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      David Gelernter: The Making of a Trumpista

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      After four years of the Trump presidency, it is still not entirely clear why a substantial number of voters in 2016 cast their ballots for a candidate who made it glaringly obvious that he lacked many of the most basic character traits needed to qualify for America’s highest political office. At the end of his tenure, fraught with some of the worst incidences of corruption, deceit and plain incompetence, it boggles the mind why anyone in their right mind would still support Donald Trump. Yet according to the most recent polls, around 40% of eligible voters still do.

      In a previous article, I have tried to explain why evangelicals and large parts of traditional Catholics have to a large degree stuck with Trump, despite his obvious moral flaws which are fundamentally at odds with the teachings of the Bible. Apparently, they don’t really care, as long as Trump pretends to take their concerns seriously. This means restoring Christianity’s traditional central role in American society, “valorizing” Christian beliefs too long subjected to ridicule and disdain, and actively promoting the one issue most important to them: the reversal of Roe v. Wade, which put American women in a position where they were free to choose what to do with their bodies.

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      Numerous observers have written about the second group of Trump supporters, the white supremacists — white voters obsessed with, and anxious about, the rapidly changing composition of America’s population. They could probably care less about abortion, given the fact that abortion is significantly more prevalent among African American than white women. In fact, in 2008, abortion rates among black women were five times as high as among white women; among Hispanic women, twice as high. For hardcore white supremacists, this obviously is good news, given their fears of being “out-birthed” by non-whites. Trump’s “nudge nudge, wink wink” when it came to the white supremacist Proud Boys thugs during the first debate with Joe Biden was a clear appeal to the white supremacist vote.

       American Entropy

      Little has been written about a third group, which is perhaps the most interesting of all, given their ideational stance, which eludes easy classification. One of its most paradigmatic representatives, I would suggest, is David Gelernter, a brilliant professor of computer science at Yale University, an iconoclast and intellectual maverick, whose intellectual curiosity has extended well beyond his main field of study.

      Gelernter attained renown — a modicum of fame he certainly could have done without — in 1993 as one of the victims of Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber. The professor lost a hand in the terror attack as well as suffering severe damage to internal organs and one of his eyes. Gelernter incurred Kaczynski’s wrath for his enthusiastic support of technological progress. Technological innovation, the Unabomber’s letter addressed to Gelernter charged, was only possible because “techno-nerds” like him made it “inevitable.” And with it a list of negative consequences, such as the invasion of privacy and environmental degradation.

      The attack confirmed what Gelernter appears to have suspected for some time — that America had become hostile to technology and pessimistic about the future. How could this happen? According to a lengthy New York Times expose from 1995, in Gelernter’s view, the United States had achieved something of a “technological and economic utopia — and the country subsequently imploded with its own success.” Evoking the second law of thermodynamics, he charged that “the entropy of American society” had “increased enormously,” and there was no way to put things back together again. What was left was a retreat to pure nostalgia, a yearning for a time when there was still a strong notion of civic virtues, when there were strong moral values and strict rules for sex and marriage and the interactions of people and authorities.

      On the flip side, what was left was a strong sense that American civilization was on the decline, provoking Gelernter’s outrage and indignation. The main reason: the incursion of “moral relativism” into the fabric of American society in the wake of ’68, which had fatally undermined what hitherto had held Americans together as Americans, their way of life — strong time-honored moral principles.

      Fast forward some 20 years. The year is 2016, and Donald Trump has emerged as the Republican frontrunner in the race for the presidency. Gelernter has chosen sides. In his view, there is only one way to protect the American nation from Hillary Clinton, and that is to vote for Donald Trump. To be sure, Trump was nothing but “an infantile vulgarian” who “had all the class and cool of a misbegotten 12-year-old boy.” But this was nothing compared to the likes of Clinton and Obama, that “third-rate tyrant” who has nothing but contempt for ordinary people, who “doesn’t give a damn what people think.”  

      Trump, on the other hand, is someone the “empty gin bottle [voters] have chosen to toss through the window,” reflecting voters’ recognition of “the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.”

      Contempt for Democracy

      In light of what has transpired since the beginning of this pandemic, with a president devoid of any sense of human empathy for the tens of thousands of victims of his callousness, exhibiting brazen contempt for even the people in his direct entourage, these observations sound eerily prescient, if in a fundamentally opposite sense. Unfortunately, Gelernter so far appears to have shied away from addressing Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 crisis. Even iconoclasts appear to have a hard time dealing with cognitive dissonance.

      In my book, this amounts to intellectual dishonesty — the refusal to own up to one’s unwavering support for a man who would rather risk destroying the very fabric of American democracy than concede defeat. But then, subverting the constitutional order, undermining existing institutions and rigging the results of elections has been one of the hallmarks of populist regimes, from Perón to Chavez, from Morales to Maduro. Populists have little love left for democracy if it does not go their way. Ironically enough, in late 2015, in a commentary for the ultra-conservative Washington Examiner, Gelernter accused the American left for seemingly having “lost its taste for democracy.”

      Today, contempt for democracy is one of the hallmarks of Trumpism. As one of his minions in the Senate recently reiterated his party’s position, America was not a democracy, nor was democracy an objective. America was a republic, dedicated to the pursuit of material happiness, and that’s it. For neutral observers, the Republicans’ objection to characterizing their country a democracy was and continues to be, as John Haltiwanger writes for Business Insider, “tied to the fact Republicans have reason to fear a system in which a majority of Americans have more say.” And given the direction of America’s demographics, fear appears to be turning into a nightmare triggering what sociologists call a “moral panic.”

      It is this moral panic which might explain Gelernter’s lashing out on the left in a 2018 Wall Street Journal commentary titled “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” With “they” he obviously referred to “the left.” Gelernter’s central thesis was that the left hated Trump because Trump was “a typical American —except exaggerated.” Hating Trump, Gelernter asserted, meant hating “the average American — male or female, black or white.” And hating the average American meant hating America, what it is, what it stands for, meaning its “exceptional and unique destiny.”

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      This in itself was not a new thought. As early as 2005 Gelernter, in an essay on “Anti-Americanism and Its Enemies” which appeared in Commentary, had argued that America was “superior to all others — morally superior, closer to God.” Americans were God’s new chosen people, “a unique collective instrument of God in the affairs of the nations,” with a distinct “divine mission to all mankind.”

      Those who hated America, did so because they hated the American interpretation of Christianity, if not Christianity itself. At the time, Gelernter’s focus was particularly on Islamic fundamentalism, hardly surprising after 9/11. In the years that followed, Gelernter’s focus shifted increasingly to what he believed were the domestic enemies of Americanism — the liberal Left, which rejected the notion that the US was meant to be the greatest county in the world. This, of course, was a notion Trump apparently wholeheartedly embraced, exemplified by his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

      The accusation that they hate their own nation has been one of the main tropes on the populist radical right against the left, not only in the United States, but also in Europe. In both cases, the right’s charge has been that the left defends the rights of minorities to a decent life not out of concern for universal human rights but because they hate their “own” people, who in reality should always come first because they hate their own country and everything it stands for. On this reading, the left have nothing but contempt for their own country because they don’t really consider it their home. Their home is elsewhere, anywhere (in David Goodhart’s sense of the word), in the empty space between Berlin, London, New York and Paris, always on the move, nowhere at home, and certainly not in their own country.

      Sense of Nostalgia

      Gelernter’s unwavering support for Donald Trump, despite his misgivings about the president’s boorish behavior, was to a large extent grounded in that sense of nostalgia which is one of the defining facets of contemporary radical right-wing populism, whether in the United States or in Europe. Nostalgia for the “small-town America” of his youth — Gelernter grew up on Long Island — his “plea for the past” irrevocably lost, reflected in his book on the 1939 World Fair, informed his intellectual trajectory following the Unabomber attack, from techno-geek to Trump apologist.

      In the process, Gelernter expressed his misgivings about a whole range of ills and evils that in his view had befallen postmodern American society, each one attributable to the liberal left. At the same time, he adopted the major tropes central to contemporary radical right-wing populism, in Europe and the US.

      Political correctness: In 2016, Gelernter wrote an essay in the Washington Examiner where he claimed that political correctness was “the biggest issue facing America today.” Political correctness, he maintained, actually was a misnomer, disguising “the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism.” Its primary victims — the traditional American mainstream, “working- and middle-class white males and their families,” furious about the havoc political correctness had wreaked on American society for decades, “made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.”

      But now there was hope because with Donald Trump, there finally was a GOP candidate who dared to stand up against political correctness. He was the only candidate who found the right words to appeal to his “unprivileged, unclassy supporters” who sense “that their children are filled full of leftist bile every day at school and college” but don’t have the “time or energy to set their children straight.”

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      Feminism: In an article from 2008 that appeared in The Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s neocon flagship published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire, Gelernter attacked American feminism for having degraded the English language. In the past, the author asserted, English had been there for everyone. Starting “in the 1970s and ’80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” This was largely in line with his earlier charge that prominent American feminists “cast women in the black victim role, men as the bigoted white oppressors.” Feminists routinely attacked women who chose their family over a career. Yet, as Gelernter put it in a Commentary article from 1996, mothers should stay home. If they failed to do so, it was not primarily the result of economic necessity or social pressures to keep up with “the Joneses” next door, but because feminists had convinced them that for a woman to “be worthy of respect is to do what men do” (a line from Goethe’s “Egmont”). Once again, there is a strong whiff of nostalgia informing the analysis, a yearning for the times before “Motherhood Revolution,” perfectly reflected in the black and white TV series “Leave It to Beaver.”

