, the city a shadow of its former self. In 2016, Trump promised that the automotive industry would come back to Michigan. It didn’t. Trump 2020 claimed otherwise: “We brought you a lot of car plants, Michigan! We brought you a lot of car plants. You know that, right?” His enthusiastic supporters knew it. Why? Because Trump told them so.

    No matter that reality was the opposite. In fact, not only since the “coming of Trump” had not one auto plant been built in Michigan, but, as Mark Danner writes in The New York Review of Books, “since his ascension not less than three thousand Michiganders had lost jobs in the vital auto sector.” Apparently, the power of make-belief trumps anything, even facts. But then, facts are nothing but the machinations of the lamestream media, out there to discredit the wonderful work of the Great Leader.

    Reality No Longer Counts

    If reality no longer counts in politics, what is left? It has been suggested that contemporary American politics is “close to a religion.” Religions tend to have a Manichean bent, centered upon a fundamental struggle between the forces of good and of evil, between light and darkness, God and Satan. Ironically enough, the notion of political religion entered the social sciences in the context of totalitarianism — fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. This obviously is not intended to conflate Trump with any of these regimes. Trump, as I have stated before, is a populist, and populism must not be mixed up with totalitarianism.

    Modern populism, as exemplified in its crudest form by Donald Trump, follows the logic introduced by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. Central to Schmitt’s thinking is the notion that politics is above all grounded in the distinction between friend and enemy. A number of recent surveys suggest that this antagonism, popularly known as polarization, has become central to understanding contemporary American politics. Donald Trump has been a master in evoking and fueling a range of emotions, from disgust to resentment, from anxiety to rage, that have contributed to and have exacerbated existing political animosities, widening, in the process, the existing partisan divide.

    Surveys reveal that the Schmittian spirit has deeply penetrated American society and the electorate. In December last year, for instance, in a comprehensive Pew study on partisanship, 55% of Republicans said that Democrats, and 47% percent of Democrats said that Republicans, were “more immoral” when compared with other Americans. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this spirit, with its quasi-religious overtones, has even reached into American families.

    Held Together With String, Can America Hold?

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    A recent article in The Jesuit Review recounts the story of a Catholic Trump supporter whose four children, all of them working in science-related fields, “hate Donald Trump” and think “he is evil.” The father obviously disagrees, reflected, for instance, in his refusal to wear a protective mask when in public. In response, one of his sons told him that if he should ever have children, he would not want his father around since he was a “bad influence.” That, the father is quoted as saying, “just broke my heart.”

    A recent New York Times article tells the story of a twin who no longer feels close to her brother because of his views on Trump, with which she does not merely disagree but which she finds “unfathomable.” Any attempt to discuss the divide separating the two siblings end in anger and mutual acrimony, putting a severe strain on their relationship.

    Over the past years, there has been a number of accounts of Americans canceling participation in family Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings in order to avoid having to deal with relatives from the other side of the political chasm. A New York Times article from late 2016,  “Political Divide Splits Relationships — and Thanksgiving, Too,” recounts the particularly poignant case of a software designer who decided “to move her wedding so that her fiancé’s grandmother and aunt, strong Trump supporters from Florida, could not attend.”

    Two Visions

    To be sure, anecdotal evidence is what it is, anecdotal evidence. But in conjunction with representative surveys, it provides further support for the deep chasm that divides contemporary American society. The motto of the American seal is E pluribus unum — Out of many, one. The past few years have clearly shown — and the result of the recent election has reconfirmed it — that the motto should be modified, at least for the time being, from E pluribus unum to E pluribus duum. What we are seeing today even more so than four years ago is a territorial entity with a population not only living in two diametrically opposed realities, but with two diametrically opposed views on reality.

    In the European literature on radical right-wing populism, one of the more prominent interpretative frames of analysis is the notion of two visions informing electoral support for or against the radical populist right — visions of either an open or of a closed society. In today’s world, a better characterization of these radically divergent visions might be cosmopolitanism versus parochialism. Sociologically, cosmopolitan dispositions are particularly prevalent in metropolitan areas and global cities, parochial dispositions in rural, small-town areas. A cursory glance at the American electoral map provides an almost perfect illustration of these dynamics. Anecdotal evidence fills in the details.

