At a campaign event, in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S. | Photo Credit: REUTERS

In America, surviving the messiah

The election results reveal a slow but potentially tectonic change in what Americans want from their leaders

by · The Hindu

America has spoken. The 2024 United States presidential election has delivered an outcome that, once again, belied the polls, which, until the day before the results came, insisted that the prospects of the two candidates in the fray, Republican and former U.S. President Donald Trump and Democrat and current Vice-President Kamala Harris, were poised on a razor’s edge. Instead, November 5 turned out to be a day of reckoning for the Democratic Party, as it watched one swing State after another slip out of its grasp and tip the election map of the country into deep red territory.

Mr. Trump, in his acceptance speech, spoke of the “incredible” MAGA movement that had put him back in the seat of power to “help the country heal” — yet in the same utterances, referred to certain U.S. media as the “enemy camp” and promised to “seal up those borders”. Trump will be Trump. But will he be a Trump to fear even more than what he was in early 2017, when he delivered a dark and tempestuous speech on Inauguration Day, now known as the “American carnage” address? Time will tell, of course, but there are some clues.

U.S. Elections 2024 results | LIVE updates

The election results reveal a slow but potentially tectonic change in what Americans want from their leaders — the global mood of transactionalism, individualism, nativism and populism — which the U.S. was at the forefront of articulating in 2016 — appears to have come full circle over eight years and seeped deep into the viscera of the voting public in the country. This might well explain the fact that Mr. Trump appears to be on track to not only win the popular vote by close to five million votes, and find victory in every swing State, but also consider himself to be the architect of a “red shift” in more than 90% of the 2,367 counties reporting complete results at the time of writing.

Explaining the inexplicable

Or else, how could the uncharitable assessment of the Biden-Harris administration record on the economy be explained? After all, at the end of four years of toiling through the once-in-a-generation devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic and its debilitating economic fallout, the 46th President and his team had brought unemployment down to a comfortably low point, wages were growing fast, and stock markets were at record highs. The price of milk and similar “household basket” goods was too high, some analysts have proclaimed — if so, was there a thought spared as to how the Biden White House brought inflation down to 2.4%, which is less than the long-term average, despite the heavy-lift of the post-pandemic economic stimulus?

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Simultaneously, voters in ever greater numbers and drawn from an ever-wider range of socioeconomic and regional cohorts were comfortable overlooking the fact that Mr. Trump faces four criminal indictments, is a convicted felon in a sordid saga of sexual involvement with an adult film star, and was impeached twice over charges relating to the obstruction of justice, to inciting insurrection and more. They were willing to set aside his routine denigration of minorities of all hues and his degrading comments on women. And they appreciated, nay, still welcomed, as they did in 2016, the fact that he was a disruptor and political fire-starter as much he was a poseur and a specialist in gimmickry and theatrics — all because Washington elites could not get their act together and expediently embark on a project of de-globalising the economy to save blue-collar jobs in the rust belt.

Unfinished agenda

If Mr. Biden could do no right, Mr. Trump could do no wrong, voters appear to say, in their unequivocal mandate of Tuesday. Now, possibly armed with a trifecta of power in the federal government should the House of Representatives join the White House and Senate and end up in Republican hands, Mr. Trump is free to coast on that mandate of trust and transform the edifice of U.S. policy and institutions in line with his paradigm, if it can be called that.

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He will begin with immigration, for that was the bogeyman of the 2024 episode of ‘American carnage’. While the memes on migrants to the U.S. “eating cats and dogs” flooded the comedy channels, there is a more serious undercurrent of “other-ising” peoples at play here, the dehumanising by a thousand cuts, all for the ultimate purpose, perhaps, of laying the ground for the promised mass deportations and — yet again — family separations that see migrant children held in unacceptable conditions away from their parents.

Next, a corporate tax cut is said to be in the works, and indeed, was also promised as a policy agenda. On the one hand, it is not clear how such a cut could impact inflation, and on the other, why would this promise hold appeal to say, a coal mine worker in West Virginia, quite clearly not a member of the elite group of Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives and shareholders, folks who stand to gain considerably from such concessions?

It is almost terrifying to open the can of worms that is a proposed Trump agenda for the world at large. The promised 10%-20% cross-cutting tariff on all $3 trillion worth of U.S. goods imports and a special, punitive 60% tariff on Chinese goods is sure to be the trigger for a retaliation-based trade war of uncertain proportions. If he resumes the Trump 1.0 plan of drawing America back inward and away from global, multilateral and regional engagements, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu will assume that he has a free hand to do more of what his country has done abundantly in Gaza and in other parts of West Asia; and Russia’s Vladimir Putin will gleefully press forward with terms to force Ukraine into a painful détente that is backed by Washington. The list goes on — and it is perhaps only four years down the road that the world will be able to lick its wounds — human toll, institutional damage, economic catastrophes — and chart a new way forward.

Post-truth world

Stepping back from the obvious contradictions between the rhetoric and promises of the Trump campaign and the interests of those who ended up voting for him in 2024, the broader philosophical question that the rise and rise of Trump begs is this: are the post-World War II liberal consensus, and its global cousin, the rule-based international order, dead in the water? Slightly less than 50% of the voters in this election — who threw their weight behind Ms. Harris with a fervent passion in the heat of mass mobilisation efforts for the Democratic Party — would answer, “No”.

They are the student protesters across U.S. universities who braved punitive actions by the university administration and the police to stand for Gaza. They are the Black Lives Matter activists who took to the streets to poignantly call out the moral repugnance of the excesses of law enforcement against minorities. They are the patient yet relentless advocates of common sense gun reform and comprehensive immigration reform, who do not shy away from telling the whole country about the plight of those at the receiving end of hawkish policies in these areas. No matter what the next four years hold for America, their message will be clear in 2028 — “We are still here.”

narayan@thehindu.co.in

Published - November 07, 2024 12:16 am IST