      Not Just a Theory

      Evolution: It is well known that one of the core constituency of Donald Trump are evangelicals. Evangelicals voted for Trump not because they believed that Trump was a dedicated Christian. Quite the opposite: They voted for him because they believed that he would restore Christianity to its rightful place at the center of American life and, equally important, that he would do whatever possible to reverse Roe v. Wade by appointing anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. One of the most important dogmas among American fundamentalist Christians is the belief that God created the world and human beings over a period of six days (on the seventh He took a break and rested), some 10,000 years ago.

      It stands to reason that for evangelicals, Darwinism is the bête noire par excellence. To be sure, over the past decades, the Darwinist paradigm has come under close scrutiny. A number of its propositions, in light of new empirical findings, have been challenged and revised.

      However, Darwinism is not only a theory, subject to scientific falsification, but also a creed. And on the American radical populist right, it has been treated as such. This might explain why Gelernter’s widely noted take on the subject, “Giving Up Darwinism,” appeared in 2019 in the Claremont Review of Books. A rather obscure magazine, the Claremont Review gained notoriety with the publication of “The Flight 93 Election,” a pro-Trump polemic that appeared in September 2016 on its website. “Published under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus, the essay compared the American republic to a hijacked airliner, with a vote for Donald J. Trump as the risky, but existentially necessary, course.”

      In the years that followed, the Claremont Review turned into “the academic home of Trumpism.” Under the circumstances, Gelernter’s essay on Darwinism takes on a “meta-political” meaning, an affirmation of being part of the tribe. It logically follows from a sentence in his essay on political correctness, his observation that “Political correctness holds that Christians are a bygone force, reactionary, naïve, and irrelevant.”

      Human responsibility for global warming: In June of this year, about two-thirds of Americans thought the federal government should do more with respect to climate change. More than three-quarters thought the US should prioritize renewable sources of energy. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on a platform that promised he would save coal while promoting other fossil fuels. The plea secured him crucial support in coal-dependent states in the Appalachian region, such as West Virginia and Kentucky.

      Coal is known as a major contributor to anthropogenic climate change. This is, of course, if you believe, like most scientists do, that humans bear responsibility for global warming and climate change. Trump, as is well known, doesn’t. In radical right-wing populist doctrine, climate change is but a “hoax,” as Trump claimed during the campaign, and the concern about climate change is nothing but alarmism provoked by the liberal left as a new ploy to undermine the capitalist system and prevent Americans from living as if there were no tomorrow.

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      Enter David Gelernter. In early 2007, Gelernter was among the forerunner for the position of science advisor for the Trump administration. At the time, he was under scrutiny, among other things on the question of global warming. When pressed he admitted he did not believe humans were responsible for climate change, even if he noted that he was not in a position to make an informed judgment. As he put it in an interview with The Scientist, “The evidence I’ve seen has not convinced me that the cause of this global warming or an appreciable contribution [to it] is human activity.” In the end, it did not matter. Despite his embrace of climate skepticism, he was not nominated. Perhaps, despite his own distaste for intellectuals, he was too much of an intellectual for a president who has shown nothing but contempt for them. Given David Gelernter’s status as a leading American scientist and intellectual with wide-ranging interests far beyond his immediate field — thus hardly the “typical” Trump supporter — his trajectory from techno-nerd to a convinced Trumpista is more than fascinating. It allows us to understand to what degree the combination of a deep sense of nostalgia and an equally profound disenchantment with the postmodern “left” prepares the ground for a mindset and psychological disposition that elevates a boorish loudmouth without substance and moral decency to an icon of redemption and revival.

      For some reason, Gelernter has been remarkably silent over the past year or so. Nothing on the president’s remarkable track record with regard to COVID-19, nothing on the eruption of racism-inspired violence during Trump’s tenure and the Black Lives Matter movement. It would also be interesting to read his views on Trump’s nomination for the Supreme Court of a mother who certainly has not taken his advice to stay at home.

      I have contacted Gelernter via email to find out what he thought about Trump’s blatant disregard for the suffering of the victims of COVID-19 (“It is what it is”), a reflection of his obvious contempt for the average American. He never responded. And yet, for some reason, I suspect that in November, Gelernter is not going to fall for Trump once again.

      *[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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      How to Make Money on the Pandemic

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      Anyone who knows how Wall Street works will not be surprised to learn that when the novel coronavirus epidemic began to turn into a full-fledged pandemic in the first two months of 2020, people in the know saw a major opportunity to play Monopoly. Any major shift affecting society and people’s behavior will lead to the possibility for the clever to cash in.

      In a New York Times article with the title “As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off,” Kate Kelly and Mark Mazzetti report on how the arrival of a pandemic was received as good news for those in the know. Because of the way it was handled, it made some wealthy people close to the Trump administration if not happier, then at least wealthier.

      Kelly and Mazzetti tell the story of a president and his savvy economic team led by Larry Kudlow who, while publicly downplaying the probable consequences of an epidemic, privately encouraged their cronies to prepare for the worst. In Wall Street terms, of course, “the worst” translates as “potentially the best.” 

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      During times of instability, intelligent traders who get wind of a factor that has a high probability of affecting the price of some types of stocks at a time when the general public still sees things as either normal or unpredictable will know what to do and when to act. If they are already holding those stocks, they will sell them and eventually buy them back later at a lower price when things begin getting back to normal. If not — and this is far more convenient — they will short them. As everyone should be aware, people close to the halls of power, and often members of the government themselves, tend to think like traders.

      The Times article takes us back to the scene on February 24, when “President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was ‘very much under control’ in the United States.” Earlier on the same day, in a private meeting, the president’s economic team had with board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, informed them that the government “could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.” Anyone with ears to hear understood what that meant: The economy was in for a rocky ride.

      According to The Times, from that moment on, things began accelerating: “The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Donors:

      Wealthy people, known for giving generously to political campaigns, who have developed the skill required in modern democracies of using a small portion of their immense wealth to get various kinds of favors from politicians, the most significant of which is access to inside information that will serve to make them wealthier and thereby better prepare them for future political campaigns, where their continued generosity will be required to ensure the stability of democracy.

      Contextual Note

      Larry Kudlow then became the key player. He had already claimed on CNBC that the virus was not only contained but reassuringly added that “it’s pretty close to airtight.” Shortly afterward on the same day, speaking to the donors, Kudlow nuanced the message, telling them that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know.” Savvy investors immediately understand the expression “to date” to mean: “Things are likely to change radically in the near future, so it may be time to act.” Kudlow was undoubtedly sincere when he added “now we just don’t know,” but the word “now” suggests that they already had assessed a strong probability.

      Kelly and Mazzetti sum up the entire story in a single sentence: “The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.” They describe the tight timeline in which events began accelerating. It started as soon as “elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.” The authors cite one investor who, after reading the memo of the meeting and having understood the scope of the threat a pandemic represents, gave the order: “Short everything.”

      Historical Note

      What would capitalism be without its recurrent crises that create the kinds of seismic shifts that enable the cleverest and wealthiest to increase their wealth, consolidate their power and drive the weaker actors in the Darwinian struggle for survival out of the marketplace? That is how the elite drafts new members and protects its own.

      Stock market crashes are usually followed by a recession or depression. That is when commentators in the media begin lamenting the suffering imposed on the economy as if they were reporting on a natural catastrophe unaffected by human agency. They often cite statistics that will incite the public to commiserate with the wealthy who might officially “lose” billions of dollars in a single day. They spend less time commiserating with the anonymous hordes who, several months later, will have lost their jobs and had their mortgages foreclosed, finding themselves homeless and, in the best cases, simply hopeful that no one comes to repossess their car since it might serve either as shelter from the cold or the means of making a living if they manage to become an Uber driver.

      When Lehman Brothers collapsed, not only did the thousands of people who worked for the bank find themselves rudderless, the tsunami that collapse unleashed across the globe affected the lives of millions of people in multiple ways. It led to an estimated 3.8 million foreclosures during the Great Recession. The implications of the drama the world is living through today as the pandemic and its consequences keep unfolding will be far greater. Not only has the pandemic directly killed over a million people, but its continuing effect — not just on the economy but on what was considered the “normal way of life” in a consumer society — has created severe social disarray, aggravating the consequences of the 2008 crisis from which society had never truly recovered. And what about the effect on the lives of the wealthy people who created the 2008 crisis? What has their suffering been like?

      In September 2018, The Guardian brought its readers up to date on the plight of Lehman Brothers chief executive, Dick Fuld, known familiarly as the “Gorilla of Wall Street.” He now runs Matrix Private Capital and advises “high-net-worth” clients. His net worth, which “once exceeded $1 billion,” is now estimated at a paltry $250 million. Philosophizing on his career seven years after the fall of Lehman, he famously said: “Whatever it is, enjoy the ride. No regrets.”

      The cronies and traders who benefitted from the diligent effort of Trump’s economic team to guide them in their investment strategies in the face of an impending pandemic have also been enjoying the ride and appear to have no regrets. Their traders have served them well. The stock market has prospered at the same time as small businesses are disappearing by the thousands and millions of people have become dependent on government handouts that have been slow in coming and not been adapted to the nature and the scale of the crisis.

      Today’s Wall Street donors, sensing an imminent Joe Biden victory, have been exercising their generosity in the Democrat’s direction in recent months. Many of them are probably the same who benefitted from the memo from that private meeting in the White House in February. How ungrateful of those disloyal bastards!

      *[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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      The New Policy of Demoting Democracy

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      In November 2000, the battle between George W. Bush and Al Gore for the US presidency was deadlocked over the status of a few thousand votes in Florida. Gore had won the popular vote, but the margin of victory in the Electoral College depended on Florida. In that state, Bush held a very slim lead of only 537 ballots. The Democrats wanted a recount of the votes in Florida. The Republicans didn’t. The case went to the Supreme Court. In December 2000, in a 5-4 decision, the court stopped the recount in Florida and awarded the election to Bush.