    Take, for instance, a recent New York Times exposé on farmers in Nebraska, most of them ardent Trump supporters. They were thrilled when Trump claimed in 2016 that he would stick up for the “forgotten men and women of our country,” who, he promised would “be forgotten no longer.” Four years later, Trump supporters in “places like rural Nebraska say they feel remembered. To them, these four years have brought a sense of belonging in a country led by someone who sticks up for, and understands, their most cherished beliefs.”

    This sense of regained dignity and respect, and a renewed sense of belonging among large parts of what has come to be known as flyover country — the vast landmass between the two coasts, home to all those Americans who in recent decades have increasingly felt not only ignored but like “strangers in their own land” — explains to a large extent why they have continued to stick with Trump. The fact that he has largely failed to deliver? Not important. But Trump’s tariff war with China hurt Midwestern farmers in particular, forcing the Trump administration to come up with a multi-billion rescue package — at the expense of the American taxpayer.

    Embed from Getty Images

    Religion is based on faith, not facts. You have to believe that God created the world some 10,000 years ago, even if science tells you that 250 million years ago, a cataclysmic event wiped out much of life on this planet. You have to believe that global warming is nothing but a hoax, another one of these liberal ploys to prevent you from pursuing the American dream. This year, roughly two-thirds of Democrats thought that climate change was an important issue; among Republicans, less than 15%.

    Political religion is a zero sum game. There is no compromise between those who believe that life starts with conception and those who think that women should have a choice on whether or not to bring their pregnancy to full term. There is no middle ground between those for whom Black Lives Matter is a fundamental civil rights issue and those for whom it is nothing but an excuse for large-scale violence. There is nothing that those who believe women are at a systematic disadvantage and those who believe that the most discriminated person in today’s world is the white male.

    No matter the ultimate outcome of this election, it is not going to change the fundamental political crisis that way precedes the advent of Donald Trump. As has often been noted, Trump is not its cause but its expression. As I have written before, Trump is nothing but an empty signifier, which allows all those who have been disenchanted with the trajectory of American history and politics over the past decades to project their disenchantment and rage, their frustrations and ressentiment, their disgust and fears onto one man.

    The ultimate outcome of this election is going to change nothing with regard to the deep-seated problems that have sundered apart the fabric of what once was, for all of its faults and blemishes, a dynamic democracy. In a recent poll, a two-thirds majority of respondents said they feared that democracy in the United States was in grave peril. Regardless of who is ultimately going to lead America come next year, it will take considerably more than mere rhetoric to restore confidence in the workings of what, after all, is one of the world’s most established democracies.

    *[Fair Observer is a media partner of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    in World Politics

    How Will Joe Biden Mansplain His Mandate?

    In a New York Times article that appeared just before this week’s interminable presidential cliff-hanger of an election, Lisa Lerer pondered how things might unfold after a Biden victory. She and the rest of the US punditry thought at the time that it might be decisive enough to define the future of the nation. Lerer cites Representative Pramila Jayapal’s speculation that Biden’s triumph could inaugurate an era of spectacular reform: “A White House victory would give Mr. Biden a mandate to push for more sweeping overhauls.”

    What Will a Post-Trump America Look Like?

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    As a member of the small group of progressives in the House of Representatives, Jayapal desperately wanted to promote the idea the Biden campaign hinted at months ago that would boldly step up to govern as a latter-day Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who changed American history and American capitalism with his New Deal in the 1930s. Jayapal supports the Green New Deal. The pundits had announced that the expected “blue wave” would reinforce the party’s majority in the House and give it control of the Senate. Whatever Biden ended up standing for, that reconfiguration of power implied a mandate for change.

    Here is today’s 3D definition:

    Mandate:

    The traditional idea, inherited from an earlier epoch of history, that has been emptied of content since that moment in the late 20th century when the science of political marketing determined that any promises made during campaigns would be designed for the sole purpose of inciting specific demographic groups to vote and have nothing to do with defining a viable legislative program.

    Contextual Note

    A little more than a year ago, The Daily Devil’s Dictionary, offered its initial definition of “mandate” in a different context. Referring to events in Israel at the time, we defined the word in these terms: “Permission to play the role as a legitimate authority even when legitimacy has never been clearly established.”

    Both today’s and last year’s definitions are valid, underlining the fact that vocabulary always derives its meaning from context. No dictionary definition can exhaust the full sense of what any item of vocabulary represents for real human beings. The very idea of a dictionary definition of any word should be seen as a myth. It may offer comfort to some parents and teachers, who can send children to a book they deem authoritative, but it is in contradiction with the reality of language.

