US in political flux

S P SETH

Looking at the US political landscape, it is a scary country these days. The leading Republican aspirant, Donald Trump, is more like a schoolyard bully who is threatening to bring down the whole house. And in his case, his schoolyard is the world at large. He is threatening to take on the Chinese, be tough with the US’s European allies by making them spend more on their collective defence, and do the same with Japan and South Korea and even let them develop their own nuclear weapons. And, of course, by now we all know that he wants to build a wall to prevent Mexicans coming into the US and make Mexico pay for it, and send back about 11 million of them, regarded as illegals, back to Mexico. And he has branded most of them as rapists and criminals of all sorts, grudgingly conceding that some of them might even be nice. How generous of Trump!

And as far as Muslims are concerned, they simply are terrorists or potential terrorists and shouldn’t be allowed into the country. How he will deal with Muslims, who are already US citizens, if he were ever to become his country’s president, is too scary to think! It is not only that he is scary outside the US, he is even terrifying the country’s conservative establishment. An example of this was that National Review recently said in a thundering editorial that, “Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.”

 Whether or not Donald Trump is elected the president of the US, his kind of extremism, as represented by wide support for him in the Republican primaries, is dangerous all around, within and outside the country. Within the US, it is pushing the country even further to the right of the Tea Party movement. Imagine any shift further to the right of the Tea Party movement under Trump’s crass populism, and you have the makings of a perfect political storm.

And why has Trump been so successful in tapping into such populism. Michael Tomasky has explored this in a recent article in the New York Review of Books. In his view, the conservatives of all hues have been worried about “what is broadly called ‘culture’, by which we really mean the anger and resentment felt by older [as well as not so old] white Americans about the fact that the country is no longer ‘theirs’ and that their former status and authority no longer seem what they once were. This rubric takes in a number of issues— immigration, especially illegal immigration; same-sex marriage; a black president in the White House; all the things that conservatives bundle under the reviled label ‘political correctness’.”

In a weird sort of logic or illogic, a black president in the White House and the ever present threat of Muslim terrorism have tended to juxtapose in the minds of many among the Republicans. A 2015 Public Policy poll reportedly revealed that among Republicans 54 percent believed that Obama is a Muslim, and it is said to be 66 per cent among Trump supporters. According to the same poll, only 29 per cent of Republicans believed that Obama was born in the US. And Trump has been trumping this charge all through Obama’s presidency.

What it means is that the US is in a state of flux where conservatives and even, some among Democrats, believe that the country is in a dire situation because the United States has been too good trying to save the world without any financial contribution or gratitude from those receiving its largesse. And it needs to exact its price, telling the world---NATO, EU, Saudi Arabia, Japan, South Korea and others—that the US is not for a free ride. And if in the process NATO breaks up, or Japan and South Korea go nuclear to defend themselves against China or North Korea, so be it. There is this sense of disenchantment and frustration with the outside world that many Americans feel but were never able to articulate effectively, which Trump is doing it for them and they like him for it. Again, it doesn’t mean that he will win the presidency if he becomes the Republican Party’s presidential contender. What it means is that that Trump would have shifted the politics of the country, especially in the Republican Party, even further to the right of the Tea Party movement, which is quite scary.

The Democratic Party is undergoing an important ideological shake up as well, though it is internally transformative but not externally as disruptive. Bernie Sanders, with his avowed socialist views, is talking about equality and equity in a way no significant US political leader has done it before. And considering that he is giving Hillary Clinton---a traditional status quo leader so much beholden to Wall Street interests— a run for her money, is indicative of the political flux in the United States. On one hand, we have Trump appealing to the crass sentiments of people who fear losing control of their destiny and country to the unknown ‘other’, (a juxtaposition of all sorts of fears); and on the other we have Sanders who encapsulates many people’s fear that America is lost to corporate interests and we need to get it back. There is genuine concern among a wide swathe of people that the country is being governed in the interests of the top one per cent who control much of the country’s wealth and are able to subvert the country’s democratic processes by financing the electoral campaigns of their protégés.

Bernie Sanders was on to something when he said, during his election campaign, that, “We do not represent the interests of the billionaire class, Wall Street or Corporate America. We do not want their money.” He was thus drawing a sharp distinction between Hillary Clinton who is getting lots of money from Wall Street for her election campaign, and his own campaign dependent on small grassroots contribution raised by his young motivated volunteers. Whether or not Bernie Sanders will get the Democratic Party presidential nomination is anybody’s guess, but by coming so close he has crystallized many Americans’ desire for a fair and genuinely democratic society. The US is truly in a political flux. At times, there are segments of the electorate, which, oddly enough, would pick and choose both the Sanders’ message of fighting against inequality and, at the same time, cheer Trump when he rails against the loss of US manufacturing jobs to cheap labour and cheaper goods from developing countries, China being the prime example.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.