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      At the same time, halfway around the world, a young East Timorese activist was sitting in a US-sponsored democracy seminar. He was bored and frustrated. As the activist recounted to me several years later, the American presenter was lecturing his audience on the virtues of the US model of democracy.

      Finally, the East Timorese activist couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up in the question-and-answer period and said, bluntly, “Pardon me, but why should we take what you are saying seriously considering what’s going on in Florida?” The American presenter didn’t have a good answer.

      Flaws in US Democracy

      The 2000 election exposed a number of flaws in American democracy: the disproportionate influence of the mysterious Electoral College, the highly politicized nature of the Supreme Court, the impact of money and lawyers and patronage systems. American democracy boiled down not to the choices of the voters but to the fact that Bush’s brother, Jeb, was the governor of Florida and conservatives held a slim majority on the Supreme Court. The democratic principle of one person/one vote was overridden by the reality of one brother/one Supreme Court justice.

      President Bush went on to become one of the greatest cheerleaders of democracy promotion abroad. The Bush administration claimed that its war on terrorism was bringing democracy to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to the whole Middle East. In the end, this campaign of democracy promotion brought a good deal of war to those countries, but not a lot of democracy.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Today, 20 years later, the United States faces another election that promises to showcase yet again all the flaws of American democracy. But this time it’s not just the inherent unfairness of the Electoral College system, which awarded Donald Trump the presidency in 2016 even though Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. This time, as I’ve written, Trump is doing everything he can to subvert democratic institutions to remain in office — by lying, stealing votes, inciting violence and simply refusing to vacate the White House.

      Unlike Bush, President Trump has shown no interest whatsoever in promoting democracy around the world. He has made friends with dictators like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin. He has ignored gross human rights violations like the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. He has gutted the State Department’s capacity to support democratic reforms and institutions globally.

      The Impact

      So, Trump’s attempt to subvert democracy at home is entirely consistent with his disdain for democracy abroad. The question is: What impact will the mess surrounding the US elections have on the future of global democracy?

      First of all, the effort to push the US model of democracy has not necessarily produced a lot of democracy around the world. Where democracy has taken root, it has been largely through the efforts of local movements, not foreign advisers. For instance, the US government supported authoritarian leaders in South Korea for decades, and it was only the efforts of the Korean people that brought democracy to the country. The same holds true for South Africa, Chile, Ukraine and many other countries.

      Where democracy promotion has failed, such as in Libya, the results have been catastrophic. Anarchy and civil war have flourished, not free-and-fair elections. Countries like Russia and China, meanwhile, have painted US democracy promotion as interference into sovereign affairs and suppressed indigenous civil-society organizing accordingly.

      So, perhaps the US retreat from democracy promotion won’t have much impact globally. It might even have the opposite effect. With the United States no longer pushing from the outside, pro-democracy activists on the inside will no longer be easily accused of being pro-American spies and thus might have greater room for maneuver.

      The disillusionment of democracy activists concerning the US might also be beneficial. The current preoccupations of the United States — over the peaceful transfer of power and the political manipulation of supposedly non-partisan institutions — send a strong message that democracies are not perfect, democracy is a process not a final state of affairs and the United States is not morally or procedurally superior to other countries. Democracy activists, in other words, can’t expect the US to wave a magic wand to end tyranny. They have to topple dictators and build democracy largely on their own.

      Lessons for US Activists

      These are all lessons for activists in America as well. If Joe Biden wins next month and then manages to take office in January, the US will be focused for some time on repairing its own democracy rather than messing with the political systems of other countries. Trump has done much to undermine the faith that American citizens have in democratic mechanisms like the security of elections, the oversight of Congress and the independence of the judiciary. A Biden administration will have a lot of work to do just to restore these democratic guardrails, not to mention winning back a minimum of international respect for the US after four years of plummeting approval for both the president and his country.

      In the wake of Trump’s democracy demotion, the most important task for a Biden administration would be democracy promotion at home. If the next administration can repair American democracy, it would suggest that perhaps the authoritarian wave that has swept over much of the world — Russia, China, India, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines — has hit a high-water mark and might even be receding.

      The polls suggest that American voters are ready to send Trump packing. Let’s hope that people around the world, having watched the impact of Trump’s demotion of democracy on the United States, will reject the politicians in their own countries who advance Trump-like agendas as well.

      *[This article was originally published by Hankyoreh and FPIF.]

      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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      Reworking US Policy in the Middle East and North Africa

      by

      US foreign policy has shifted dramatically from just a brief 20 years ago. This is not the making of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Rather, they are symptoms of forces that have been building since the post-Soviet era. With the ascendency of the US as the global superpower and the “Washington Consensus” as the pillar of economic development, it was easy to assume that Pax Americana was our legacy to the world.

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      In less than three generations, we are now less sure of our leadership and concerned — as are other nations — with the contradiction of a great power festering internally. Yes, the US certainly retains the world’s strongest military, economy, number of Nobel Prize winners and sometimes even Olympic gold medals. But America’s leaders are unsure of its place in the world, and they disagree on key issues: climate change and the environment, sustainable economic growth, support for international organizations, reengineering the social contract and similar deep-seated concerns.

      The US in the Region

      It is no surprise that there are many opinions on what US foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region will look like under an administration led by Joe Biden or Donald Trump. The only clear agreement is that there is no going back to 2000, 2008 or 2016. The world has changed in many respects. While we can discern a pattern of Trump’s preferences, Biden’s policies would reflect what he and his team learned from their time in the White House under Barack Obama and, hopefully, what he has learned in his almost 50 years of being in Washington. 

      Opinions about a return of Trump’s world vision run the gamut from doomsday to what could be better? For example, writing for Brookings, Thomas Wright exclaimed that “a second Trump term would make a lasting impact on the world right when it is at a particularly vulnerable moment. U.S. alliances would likely crumble, the global economy would close, and democracy and human rights would be in rapid retreat.”

      Embed from Getty Images

      This is hardly the view of the president’s supporters. They believe that international alliances, the global economy and promoting democracy and human rights have not secured stability or prosperity for the US, so why continue with policies that do not serve America’s vital interests? This brings us to the nub of the question: What are those interests that are literally worth fighting for?

      On the macro-level in the MENA region, it used to be simple: Israel and oil, with a secondary nod to trade and arms sales. This is no longer the case. Trump has put Israel on the road to control over its future by pressuring Iran and Hezbollah, continuing bilateral defense arrangements that enhance Israel’s qualitative edge, sealing the normalization of relations between the Israelis and some Arab countries, and ensuring that the UN Security Council will never pass another annoying resolution challenging Israel’s worldview.

      In world energy markets, Saudi Arabia has found itself outmaneuvered as the US can shift the supply paradigms to Asian markets by increasing its exports, which now makes America a more dangerous competitor than Russia. Even in arms sales and commerce, the US finds itself in tough competition with Russia, China and a host of regional producers — from Turkey to France and the UK.

      Regarding who are US allies and who are not, it appears that Trump favors leaving the Middle East and North Africa to its own devices, which includes supporting leaders who reflect his values of disdain for democratic limitations on their exercise of decision-making. This includes Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman and the UAE’s Mohammed bin Zayed. Trump’s penchant for transactional diplomacy is well illustrated by his treatment of the Kurds, Iraqis, the Syrian opposition, Turks, Iranians and others, often viewing diplomacy as a zero-sum competition.

      Does this mean a Trump foreign policy in the MENA region is without merit? Not if you are a supporter of Israel’s security, a hard-line approach on Iran’s dysfunctional role in the region and beyond, pro-arms sales as a tie that binds the US to its friends, and ending what seem to be “endless wars” that make no sense to many American voters.

      A Second Trump Administration?

      If Trump wins a second term in office, his administration would further refrain from direct action in places like Yemen, Libya, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt, again focusing on the benefit to US interests as the guiding principle. For weak states like those in North Africa as well as countries such as Lebanon, it will continue to be a tug-of-war within the State Department as to how best to support US interests in any bilateral relationship. The bigger the country (Egypt), the better endowed with energy resources (Algeria) or the more likely to be convinced that normalizing ties with Israel will be tolerated by its citizens (Sudan), the more attention it will get. As has been noted by a former US ambassador, “This will become a major priority of the next Trump administration and they will make foreign aid contingent on normalization agreements.”

      How this shakes out for Morocco and Saudi Arabia, both of which are targets of US-Israel diplomacy, is not clear as the two countries have special ties to Jerusalem not easily superseded by realpolitik. Don’t plan on seeing any reduction in US support for the Saudis in Yemen unless the Senate goes to the Democratic Party, which may force the president to deal with his friends in the Gulf.

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      Somalia remains an outlier, although its fits and starts toward democracy may draw the attention of policymakers who realizes the threat of the geostrategic encroachment of China and Russia in the Horn of Africa. As for Mauritania and Djibouti, like many Americans, most members of Congress can’t find them on a map, which leaves these countries open to the jaws of Russia and China.

      The great powers game in the MENA region is just beginning to be engaged as China has expanded its ports to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. Its economic diplomacy is making inroads in a long and patient march to North Africa. Russia is not leaving Syria anytime soon and will continue to press Lebanon and Egypt to accept military assistance, as it will also do in Iran, much to the detriment of US–Israel interests.

      It would be quite short-sighted to minimize the roles of Iran and Turkey as regional powers in being able to affect key issues: Libya, Lebanon, Syria, eastern Mediterranean energy, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, the use of mercenaries, arms sales and taking risks that are considered illogical to some Washington policymakers. Each must be considered on its own terms and with a close eye on their often expressed interests and weakening domestic support. While a paper can be written on each of these countries, suffice it to say that a second Trump administration will have to use much greater diplomatic finesse in convincing Erdogan to work with rather than against Washington’s interests.