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    What does that imply concerning the idea of a mandate in the days following this November’s historic US presidential election? In The Times article, Lisa Lerer went on to quote another Democratic politician, Henry Cuellar, a moderate from south Texas. Cuellar better reflects the rhetoric of the Biden campaign in its later stages and apparently expresses Lerer’s own sentiments: “If liberals had a mandate, then Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren would have won the primary. The mandate of the American public was to have somebody more to the center.”

    The Democratic Party under Biden proudly embraced the idea of pushing its agenda further to the center as the key to electoral success rather than wasting time on analyzing the needs of a nation in crisis and proposing remedies. In the later stages of the campaign, Biden insisted more strongly than ever on his credentials as a centrist by claiming, consistently with Cuellar’s remarks, that his greatest achievement in the primaries had been to defeat the socialist, Bernie Sanders. 

    That boast was something of an exaggeration. It wasn’t Biden who eliminated Sanders. In February, the “no malarkey” candidate was practically down and out, trailing in all the early primaries and penniless. That was until Barack Obama, working in the wings, stepped in to organize the defeat of Sanders, who had been riding a wave of momentum. Everything changed on the Monday before Super Tuesday. 

    As NBC News reported after the event, “there appears to be a quiet hand behind the rapid movement: former President Barack Obama.” He put pressure on the majority of remaining primary candidates to coalesce behind Biden. A month later, Glenn Thrush summed up the denouement of the primary fight in a New York Times article, noting how “with calibrated stealth, Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed.”

    Historical Note

    After Super Tuesday, it was clear that Biden owed one to Obama, his former boss, who had not only ensured his survival but guaranteed his emergence as the “presumptive nominee,” a term that amused many commentators, who understood that though the primaries were not over, they had been “decided” by other people than the voters themselves. After overturning Sanders’ early momentum, could the idea take hold that Biden was a candidate with a mandate? As he hid in his basement during the lockdown and avoided the media, nobody could answer that question.

    Obama may have had his own idea of that mandate. It would be the Democratic version of “Make America Great Again.” The former greatness to be aspired to this time could be defined as simply a return to the Obama years, but with one singular innovation: masks to fend off the coronavirus.

    Beyond the triviality of hiding from contamination, the new Democratic agenda also meant turning the ship of state starboard to embrace the moderateness not just of mainstream Democrats and Obama loyalists, but also centrist Republicans. They called themselves anti-Trumpers and engineered The Lincoln Project. 

    The campaign’s essential and unique promise evolved into veering away from both Sanders populists on the left and Trump populists on the right. Instead of ideas for governing, it proposed a team of “trusted” political moderates, from Larry Summers to John Kasich, culled indifferently from the two dominant parties. When that is all a party can do, the very idea of trust becomes distorted and any hope of defining the terms of a mandate undermined.

    The Democrats long ago stopped trusting the voters. That may be why voters have stopped trusting Democrats. Even Kamala Harris failed to earn any trust from the voters in the primaries, although she was initially touted as the ideal Democratic candidate. She was one of the first to drop out of the race for fear of being humiliated in the actual primaries. The early primaries actually did show a movement toward trust on the part of the voters: Masses of voters expressed their trust in Sanders. It wasn’t so much trust of the man as trust in his ability to fashion a program that could define a mandate for the next president, whoever that might be. That changed as soon as Obama stepped in to restore order.

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    In his article on Fair Observer yesterday, “Can America Restore Its Democracy?” John Feffer wrote: “Unlike 2008, the Democrats will be hard-pressed this time to claim an overwhelming popular mandate after such a close election.” Even after a landslide victory and the conquest of the Senate, it is far from certain that Biden would have understood that the voters had given him a mandate for anything more than imposing the wearing of masks in public.

    The final irony is that, if confirmed, Biden will be the president to have culled the greatest number of votes in the history of the nation thanks to a record turnout of nearly 67% of eligible voters. That kind of enthusiasm to go out and vote — or, in times of pandemic, “stay in and vote” — should logically reflect an enthusiasm for a political program in times of crisis when serious change has become an absolute necessity. Not this time. Neither Trump nor Biden had anything to propose that could translate into a mandate to govern. Three days after the polls closed, we still don’t know who won in a contest between two candidates with nothing to offer. That tells us a lot about the state of US democracy today. 

