With the two major political parties in the USA offering what is but a Hobson’s Choice ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson%27s_choice ) to US voters by each backing a candidate who can even most charitably be called only a dismal choice, the oldest democracy of the world is undermining its own democracy and also its world dominance and playing a masochistic role of an iconic hero of an unfolding tragedy of immense proportions. Ironically, this happens in the very year when the voters of the largest but younger democracy of the world, India, demonstrated surprising maturity by showing that they are not beholden any more to personality cults or divisive party politics. US voter concern this year should not be on who wins the race, but rather how much more harm will come to the nation and the world from whoever that wins the race and gets his second term.
Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee won his first term as President mainly through divisive politics and fear mongering although with hindsight one must say he was helped by Barack Obama who threw his support behind an unelectable Hilllary Clinton upending a leading candidate of his own party. Also, that the key turning point in Biden’s own election success came mainly through the support of African American Congressmen did not help to attenuate the devisive feelings fanned by Trump. Stoking feelings of white supremacy and exploiting the fear that whites in the nation are becoming a minority and may eventually get marginalized, Trump has polarized the nation to an extent that the U of the abbreviation USA itself is today in doubt. Its states and people are now divided into irreconcilable ‘blue’ and ‘red’ blocks. No longer does any of Trump’s supporters feel the slightest compunction about displaying their bigotry openly or being totally uncivil even in the hallowed halls of the US Congress. Even groups like Italian and Cuban Americans that only a few decades ago were as hated and disliked as the present day Hispanic immigrants have joined his bandwagon.
The culmination of Trump’s disdain for democracy was, of course, the insurrection he engineered and the attempted takeover by force of the United States Capitol, the very symbol of democracy for over two centuries. That Trump can be a frontrunner in the Presidential race after that and even after being convicted on thirty four felony counts speaks for the depth to which the US has descended. A big chunk of the nation that was hitherto inspired by the high ideals of equality and justice for all is today following the demagogue Trump like the children of Havelin who followed the pied piper, this time into a deep ocean of ultranationalism, racism, and bigotry.
The only glimmer of hope is that a second term of Trump, like his first, may go without any major war. It indeed may, not so much due to the goodness of his character but more so due to his placing a higher emphasis on a Trump Tower in major cities of the world and pushing his personal financial interests over everything else. And that, he has to do now with even greater vigor given that he has had to spend so much just on his legal defense alone. But at what price? He has already threatened to curb democracy and free speech and to go after his political opponents in whatever way possible to extract revenge for what he asserts is injustice handed to him by Biden & Co. Already with the US Congress in total disarray and the US Supreme Court dominated by rabid conservative ideology, any semblance of balance of power appears to be totally absent. What is in peril through Trump is US democracy itself.
Certainly, Trump will pursue a policy of US isolation on the world stage and can be expected to offend other world leaders a lot more than in his first term setting back US international relations quite badly. His promises of economic prosperity and job growth will be as farcical and a failure as in his first term although some policies of his will benefit the richest small percentage in the nation. But none of this seems to concern the majority that supports him today for whom race, abortion and gender issues, religion (Christianity), and immigration (nay the halting of it) are the more important issues, enamored as they are by the rhetoric of nationalism and racism. Trump will be bad news to the world, but may actually be even worse for the US.
If the Republicans are failing the nation with their choice, the Democrats are no better and are backing one who is equally a bad choice. In that, they are betting solely on the advantages of incumbency despite that being not such a great advantage in itself as shown by the defeats of Carter, (the Senior) Bush, and recently Trump.
Biden certainly has made some great strides by way of successfully getting ‘the much overdue infrastructure bill to upgrade the failing infrastructure of the nation, and through that and a few other policies created many jobs. His initiative to bring back manufacturing to the USA as also to reduce the dependence on China for material and products, including key components for its strategic sector, will certainly bear fruit for the nation in the long run. One can even say that he has a genuine concern for the lower rungs of the society and is a man of much higher integrity than his rival.
But Biden’s overall performance both domestically and internationally leaves much to be desired, making him a great disappointment to even many of his former supporters who expected much better from his long experience in government and chronological maturity. In many ways, it will not be an exaggeration to say that he has shown himself to be a demagogue too and to be a man of the previous century with no good understanding of the changed, multipolar world of today. His blind support of Israel and continued supply of arms and support to Israel despite its blatant human rights violations against unarmed innocents, shows a callousness towards the deaths and cruelty inflicted on innocent Gazans bringing to question whether he values all humans and human lives equally or whether he has his own hierarchy where some peoples are indeed expendable. His first act of a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan perhaps should have served as an indicator of this.
Domestically, Biden is viewed as having encouraged the worsening of illegal immigration in the southern border of the USA by not coming down from the get go as strongly as he does now against illegal immigration. Despite the ballooning of the federal budget and the US debt during the Covid period, he did not place a sufficient high priority on shoring up the economy and taking steps to curb an impending inflation, but instead chose many expensive populist schemes like student debt write offs without regard to the moral hazard such policies create or to the creedence it adds to the allegation that he and his party would ‘give it all away to ‘em people to retain power.’ His priority should have been to retain the Congress for his party and to have paid more heed to the famous statement, ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ of one of his predecessors.
Biden’s international policies, spearheaded by his Secretary of State Blinken - of Ukrainian descent and of Jewish persuasion - has got him embroiled in two wars, of which one can be attributed only to his not coming to grips with the fact that US is no longer the only superpower in the world and the other to his being a captive of a domestic vote bank and campaign contributors. In neither case, he has shown a strong commitment to peaceful resolution of the conflicts except as lip service. In that, he displays a machismo and hegemonic tendencies of a past century. Both these involvements have done much harm to both the US economy and to US reputation. As though this were not enough, he has taken on China at the most inopportune time and too openly pushing it closer to Russia adding to the danger of the Ukraine conflict escalating to a third world war between major blocks nuclearly armed and capable of total destruction of each other. The combination of all these has also created a serious supply chain problem for the US (and to other world economies) adding to inflation and other economic woes. Finally, on top of these, he has taken steps to garner Russian wealth deposited with the US thereby degrading the trust of every depositor sovereign nation to the extent that there is genuine fear now that the US cannot be trusted as the banker of the world. The long term effect of this could very well be that the dollar may cease to be the dominant exchange currency of the world. Already, we are seeing nations, including supposedly opposed ones like India and China, trading bilaterally in their currencies. Biden’s re-election is bound to embolden him even more on his absurdly destructive path and make the US (and the world) much worse.
Now, the reader can see why I asserted up front that the real concern for the US voter should be not who gets elected, but how much more harm he will do to the nation and to the world. November 2024 is still far away, and much could change between now and November. But as of this moment, the future of the USA and the world are very much in flux, and all one can do is to pray for some divine intervention.
The problem faced by the US today appears to be endemic to all democracies. For instance, politics in India, despite what I said earlier, is increasingly driven by divisive demagoguery, and corruption is rampant. The comparison is all the more pertinent since what is happening here in the US is now turning our nation into a so-derided Third World.
Democracy seems to be its own destructive force through the freedom it gives that can be exploited to incite people based on wrong arguments. Voter education, unbiased media, and even more importantly taking money and disregard for the law and accepted norms out of politics are most important in preserving democracies and making them really function for all people. Laws alone shall not suffice, nor will a long history of being a democracy. Indeed, as in the words of a great poet, "Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay." Those are the lessons unfolded by the current state of affairs in the USA today. May God bless America and the world!