      And a Biden Administration?

      The biggest challenge to an incoming Biden administration is to indicate how it will retain the best policies of the Obama administration while introducing initiatives that will strengthen perceptions of US commitment to act decisively. Many people in the Middle East and North Africa look at President Obama’s hesitation to act firmly in Syria and Libya, the hands-off treatment over Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and the uneven commitment to human rights as indications of weakness and inconsistency.

      A Biden administration would begin from a different set of values that define different interests than the Trump White House. Ironically, Joe Biden’s values have more in common with the internationalist agendas of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush than with the current Republican administration. The cornerstones of Biden’s platform include the primacy of diplomacy, building relationships and alliances, emphasizing multilateralism for conflict-resolution, and greater attention to human rights and rule of law.

      As an open letter of endorsement for Biden by former US ambassadors and Middle East experts states, while “each country faces its own unique issues, the core complaints of poverty, corruption, and a scarcity of freedom are a common challenge.” Many of Biden’s positions are aspirational — for example, assuming that the right combination of sticks and carrots will bring Iran back to the bargaining table while Russia and China are already working to bolster their regimes militarily and economically.

      Promoting human rights and democratic values are front and center, but one wonders how those values resonate with the current generation of leaders, many of whom ignore and suppress expressions of dissension and calls for change. Part of Biden’s pledge is to support economic and political reforms, which may be opposed by those regimes he seeks to move toward. These reforms include greater inclusiveness and economic development for the young, women and marginalized groups.

      Biden claims that his administration would not countenance regimes that deny the basic civil rights of their citizens, nor ones built on widespread corruption and cronyism or those that meddle in the affairs of neighboring states. There is a gnawing fear among pro-Israel Americans that he will veer from his traditional uncritical support for Israel and insist on an end to actions that undermine the possibility of a two-state solution between the Israelis and Palestinians. These include halting the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and stopping the annexation of Palestinian territory. Biden has already noted that he will restore economic and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians and reopen the US Consulate in East Jerusalem that serves the Palestinian communities.

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      Regarding Lebanon, the former vice president favors assisting its civil society and citizens to develop and implement policies that will be inclusive, and also supporting a dynamic state that reflects democratic values of equality and fairness. He mirrors the Trump administration in promising to continue support for the Lebanese armed forces. Biden also recognizes the need to sustain extensive humanitarian assistance to Syrian refugees and host communities in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. What Biden won’t do, according to his statements, is continue to tolerate support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its pursuit and punishment of dissidents and critics inside the kingdom and elsewhere.

      While no specifics are mentioned regarding Biden’s policy on Syria beyond “standing with civil society and pro-democracy partners on the ground,” his campaign platform maintains the role of US leadership in the coalition to defeat the Islamic State group and restore stability and promote a political solution in partnership with others in the region.

      Although not an Arab country, Iran plays an outsized role in the Middle East. Biden has already noted that he will renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran — with a broader focus on ending Tehran’s regional interference, support of terrorism and militias, and production of missiles. A similar agreement tailored to the specifics of Erdogan’s endgame in the region is also critical if any of the goals mentioned by a Biden administration are to be realized.

      While these goal statements are well-crafted, the lack of details — while understandable — raises concerns considering challenges, such as needing to reenergize a dispirited US diplomatic corps, indifferent or hostile players in the region, and unsure allies in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa. The critical need to focus on America’s domestic economic and psychological revival in the coming years will also compete with international priorities. Of course, the disposition of the races in the Senate and House of Representatives are also critical to closing the gap between aspiration and implementation.

      The authoritarian regimes in the MENA region prefer the devil they know. Yet the youth, women and those who are marginalized are desperate for changes that incorporate their aspirations and are built on equality, justice and opportunity. Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both known in the Middle East and North Africa. It will be quite interesting to see how the region reacts on November 4.

      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 Rise and Fall of US Democracy

      by

      A functioning democracy requires an educated, informed population that understands its role in the processes that define how the democratic nation is governed. Ordinary citizens have two opportunities for actively participating in those processes. They can run for office or help those who are running for office get elected. And they can vote. Most people settle for voting. Actually, in the best of years, only slightly more than the majority of eligible voters actually vote. American democracy has never fired on all its cylinders.

      The failure of half of Americans to participate is surprising because America has sedulously made the effort to educate its future voters. From day one, every schoolchild in the United States learns not only that the form of government they live under is a democracy but also that it is a regime defined by its commitment to freedom. Teachers, seconded by the media and the politicians who appear in the media, relentlessly drill into them the idea that the US is uniquely free, in ways that no other nation can claim. Americans possess unbridled freedom to speak out and to act, even in socially eccentric ways. For some, it even includes the freedom to shoot.

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      Although democracy and freedom are not synonymous, every schoolchild is taught to believe that they are. This has created a curious phenomenon in US culture: the idea that what they have is less the freedom to speak out, act and influence their community than the freedom from interference by other people — and especially by the government. In other words, many Americans understand that the most fundamental freedom is the freedom to be left alone. Instead of defining the individual’s field of possible action and participation, in their minds, democracy defines the right to avoid all action and participation.

      The Art of Democratic Identity

      Children who enter first grade and learn for the first time that they live in a free country may be left wondering what an unfree country is. A literal-minded 6-year-old — such as this writer who entered first grade during the Cold War — may naively wonder why, in a country that our teacher insisted is free, we have to pay for the things we consume. After all, any child who had ever been to a restaurant, a movie theater or a hotdog stand could sense what Milton Friedman would later affirm: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

      My teacher’s message, of course, had nothing to do with the price of things. We would learn about price, cost and value later. Like our parents, one day we would have a job, a house and a dog and be saddled with the task of fending for ourselves in a competitive world. We weren’t quite prepared to understand that our teacher’s riffing on the fact that we were a “free country” was, at the time, simply about the fact that another country with nuclear capacity, the Soviet Union, wasn’t free. We children knew nothing about Russia, the Iron Curtain, communism, capitalism and everything else that was talked about on the news, mainly because we watched cartoons on television. Our exposure to Cold War propaganda was only just beginning.

      On that first day of school, we began the task of memorizing the secular prayer that would kickstart the learning process every day of our schooling for the following 12 years: the pledge of allegiance. Its syntax was incomprehensible, but it sounded comfortingly patriotic. The abstract idea of allegiance was too much for our young minds to deal with. But the key words, beginning with “the flag,” offered something concrete and allowed us to begin to understand that our job was to learn to comply with a system we couldn’t yet begin to understand.

      “The flag” had meaning because we could see it in front of us, whereas “the Republic for which it stands” remained a mystery. Even “one nation” failed to make much sense to any of us since we hadn’t yet studied the Civil War — a moment in history when there were briefly two — but clearly one seemed to be the right number of nations to belong to. “Under God” confirmed what most of our parents had already told us, though the idea of who that being was differed from family to family.

      It was the last six words of the pledge that held some meaning and still resonate in people’s minds: “with liberty and justice for all.” That’s when we began to learn what it meant to be a democracy. This became reinforced later, when we began studying the salient facts of history, including the importance of the first three words of the Constitution: “We the people.” The picture of a democratic society where people, on the one hand, are free (both to vote and to be left alone) and, on the other, treated fairly and equally, combined with our belief in the goodness of the complete system, had begun to fall into place.

      Every official text we would subsequently discover, starting with the Declaration of Independence’s proclamation that “all men are created equal,” delivered the message that we, the citizens (or at least those who could vote), collectively controlled the form of a government that would protect us from various kinds of evil forces. Among those evil forces were, historically speaking, the European monarchies to the east against whom we revolted, and the rampaging Native Americans to the west.

      The first group, the European kings, defined the enemy in our battle for freedom in the 18th century. The second group, the Indians on horseback, defined the 19th-century enemy. Once those two had been neutralized, all that was left in the 20th century, following our victory over the Germans and Japanese in World War II, was the Soviet Union.

      Things had now become remarkably simple. We were a democracy that thrived thanks to our freedom, and especially the freedom of our markets. The Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship with a five-year plan. We were consumers with the widest possible range of choice who knew we would be left alone to consume whatever we chose. Moreover, they were atheists, and we, despite our freedom to believe or not believe, were “under God.” They had the mission of spreading across the globe their elaborate system of government interference in every aspect of everyone’s lives. In contrast, we knew, as President Woodrow Wilson had clearly established decades earlier, that our mission was to “make the world safe for democracy.”

      Reconciling Democracy and Predestined Greatness

      Unlike the Soviets, we had the power to elect our leaders. They had a single party, the Communist Party. We had two, a consumer’s choice. We understood the principles of democracy. The first of those principles consists of having a constitution with a bill of rights. The second is to have regularly planned elections permitting to choose which of the two parties we wanted to be governed by. Any wonderful and wild idea was possible, so long as one of the two parties embraced that idea.

      Communism, of course, or its twin sister, socialism, represented impossible ideas, not only because they made no sense in a consumer society, but because neither of the parties would embrace such ideas. Nevertheless, some feared that the Democrats might be tempted by socialism or even communism. And so, enterprising politicians committed to the idea of democratic choice invented the House of Un-American Activities, making it clear to political consumers — i.e. voters — that some choices, deemed political heresy, would not be available in the political marketplace. Heresy can, after all, happen in a free country that is also “under God.”