    In an article in The Guardian, Columbia University Professor Adam Tooze assesses the obstacles in Biden’s path if he seeks to achieve anything Republican Senate majority leader might oppose. He concludes that “this election threatens to confirm and entrench the poisonous status quo.” In some sense, that makes Biden’s mandate easier. Like Obama, who quickly lost his congressional majorities, he will be able to say that it’s the Republicans who are preventing him from responding to the real needs of the people and a nation in crisis. And the status quo will carry on with business as usual.

    *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    “All I Want Is For My Vote to Count”

    Citizens of the United States of America have finished exercising their right to vote in what is likely to be an election with the highest turnout in more than 100 years. Taking advantage of in-person early voting and by mail, nearly 100 million Americans had cast their ballots even before the polls opened on November 3. That staggering number adds up to nearly three-quarters of the total votes cast in the 2016 presidential election.

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    Another 60 million or so voted on Election Day, making the total number of citizens who voted reach nearly 160 million, according to CNBC estimates. This works out to a historic 66.8% of the 239.2 million Americans eligible to vote in 2020.

    These people had one reason to participate in the democratic process. They wanted their vote to count. They wanted their ballot to be counted. Intellectually, it is easy to rationalize the logic that a person exercising their franchise wants their voice heard. That rationale took a far more significant meaning when I got a chance to observe the face, the countenance and emotions of a person when they showed up at a vote center and said, “I would like to vote.”

    Listening to Voters

    I worked as an election officer in my local county for the 2020 elections and had the opportunity to observe first-hand nearly 1,500 people who stopped by at my vote center. What I experienced when I directly interacted with many of them made my usual intellectual rationale pale in significance, allowing me to viscerally appreciate the importance of every single vote.

    It was heartwarming to observe a nonagenarian lady and her septuagenarian daughter come in together to cast their vote — the daughter assisting her mother with the process.

    There was an elderly lady who required the assistance of her husband, a mobility walking aid device and a portable oxygen tank in order for her to come to the vote center and drop off her vote-by-mail envelope. She could have dropped it in one of the 100 ballot boxes the county had set up. Yet for this lady, it was important to come to a vote center — even if it meant taking one small step at a time from the parking lot — and be assured that her vote would count by an election official before dropping her envelope in the proper bag.

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    There was an octogenarian man who was not comfortable coming into the vote center due to COVID-19. We assisted him by setting up a polling station out in the open so he could exercise his right to vote. Despite being worried about his health and the pandemic, this old man decided to come in person and ensure that his voice was heard.

    Worried that using the United States Postal Service may not get their ballot to their county in time, an older couple was willing to drive more than 400 miles in order to drop off their ballot in their county of residence. Thankfully, we were able to assure them that dropping their vote-by-mail envelope in our vote center would ensure their ballot would reach the appropriate county and their vote counted.

    Another person who was concerned that the vote-by-mail envelope she had mailed had not been recorded in the system made several phone calls to various people — including Senator Kamala Harris’ office — before deciding to come to a vote center to understand what had happened. In her conversation with me, she kept repeating, “All I want is for my vote to count.” Thankfully, we were also able to assist her and allay her fears that her voice would not be heard in what she felt was “the most important election she has ever voted in.”

    Yet another person who works for the city but registered to vote in a neighboring county that was a couple of hours drive away accosted me when I was taking a break to get some fresh air. Explaining his special circumstances, he clarified with me exactly how he could vote. Once he understood the process, I could hear him talking to his manager asking for time off on Election Day so he could drive to his county and exercise his franchise.

    Living in one of the most diverse counties in America, we were also able to assist several monolingual voters with the process. One of our bilingual aides spent nearly an hour assisting a first-time voter who only spoke Spanish. Another aide assisted a Vietnamese family who were somewhat overwhelmed by the voting process.

    Every Vote Counts

    These are only a handful of the many instances when I could sense the palpable concern of the voter who needed to be assured that despite efforts by the sitting president to discredit the democratic process, their voice would be heard.

    I am just one average citizen, living in one corner of America, but one who actively participated in the elections this year. My eyes misted over on more than one occasion when I interacted with people who braved many personal challenges, be it physical, emotional or a linguistic one, in order to exercise their democratic right. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of people across the length and breadth of the country had to overcome their own personal obstacles in order to cast their vote in this election.