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      Throughout our schooling, our teachers and textbooks led us to assume that the nation’s founders, like Woodrow Wilson more than a century later, had one mission in mind, though with a more local focus: making North America safe for democracy. According to the narrative we received, it was in the name of democracy that the Founding Fathers decided to break away from the despotism of the British monarchy. This created the enduring belief that the founders were visionaries intent on creating what would later become known as the “world’s greatest democracy.”

      It’s a trope US politicians today never tire of repeating. The Democrat, President Harry Truman, may have been the first when he uttered the phrase in 1952, just as the Cold War was picking up steam. He cited America’s “responsibilities as the greatest nation in the history of the world.” Like George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and any Republican, President Donald Trump deems the US to be not only “the single greatest nation in the history of the world” but also “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” In contrast, this year’s Democratic candidate for the presidency, former Vice President Joe Biden, more modestly characterizes it as merely “the greatest nation on earth.” Perhaps he hasn’t studied history as carefully as Truman and Trump have.

      It isn’t clear whether Cassius Clay, before becoming Muhammad Ali — who famously boasted he was “the greatest” — was inspired by patriotic politicians at the time vaunting the economic power and military prowess of the nation or whether today’s politicians who keep insisting on greatness are inspired by Ali. Donald Trump is not the only American to resonate to the idea of greatness. In every domain, Americans seek to determine who is the GOAT, the Greatest of All Time. There must always be a winner, someone who is totally exceptional.

      American exceptionalism is not just an idea. It has become a dogma that leaders must embrace. Violating it or even trying to nuance it can prove disastrous. At a press conference in Europe in April 2009, fielding a question from a Financial Times reporter, newly installed President Barack Obama tried to limit his patriotic hubris when he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” This was too much for many Americans, such as Republican Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Fox News, who saw this as proof that Obama wasn’t a true believer in American exceptionalism. How could he dare to reduce the nation’s prestige to that of has-been countries like the UK and Greece?

      The Historical Truth

      At the nation’s very beginning, the founders sought and fought simply to create a nation that was no longer attached to Britain. It was a first step in the direction of just wanting to be left alone. They grappled first with the idea of how whatever emerged might define itself as a political entity. After that came the question of how it should be governed. Because of the diversity of the colonies, the founders could agree on the idea of dispersed authority, leading to the idea of a federation that could be thought of as a single federal state. They also, and nearly as emphatically, agreed that it was not about democracy.

      In 1814, John Adams, a revolutionary leader and the second president of the United States, famously responded with this curt judgment to one of his critics who berated him for maligning democracy: “Democracy never lasts long.” Lambasting what he referred to as the “ideology” of democracy, Adams expressed his horror at “democratic rage and popular fury” and insisted that democracy “soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.” The chaos of the French Revolution, which they considered an exercise in democracy, had left a bad impression on the minds of the Founding Fathers.

      Alexander Hamilton, who died prematurely in a duel 10 years before Adams drafted his letter to John Tyler (but who miraculously came back to life on Broadway in a rap-based musical comedy exactly two hundred years later) emphatically agreed with Adams: “We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” Both men had studied ancient history and witnessed the chaos of the French Revolution. Hamilton concluded: “The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

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      The idea of democracy got off to a bad start in the young republic. And yet, most Americans today assume that US democracy was born with the drafting of the US Constitution. Even if the Founding Fathers clearly stated their preference for the idea of a republic ruled by a patrician elite and sought to define the young nation as fundamentally the opposite of a democracy, for generations, Americans have tended to believe that the Constitution embodied and validated democratic principles.

      Obsessed by the attribute of greatness, Americans also continue to believe that the US deserves the title of “the world’s greatest democracy.” This is a notion that has the potential to irritate people who are not American. Last year, Dutch blogger Moshe-Mordechai Van Zuiden, writing for The Times of Israel, bitterly contested the insistence on American greatness. He lists 10 reasons why the US electoral system in no way reflects the ideal or even the messy reality of effective national democracies.

      After excoriating a two-party system offering “only a choice between two people widely despised,” as happened in 2016 and may even be the case in 2020, he makes a more fundamental complaint: “Top Dog Wins is not democracy. It’s a dictatorship of the majority.” All of the 10 points made by this brash Dutchman are well taken. Despite their national pride, more and more Americans are ready to agree.

      The Last Election

      Americans are clearly unaware of the fact that the revered founders believed that if democracy were to take hold, it would lead to the collapse of a fragile nation. The president who successfully marketed the idea of democracy for the first time, changing the course of America’s political culture, was Andrew Jackson, the president Donald Trump most admires (after himself). It was during Jackson’s presidency that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote and published “Democracy in America.” Thanks to the French aristocrat’s writing and Jackson’s deeds, including displacing and sometimes massacring native tribes, the label stuck.

      It subsequently became dogma that the United States not only is a democracy but exemplifies the ideal of what democracy should be. Abraham Lincoln went on to provide the concept of democracy with a permanent advertising slogan when he called it a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” By the time of Lincoln and the imminent Emancipation Proclamation, the idea of “people” had taken on a much broader meaning than at the time of the drafting of the Constitution.

      As Van Zuiden and others have pointed out, the electoral system in the US was never designed to function as a true democracy. Nevertheless, the belief was solidly instilled that democracy was in the nation’s DNA. It has withstood numerous assaults along the way and only recently begun to reveal some serious flaws that risk undermining Americans’ unquestioning belief in its virtues. For future observers of US history, the illusion of democracy as the basis of government may technically have expired in December 2000 when nine Supreme Court justices, and not the people or even the states, elected George W. Bush as president. At the time and amid such confusion, few had the courage to acknowledge that Bush’s election reflected a permanent change in their perception of democracy.

      The chaos of this year’s election, characterized by the twin evils of a persistent pandemic and the personality of Donald Trump, may well be the election that dispels all remaining illusions. In 2021, a new approach to understanding the relationship between the people and the nation’s institutions will most likely begin to emerge. The rupture with past traditions has been too great for the old dogmas to survive intact.

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      It’s impossible to predict what form that seismic shift in the political culture will take. It now looks more than likely — though prudence is still required — that if democratic processes play out according to recognized rules, Joe Biden will by the 46th president of the United States. But there is no guarantee that democratic processes will play out in any recognizably legitimate way, partly because the COVID-19 pandemic has created a physical barrier to the already troublingly chaotic conduct of traditional elections whose results pass through the archaic Electoral College, and partly because President Donald Trump will be highly motivated to disturb, delay and possibly cancel whatever validated outcome emerges. But further complications and a practically infinite series of complementary risks are lying in the offing. The risk of uncontrollable civil unrest, if not civil war, is real.

      Whatever the official result of the presidential election, whether it becomes known in the immediate aftermath of November 3 or sometime in January, it will be the object of contestation and possibly unpredictable forms of revolt by the citizens themselves. Like any episode of social upheaval, there is a strong chance that it will be quelled.

      Biden’s Dilemma

      But even if quashed and silenced, it certainly will not be resolved. The most favorable scenario for neutralizing the revolt of the Trumpian right would be a landslide victory for Biden, with the Democrats retaking control of the Senate while maintaining and increasing their majority in the House. But even so, the losers will certainly cry foul.

      A resounding majority for Biden and the Democrats would nevertheless buttress what remains of the population’s belief in democracy, legitimizing Biden’s claim to govern the nation. But even in the best of scenarios, a landslide would still leave Biden in a fragile, if not precarious position. Biden has done next to nothing to unite his own party. A Democratic victory will incite the young progressives to contest his legitimate control over an aged and aging party establishment. Gallup reports that “Americans’ frustration with the parties is evident in the 57% of Americans saying a third party is needed.”

      That figure has been stable for at least the past 10 years, but the level of frustration has been magnified by the presence of uninspiring candidates in both parties. As governing structures, both dominant parties have been seriously fragilized in the past two elections, the Republicans by Trump’s successful assault on their traditions and the Democrats by the nearly successful challenge of Bernie Sanders and the party establishment’s resistance to change.

      If elected, Biden will be challenged on the right by the combined force of fanatical believers in Trump as the messiah and hordes of libertarians appalled by the prospect of more “big government.” He will be challenged on the left by the progressives who not only oppose his tepid policies but no longer believe in the integrity of the Democratic Party. If it was just a question of managing the personal rivalries within his party, as it was for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, all might be fine. But with a prolonged pandemic, an out-of-control economic crisis, increasingly lucid and effective racial unrest and a growing anti-establishment sentiment across much of the right and the left, reinstalling the establishment that preceded Trump and restoring faith in its ability to govern will be a task logically beyond the capacity of 78-year-old Biden.

      The End of an Era

      And those issues only begin to define the challenges Biden will be facing. In an essay in The New Criterion earlier this year, James Pierson observed the very real potential for social collapse: “Yet today the United States seems headed in a different direction: toward pluralism without consensus — a nation-state without a national idea — and towards animus among racial, religious, regional, and national groups.” In his article, Pierson deftly summarizes the history of the nation from the convergence of disparate colonies into a “union” and its need for imperial expansion to maintain its unity. Historically speaking, both convergence and expansion are no longer what they used to be.

      Pierson claims that before the Civil War and the victory of the Union forces, the US had not really decided what it was. He asks the question, “what was it: union, republic, or empire — or a combination of all three? Whatever it was, it was not yet a nation.” He claims it only became a nation-state “over a ninety-year period from 1860 to 1950, an era bookended by the Civil War and World War II, two great wars for liberal democracy, with World War I sandwiched in between.”

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      Pierson credits Abraham Lincoln with creating the democracy that eventually came to dominate the world in the 20th century. Although assassinated by John Wilkes Booth before he could begin to implement his plan, Lincoln effectively created a political culture or system of belief that has only begun to fray in the last few decades. Pierson describes Honest Abe’s ideological triumph. “Lincoln envisioned a nation held together by a ‘political religion’ based upon reverence for the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence.” It was a nation “held together by loyalty to political institutions and abstract ideals.’”

      Pierson believes that that stable system began to dissolve after 1950, when what had been clearly a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) culture began to lose its capacity to impose its norms. He concludes, somewhat nostalgically: “It is no longer possible for the United States to go forward as a ‘cultural’ nation in the form by which it developed between 1860 and 1950. Whether or not this is a good thing is beside the point: it has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen.” And then, fatalistically, he adds: “These developments leave the United States without any strong foundations to keep itself together as a political enterprise — in a circumstance when its increasing diversity requires some kind of unifying thread. What will that be? No one now knows.”

      Pierson’s description of cultural decline echoes the thesis of Samuel Huntington’s book, “Who Are We?” It expresses a sentiment that Trump exploited with his slogan “Make American Great Again.” Pierson seems to recognize that a return to the good old WASP order, wished for by Huntington and Trump (and perhaps Pierson himself), is simply not going to happen.

      Joe Biden has promised to provide the thread that will unify the nation. Pierson believes that’s an impossible task. Others, focused on the possibilities of the future rather than a nostalgia for the past, claim it can be done. But Biden, though more conciliatory than Trump, clearly lacks the vision and the personality required to achieve it. And, of course, another Trump victory would only fragment the culture further and faster.

      The obvious conclusion should be that there is little choice for a politician who wishes to survive intact other than to move forward boldly and accept to resolve some serious historical ambiguities and overturn a number of institutions that have created a situation of political sclerosis and accelerated cultural decline. There are plenty of ideas to work with. Some of the younger members of the Democratic Party have demonstrated the kind of energy needed to achieve success. And the population will not be averse to change if they see it is intended to cure the disease and not just temporarily relieve the pain. The opioid crisis has at least taught them that mere pain relief is a dead end.

      The problem is that there will be resistance, though it will not come from the people. They know what they want. A majority wants to see expanded choice and at the very minimum a third party, simply because they no longer trust the two parties that have been running the show. An even clearer majority supports single-payer health insurance. A majority among the younger generations and possibly the entire population expects a serious and thorough response to climate change. But as the actions of past presidents have demonstrated, changing the way of life of a society of consumers appears to be too much to ask of politicians.

      Once the dust has settled from the election — unless that dust becomes radioactive while waiting for definitive results — 2021 is likely to be a year of confused political maneuvering and deep social instability. It will undoubtedly be a period of crisis. In a best case scenario, it will be the type of crisis that enables the nation to focus on a serious project of transformation. Those who see a Biden victory as a chance to return to the former status quo will attempt to manage the crisis, but they will inevitably be disappointed.

      That includes traditional donors, Wall Street, Hollywood and the vast majority of the political class. The two-dimensional chessboard with its 64 squares that they have been playing on for decades has now acquired a third dimension. Their expertise in pushing around the same pieces, according to the same rules on the same traditional chessboard, has lost its validity.

      Fragile Simulacrum

      History has already overtaken the political potential of a fragile simulacrum of a democracy that was never meant to be a democracy. No historian tracing the events as they played out over more than two centuries should be surprised that, while maintaining the illusion of democracy, the system evolved to function essentially as an elaborate, well-armed oligarchy. The oligarchy will use every power it has in its high-tech arsenal, including new forms of apparent generosity, to stabilize those institutions that best resist the seismic forces that have already begun cracking the entire system’s foundations.

      Even if it achieves some form of success and reaches what appears to be a state of relative stability, the world it believes it still controls will be very different and will begin evolving in highly unpredictable ways.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Many are predicting collapse. Given the degree to which an individualistic and corporatist culture has undermined most of the principles of human solidarity, collapse may well be the inevitable outcome. But collapse of what? Will it be the supposedly democratic political structures, traditions or ideologies? Will it be the economy? Or, as the coronavirus pandemic has shown, will it be human health, to say nothing of the health of the planet?

      Voters in the November 3 election should be asking themselves not just whom they want to vote for, but a much more immediate question that is nevertheless difficult to answer. What do Biden and his future team think about all the above questions? Are they prepared? What do they seriously think they might do about them as soon as the cracks start appearing, many of which are already visible?

      In the run-up to an election, politicians are unlikely to blurt out the truth, especially if it involves taking on serious problems whose solutions will inevitably cause pain in certain quarters. They will typically try to deal with three somewhat contradictory concerns. Keep the people happy. Reassure the donors. Prepare the next round of unholy alliances just to be certain they will be able to get something done. And then the big question arises: When it comes to taking hold of the reins of power, whom will they accept to disappoint? But the real question is this, whom can they afford to disappoint?

      We are left asking ourselves whether John Adams was right when he wrote that democracy never lasts long. If Biden is elected and serves two terms (reaching the age of 88 at the end of his second term), the kind of democracy the US has created will have lasted exactly two hundred years. John Adams probably would consider that a long time.

      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 Role of Foreign Policy in the US Election

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      It has become cliché to assert that unless their country is at war, Americans pay scant attention to foreign policy in their presidential elections. On the whole — and assuming a candidate isn’t seen as a warmonger, an accusation made of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in his loss to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — this has been largely true. A corollary may be that when the US is at war, the incumbent usually wins, (George W. Bush being the most recent example in 2004).

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      The US isn’t technically at war now, though it has military forces deployed to high-threat areas and combat zones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Those deployed numbers are pretty modest compared to recent years and have been trending downward since the Obama administration.

      So, will foreign policy matter to American voters when they vote in this election cycle? (November 3 is the official voting day, but millions have already begun voting by mail and are expected to continue in increasing numbers as Election Day approaches.)

      Foreign Policy May Matter to Voters But in a Different Way

      We won’t know the answer to that question until after the election when exit polls and surveys can more accurately measure voters’ attitudes and reasons for voting. It is probably true to say, however, that foreign policy won’t be at the top of most Americans’ agendas when they fill out their ballots. More important domestic issues will undoubtedly prevail. Those include the president’s response (or lack of) to the coronavirus outbreak, which has taken the lives of more than 215,000 Americans; the consequent devastating impact of the pandemic on the US economy; health care; racial justice and equality; and climate change.

      Embed from Getty Images

      There is another concern of voters and it is unprecedented in modern times. That is the heightened level of Americans’ anxiety over Donald Trump’s crisis-a-day presidency and an uncontrollable addiction to Twitter, which often only serves to exacerbate that anxiety. A return to a less apprehension-provoking presidency would be welcomed by many Americans.

      Part of that anxiety, one could argue, might stem from Trump’s dramatic departure from the foreign policy supported by every US president since Harry Truman following World War II. This was generally characterized as an alliance-based approach in which the US enlisted nations throughout the world in some form of alliance, partnership or understanding. It’s what drove the US to lead the effort to form — or support the formation of — multilateral organizations like the United Nations, NATO, the European Union and a myriad of UN-affiliated or regional organizations, from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank to the International Monetary Fund and the Latin American Development Bank. It was also responsible in part for America’s successful emergence from the Cold War.

      Spoiled by Peace?

      This level of stability and security is taken for granted by far too many Americans. The enormous prosperity and development they have enjoyed since the end of World War II were possible because Americans need to worry as much as other nations about threats or invaders from abroad. The Cold War and the prospect of a nuclear Armageddon hung over Americans for decades. But most people understood that their leaders as well as those of the Soviet Union did not want — and most often sought to avoid through diplomacy — such confrontations from which neither would have emerged victorious. Through its far-sighted policy of alliance-based relations, America could also count on the support and partnership of other nations, including most of the world’s most advanced industrial nations.

      Today, Americans need not fear threats from abroad because their nation has maintained a foreign policy intended to ensure their security and promote their welfare. It has been the blessing that has allowed all other blessings of America to flourish virtually without hindrance from abroad.

      President Trump has cast this approach into doubt. Furthermore, he’s been challenged at times to lay out a cogent foreign policy alternative. What may best describe his approach is anti-multilateral and “America First.” That has meant directing harsh criticism at NATO and the EU as well as the UN, the WTO and the World Health Organization.

      Additionally, he has developed an unseemly and uncharacteristic (for American presidents) liking for autocrats, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (among others). More shockingly, he has insulted and degraded some of America’s closest friends and allies, including Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

      Americans Support Active International Engagement

      These actions by their president disturb many Americans. How many exactly we can’t be sure of. But the previous alliance-based foreign policy is supported by a significant majority of Americans of nearly all political persuasions. Though far from perfect at times, it has permitted the country to avoid major wars. Even in America’s wars of choice like Vietnam and Iraq, the US could still count on the backing of many of our friends and allies, at least at the outset.

      Recent polling bears this out. Majorities of Americans support their country’s alliances and ties to such stalwart allies such as NATO, Germany, South Korea and Japan. Majorities also believe that maintaining America’s military superiority is important, and they even accept stationing US troops in allied countries. According to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 69% of Americans want the US to play an active role in international affairs but not dominate.

      Americans also believe that international trade, another hallmark of previous US foreign policy, is good for the country and its economy. According to a survey conducted by the Chicago Council, 83% think international trade is good for US companies and nearly 90% believe it is good for the US economy. More than three-quarters support compliance with rulings of the WTO.

      None of this would appear to comport with Trump’s foreign policy. In fact, his approach has flown in the face of what Americans believe, support and want.

      Other decisions affecting America’s standing in the world also weigh on their emotions and sentiments. For example, Trump’s unwillingness to cooperate with other nations to develop and distribute a vaccine for the novel coronavirus and his precipitous announcement to withdraw from the WHO sound out of character, if not ominous, to a nation that has historically led the global fight against viral threats and has been seen as a global leader in medical science.