    As I cleared my thoughts and got back to my job after each moving interaction I experienced, one aspect became crystal clear: that every vote matters. And every vote that has been cast must be counted. Whether it is in a blue state or a red state. Whether it is in a battleground state where the incumbent is leading or the challenger is leading. Even if it takes several days, in order to uphold the fundamentals of democracy, every vote that has been cast must be counted.

    As that one voter put it, “All I want is for my vote to count.”

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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    What Will a Post-Trump America Look Like?

    Americans are still anxiously waiting to find out who will be the 46th president of the United States. But while the results of the 2020 race may still be murky, what this election has made clear is that whoever succeeds President Donald Trump — whether in 2021 or 2025 — will face an uphill battle of governing a post-Trump America.

    What will this look like in practice? One only needs to look as far as one of the United States’ closest allies in the hemisphere, Colombia, for a glimpse of the challenges that await Trump’s successor.

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    Colombian politics has its own Trump-like figure. His name is Alvaro Uribe Velez. Elected in 2002, Uribe governed for eight years as a tough conservative politician. His aggressive military campaigns against the country’s guerilla groups brought long-sought stability and security to much of the country and transformed him into a national hero for many Colombians. But his presidency was also marred by controversy. He has been accused of facilitating widespread human rights abuses, corruption and drug trafficking.

    Despite — or perhaps because of — this dual legacy, Uribe has remained a central figure in Colombian politics since leaving the presidential palace. He continues to serve as the leader of the country’s ruling political party, the Democratic Center, and sat as a senator until summer 2020 when he resigned pending the results of a criminal investigation against him.

    The influence Uribe continues to wield on the Colombian political scene should serve as a warning to whoever succeeds Trump in the Oval Office. In Colombia, Uribe’s willingness and ability to mobilize broad swaths of the population to support his interests has proved a challenge for governance by opposing politicians.

    Former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos experienced this firsthand in 2016 as he tried to sell the people a peace deal to end the country’s 60-year-long civil war with a guerrilla group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC). As the most visible and vocal opponent of the deal, Uribe consistently belittled both Santos as a politician and the peace he negotiated with the FARC. “Peace yes, but not like this” became his rallying cry in public speeches, interviews and perhaps his — and Trump’s — favorite platform, Twitter. His vitriolic attacks played a part in Colombians’ surprise rejection of the peace deal in a national referendum, a humiliating defeat for Santos.

    Trump May Still Influence US Politics

    The small margins of this year’s US presidential election suggest that a Democratic successor to Trump will have to confront a former president with a similarly devoted following as the one Uribe has maintained in Colombia. Trump is unlikely to bow graciously out of politics. With a large base that continues to support him, he could still influence politics informally, by calling on his followers to engage in (possibly violent) protests.

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    The president’s continued popularity among Republican voters may also force the GOP to maintain its current far-right policy positions to retain voters in future elections. The election of a QAnon conspiracy theorist to the House of Representatives confirms that Trump’s influence reaches beyond the presidency.

    Indeed, Democrats are not the only ones who should be worried about Trump’s continued influence after leaving office. Uribe’s handpicked successor in the 2018 presidential election, President Ivan Duque, has struggled to govern under the shadow of the former leader. Like the US, Colombia today is deeply polarized. Though Duque and his allies hold a majority in the Senate, distrust and frustration with the government sent nearly 200,000 Colombians to the streets of the country’s major cities in protest last year.  

    But Duque’s reliance on support from Uribe’s hardline followers has effectively precluded him from building bridges with his opponents, lest he be seen as abandoning Uribe’s legacy. Unable to fully satisfy either camp, Duque’s approval rating has languished far below 50% for most of his presidency.

    Confronting the Legacy

    Republicans will face a similar challenge if they wish to maintain Trump’s base while also trying to repair the deep divisions that he has sown among US society.

    It may seem extreme to compare the United States to Colombia, a country that has teetered on the edge of collapse and conflict for over 60 years. But the reality is that the US is also a post-conflict country. Our civil war may have ended in 1865, but events in 2020 — the partisan reactions to the coronavirus pandemic, racial tensions following the extrajudicial killings of black Americans, and a presidential vote that remains too close to call three days after the election — have proved that the legacy of the violence and the polarization it sowed persist today.

    Whoever succeeds Donald Trump must confront this legacy head-on. But as Colombia shows, doing so with Trump in the background will be far from easy.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More