      These actions detract from the country’s image and reputation in the world and contrast with Americans’ strong penchant for humanitarian action, especially in a crisis. Polling by the Pew Research Center indicates that as badly as foreigners evaluate China’s response to the coronavirus pandemic (61% negative), more people (84%) viewed the response of the US as poor.

      Temperament, Judgment and American Anxiety

      American attitudes about foreign policy are certainly shaped by interests. But interests in the US are as diverse as Americans themselves. So, very often, American values tend to play an outsized role in what citizens think their country’s foreign policy ought to be. Those values revolve around the same values that shape attitudes about their own government — i.e., democracy, freedom, equality, human rights, rule of law, and free and fair elections.

      Donald Trump’s affinity for demagogues, populists, illiberal autocrats and out-and-out dictators undercuts those values. And his administration’s failures to defend Hong Kong, stand up for the 1 million persecuted Uighurs in China, condemn Saudi Arabia’s execution of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or to speak out against the many cases of Saudi human rights abuse against women and bloggers fall short of American values. His administration expresses occasional support for Venezuelans and Nicaraguans opposing the Nicolas Maduro and Daniel Ortega governments, respectively, but only when such support coincides with the Trump administration’s political self-interests in those countries, whose governments the US opposes.

      Nevertheless, it’s probably safe to say that not one of these issues will figure prominently on the minds of many American voters when they cast their ballots for either President Trump or his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. But they do contribute to their heightened anxiety over Trump’s leadership. That anxiety is driven by concerns about his judgment and temperament. Virtually every American is asking how comfortable and confident they feel with one or the other of these men in the White House for the next four years. The candidates’ positions on US foreign policy will directly impact that question.

      For most Americans, the candidate whose temperament and judgment on foreign policy — as well as the many other key domestic issues — gives them the predictability, reliability and comfortability they’ve missed these last four years is the one likely to get their vote.

      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’s Maestro of Death and Destruction

      by

      Yes, when he was running for president, he did indeed say: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

      Then he won — and on November 3 (or thereafter), whether he wins or loses, we’re likely to find out that, when it comes to his base, he was right. He may not have lost a vote. Yes, Donald Trump is indeed a “murderer,” but here’s where his prediction fell desperately short: As president, he’s proved to be anything but a smalltime killer. It wasn’t as if he went out one day on New York City’s Fifth Avenue or even in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and shot a couple of people.

      The Next President Needs to Learn From Past Mistakes

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      Nothing so minimalist for The Donald. Nor is it as if, say, he had plowed “the Beast” (as his presidential Cadillac is known) into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, as so many other drivers have done this year. Let’s face it: that’s for his apprentices, not the showman himself. After all, Donald J. Trump has proved to be America’s 21st-century maestro of death and destruction, the P.T. Barnum of, as he put it predictively enough in his inaugural address, “American carnage.” In fact, he’s been a master of carnage in a way no one could then have imagined.

      Back in 2016, he was way off when it came to the scale of what he could accomplish. As it happens, the killing hasn’t just taken place on Fifth Avenue, or even in his (now hated) former hometown, but on avenues, streets, lanes and country roads across America. He was, however, right about one thing: He could kill at will and no one who mattered (to him at least) would hold him responsible, including the attorney general of the United States who has been one of his many handymen of mayhem.

      His is indeed proving to be a murderous regime, but in quite a different form than even he might have anticipated. Still, a carnage-creator he’s been (and, for god knows how long to come, will be) and here’s the remarkable thing: He’s daily been on “Fifth Avenue” killing passersby in a variety of ways. In fact, it’s worth going through his methods of murder, starting (where else?) with the pandemic that’s still ripping a path from hell across this country.

      Death by Disease

      We know from Bob Woodward’s new book that — in his own strange way — in February, Donald Trump evidently grasped the seriousness of COVID-19 and made a conscious decision to “play it down.” There have been all sorts of calculations since then, but by one modest early estimate, beginning to shut down and social distance in this country even a week earlier in March would have saved 36,000 lives (the equivalent of a dozen 9/11s); two weeks earlier and it would have been a striking 54,000 in a country now speeding toward something like 300,000 dead by year’s end.

      Embed from Getty Images

      If the president had moved quickly and reasonably, instead of worrying about his reelection on November 3 or how he looked with a mask on; if he had followed the advice of actual experts; if he had championed masking and social distancing as he’s championed the Confederate flag, military bases named after Confederate generals and the Proud Boys, we would have been living in a different and less wounded country — and that’s only the beginning of his Fifth Avenue behavior.

      After all, no matter what the scientific experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection and elsewhere were back then saying about the dangers of gathering in mask-less crowds indoors, it was clear that the president just couldn’t bear a world without fans, without crowds cheering his every convoluted word. That would have been like going on the diet from hell. As a result, he conducted his first major rally in June at the Bank of Oklahoma Center in Tulsa.

      Admittedly, that particular crowd would be nowhere near as big as he and his advisers had expected. Still, perhaps 6,000 fans, largely unmasked and many in close proximity, cheered on their commander-in-chief there. It was visibly a potential pandemic super-spreader of an event, but the commander-in-chief, mask-less himself, couldn’t have cared less. About three weeks later, when Tulsa experienced a striking rise in coronavirus cases (likely linked to that rally) and former presidential candidate and Trump supporter Herman Cain who had attended unmasked died of COVID-19, it didn’t faze the president in the slightest.

      He kept right on holding rallies and giving his patented, wildly cheered rambles in the brambles. As Rolling Stone correspondent Andy Kroll put it after attending one of his outdoor rallies in North Carolina, the president’s “remarks” that day (which ran to 37 pages and 18,000 words) were “practically a novella, albeit a novella that makes Finnegan’s Wake look like See Spot Run!”

      Nothing, certainly not a pandemic, was going to stop Donald J. Trump from sucking up the adoration of his base. Though in the first presidential debate with Joe Biden he claimed that he’s only been holding his rallies outdoors, in September in Nevada — a state whose governor had banned indoor gatherings of more than 50 people — Trump held a typically boisterous, adoring indoor rally of 5,000, largely unmasked, jammed-together Trumpsters. When questioned on the obvious dangers of such a gathering, he classically responded, “I’m on a stage and it’s very far away. And so I’m not at all concerned” — i.e., not at all concerned about (or for) them.

      If that isn’t the COVID-19 equivalent of a bazooka on Fifth Avenue, what is? And it summed up perfectly Trump’s response to the choice of pursuing his own reelection in the way he loves (and seems so desperately to need) or keeping Americans healthy. During these unending pandemic months, he regularly downplayed every danger and most reasonable responses to them, while at one point even tweeting to his followers to “LIBERATE” (possibly in an armed fashion) states that had imposed stay-at-home orders. He needed what he’s long called the “greatest economy in the history of America” back and reopening everything was naturally the way to go.

      Mimicking his boss’s style, Attorney General William Barr would even essentially compare lockdowns to slavery. As he put it, “A national lockdown. Stay-at-home orders. It’s like house arrest. Other than slavery, which is a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”

      Clearly at the president’s behest, “top White House officials” would, according to The New York Times, pressure “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this summer to play down the risk of sending children back to school, a strikingly political intervention in one of the most sensitive public health debates of the pandemic.” (As the president would tweet in a similar spirit: “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but it is important for the children and families. May cut off funding if not open!”)

      In other words, it didn’t matter who might be endangered — his best fans or the nation’s schoolchildren — when his reelection, his future wellbeing, was at stake. Murder on Fifth Avenue? A nothing by comparison.

      Supreme Assassins?

      And his response to the pandemic only launches us on what should qualify as an all-American killing spree from hell. In the end, it could even prove to be the most modest part of it.

      Embed from Getty Images

      For the rest of that death toll, you might start with health care. It’s already estimated that at least 2.3 million Americans have lost their health insurance in the Trump years (and that figure, according to the US Census Bureau, includes 726,000 children, some of whom may now be headed back to school under pandemic conditions). That, in turn, could prove just a drop in the bucket if his administration’s ongoing assault on Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) finally succeeds. And after November 3, it indeed might if Mitch McConnell is successful in hustling Amy Coney Barrett onto the Supreme Court in place of the dead Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who twice upheld the constitutionality of that act). A supposedly “pro-life” Trump version of the Supreme Court — unless the pandemic were to sweep through it — would undoubtedly turn out to be murderous in its own fashion. Think of them as potential “supreme assassins.”

      Barrett, in particular, is known to hold negative views of the ACA, and the court will hear the Trump administration’s case for abolishing that act within a week of Election Day, so you do the math. Wiping it out reportedly means that at least 23 million more Americans would simply lose their health insurance and it could, in the end, leave tens of millions of Americans with “pre-existing medical conditions” in an uninsured hell on earth.

      Death? I guarantee it, on and off Fifth Avenue — and it will have been The Donald’s doing.

      A Murderous Future

      All of the above should be considered nothing more than warm-up exercises for the real deal when it comes to future presidential slaughter. All of it precedes the truly long-term issue of death and destruction that goes by the name of climate change.

      It’s hardly news that Donald Trump long ago rejected global warming as a Chinese “hoax.” And as he withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and — like the child of the fossil-fueled 1950s that he is — proclaimed a new policy of American energy dominance (“the golden era of American energy is now underway”), he’s never stopped rejecting it.

      He did so again recently on a brief visit to burning California amid a historic wildfire season, where he predicted that it would soon get “cooler.” The only exception: when he suddenly feels in the mood to criticize the Chinese for their release of greenhouse gases. As he said in a speech on September 22 to the UN General Assembly, “China’s carbon emissions are nearly twice what the US has, and it’s rising fast. By contrast, after I withdrew from the one-sided Paris Climate Accord, last year America reduced its carbon emissions by more than any country in the agreement.”

      He and those he’s put in place at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere in his administration have spent his presidency in a remarkably determined fashion trying to destroy the American and global environment. So far, they have rolled back (or are trying to roll back) 100 environmental protections that were in place when he arrived in the Oval Office, including most recently limits on a pesticide that reportedly can stunt brain development in children. Air pollution alone was, according to one study, responsible for 9,700 more deaths in this country in 2018 than in 2016. Above all, at the service of a still-expanding American fossil-fuel industry, he and his crew have done their damnedest to open the way for oil, gas, and coal development in just about any imaginable form.

      In a season in which the West Coast has burned in a previously inconceivable fashion, leaving a historic cloud of smoke in its wake, while fierce storms have flooded the Gulf Coast, Trump has continued, for instance, to focus on opening the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.

      In short, he and his administration have, in a rather literal fashion, proved to be pyromaniacs of the first order. They’ve been remarkably intent on ensuring that, in the future, the world will continue to heat in ways certain to unsettle humanity, creating almost unimaginable forms of death and destruction. Despite the fact that Joe Biden called him a “climate arsonist” as the West Coast burned, somehow the potentially murderous nature of his environmental policies has barely sunk in this election season.

      If the legend was true, the Roman emperor Nero fiddled — actually, he was probably playing the cithara — while the capital of his empire, Rome, burned for six days. He didn’t personally set the fire, however. Trump and his crew are, it seems, intent on setting fire not just to Rome, New York or Washington, but to the Alaskan wilderness, the Brazilian rainforest and that giant previously iced in landmass he couldn’t figure out how to purchase: Greenland. He’s helping to ensure that even the oceans will, in their own fashion, be on fire; that storms will grow ever more intense and destructive; that the temperature will rise ever higher; and that the planet will become ever less habitable.

      Meanwhile, intently maskless and socially undistanced, even he (and his wife Melania) contracted COVID-19, officially becoming part of his own American carnage. The White House, Air Force One and the president and his aides became the equivalent of COVID-19 superspreaders, as senators and reporters, among others, also began to come down with the disease. It’s now proving a visible all-American nightmare of the first order. 

      Donald Trump has, of course, hardly been alone when it comes to burning the planet, but it’s certainly eerie that, at this moment, such an arsonist would stand any chance at all of being reelected president of the United States. His urge is visibly not just to be an autocrat, but to commit mass murder nationwide and on a planetary scale deep into the future.

      Murder, he said, and murder it was, and Fifth Avenue was the least of it.

      *[This article was originally published by TomDispatch.]

      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

      Can Donald Trump Steal a Second Term?

      by

      US President Donald Trump, who lost the popular vote by more than 3 million in 2016, is trailing his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, in most national polls. It looks like the writing is on the wall for Trump, with his ineptitude and disingenuity laid out for the world to see.

      Trump is a president whose bungled handling of the COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in the death of more than 215,000 Americans. Even after being infected by the virus himself, Trump tweeted on October 5: “I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”

      360° Context: The 2020 US Election Explained

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      As president, Trump received the best possible treatment anyone infected with the virus could hope for, including access to medication that an average American can only dream of. Trump’s insensitive tweet flies in the face of the lives lost, displaying his utter disconnect from reality and a cruel lack of empathy. This is a president who has a chronic compulsion for defrauding people and lying pathologically about seemingly everything, including his finances. As a recent investigation by The New York Times exposed, Trump not only managed to pay no tax at all in 10 out of the past 15 years, but he is also a consummate loser as a businessman.

      Trump is also the first president in the history of the United States to have been impeached and then seek reelection following an acquittal by the Senate. It is seemingly inconceivable that a tax evader, crook, pathological liar and callous narcissist can succeed in hoodwinking the public for a second time into electing him. Sadly, anyone who dismisses Trump as not reelectable would do so at their own peril.

      Voter Suppression

      President Trump has repeatedly tried to undermine the democratic process in more ways than one cares to count in the lead up to the presidential election on November 3. Without providing any credible evidence, he has claimed that voting by mail is fraught with fraud, sowing seeds of doubt in the election results should his bid for a second term fail. Wary Democrats have reacted to this by encouraging people to cast their vote in person, despite the raging pandemic.

      In an effort to further subvert mail-in voting, Trump trained his guns on the United States Postal Service (USPS), openly admitting that he opposed allocating additional funding. “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump stated unabashedly in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo in August. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” Despite these attacks, Trump himself voted using a mail-in ballot during the March presidential primaries in his resident state of Florida.

      Embed from Getty Images

      One has to marvel at the brazen thoroughness with which he is diminishing the authenticity of the very process that propelled him to his current position. There are only two ways in which people can exercise their franchise: by voting in person or by using an alternate option that is available to them in their local jurisdiction, such as absentee ballots. On the one hand, Trump has discredited the usage of mail-in ballots. He has also appointed Louis DeJoy, a Republican donor, as postmaster general, who has crippled the operations of the USPS. On the other hand, Trump is employing scare tactics to turn people away from in-person voting. His comprehensive approach is aimed at lowering voter turnout, which he believes will be favorable for Republicans.

      In a statement that borders on voter intimidation, Trump stated in an interview with Fox News on August 20 that “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement, and we’re going to hopefully have U.S. attorneys and we’re going to have everybody, and attorney generals.” Trump was alluding to sending law enforcement officials to voting centers. Federal law prohibits any on-duty law enforcement personnel bearing arms from entering a voting center without the express purpose of casting their own vote. Yet the mere threat of sending police and sheriffs to voting centers, even if only to monitor polls, can terrify marginalized communities and prevent them from turning up to vote.

      Logic Defying Loyalty

      Anyone with an iota of common sense can see the hypocrisy of Trump’s statements. Sadly, there is an intransigent base of followers that he has cultivated who refuse to see him for the charlatan president he really is. Cognitive neuroscientist Bobby Azarian’s article in Psychology Today, entitled “A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump’s Support,” enumerates more than a dozen elements that energize Trump’s voter base, which include terror management theory and the Dunning-Kruger effect.

      There are several Republican politicians who have stated that they will not be supporting Trump in this election. Nearly everyone on the list is someone who held office as a Republican in the past and is not seeking reelection. Other than Senators Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom have not categorically stated who they intend to vote for, most sitting Republican politicians have forsaken their dignity and self-respect in order to do Trump’s bidding.

      Former Nevada Senator Dean Heller brazenly lied in a Fox News interview that the state’s vote-by-mail process will allow people to vote once by mail and once in person. Trump echoed this in September when he seemed to suggest voters should “test” the system by casting their ballot twice.

      Serving as an election officer in my local county, I know for a fact that when a person’s vote-by-mail ballot is received, it is recorded in the system and it is impossible for the same person to vote again without committing fraud under the penalty of perjury. Truth notwithstanding, Trump and Heller have managed to sow seeds of doubt among the gullible, making some of them question the robustness of the country’s democratic election process.

      South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has been one of the biggest turncoats in his criticism of the president. In 2015, Graham called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious-bigot.” Today, he is one of Trump’s staunchest cronies. Fighting a tough reelection bid in his home state, Graham shamelessly kowtows to the same person who was the object of his scathing criticism that has made an interesting case study on the fluctuating loyalties of politicians.  

      GOP Machinery

      However disingenuous and self-serving Trump’s actions may be, to win in November, the president needs the help of well-oiled machinery that is unafraid to flout the democratic process, engage in voter suppression and set the stage for a possible showdown in the judiciary system overruling the will of the people. That machinery goes by the name of the GOP.

      In Santa Clara County, California, the Registrar of Voters has made available nearly 100 vote-by-mail drop-off locations spread across the county. In stark contrast, Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose ordered just one drop-off box installed in each of the state’s 88 counties, some of which have a population of more than a million. LaRose reluctantly yielded after a judge in Franklin County rescinded his order. LaRose has since agreed to allow individual counties to decide to have more drop-off boxes if they wish to, but he has mandated that the location of those boxes has to be within the premises of the board of elections’ property, doing his best to make it as difficult as possible for people to cast their ballots.  

      It is worth remembering that, in 2004, the partisan actions of Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell may very well have played the decisive factor in George W. Bush getting reelected. Ohio continues to be a battleground state in 2020, and the actions of LaRose are dangerously reminiscent of what happened 16 years ago.

      In Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has managed to succeed where LaRose fell short. Abbott has issued a proclamation limiting the number of drop-off locations to just one per county. Elections are already underway even as the legal wrangling over Abbott’s decision is likely to ensue. Concerned by the changing demographics of the voting population in his state, Abbott’s actions show how scared Republicans are and the extent to which they will go to subvert democracy.

      Setting the Stage for a Grand Finale

      Should he lose, Trump has categorically refused to commit to an orderly and peaceful transfer of power to his Democratic opponent. The president believes that this election will be decided by the Supreme Court, not the people of America.

      The sudden demise of the liberal Supreme Court icon, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has provided Trump and the Republicans a fortuitous opportunity to shift the ideology of the court to decidedly conservative. No doubt, Democrats will do everything within their power to appeal to the logic and conscience of Republican senators to stop the confirmation of Trump’s nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, to replace Ginsburg just weeks before the presidential election. Unfortunately, both logic and conscience are in dangerously short supply, if not downright nonexistent, among Republican politicians in a Trumpian world.

      Can America see a blue wave of unprecedented proportion, awarding the White House to Joe Biden and flipping the Senate majority to the Democrats? Or will the machinations of Donald Trump and his coterie preclude such an occurrence from coming to pass? Whatever happens, if Trump fails to get the result he desperately craves, we should not be surprised to see more flagrant acts aimed at subverting democracy unfold before us.

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