By next Wednesday evening, the world will have changed a little bit due to the outcome of the presidential and legislative elections in the United States of America. And, if Donald Trump wins, that change is likely to be greater than in if Hillary Clinton wins. Of course, some women’s rights activists may argue that the election of the US’ first female executive head of state would make a Clinton victory more historic than that of a Trump. Granted. But how much lone women political leaders have been able to actually achieve something for women in the men’s world of conventional politics, can be seen in the tenure in office of Margaret Thatcher, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Cory Aquino and Sheik Hasina Wazed: little.
I say the world will change ‘a little bit’, advisedly. In the past century, the United States of America emerged as the dominant world power, albeit with a powerful coalition of regional powers and limited world powers all supportive of America’s sway. Today, the United States is no longer as pivotal as it once was, as little as fifty years ago. Nevertheless, a political shift in the US government yet certainly makes a dent in the global state of affairs even if that dent is now one of several, perhaps smaller ones, being made by a handful of rising world powers as well as a former superpower (Russia).
The USA remains the singlemost powerful country both economically and militarily. Its position as the most powerful founding-state of the UN and its leadership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the single most powerful global military bloc, makes the US still the sole global ‘super-power’.
Thus, the executive president of the USA has tremendous capacity to influence world politics. This influence ranges from sustaining on-going alliances and support networks to winning new allies while weakening (or defeating/eliminating) enemies. But this is only half the picture.
The gradual inter-connectivity between regions of the Earth that has evolved over the millennia of human history has resulted not only in the politics between states but also in a wonderful enrichment of culture and social life.
Many developing and newly developed countries owe the West for their political and economic system (while yet striving to recover from the triage of colonialism).
Sri Lanka too has followed the working models of democracy of the West. What is most intriguing about the ongoing presidential electoral battle has been that some of crucial pillars of modern western democracy have come into question and hot debate.
We, in the Third World, have often been told to learn from the liberal democratic systems of the West when it comes to issues such as social equality, gender equality, ethnic equality and criminal justice.
And it is precisely these issues that have been pulled up, from the very roots of American democracy as it were, and dashed about in furious election debates and media messaging.
The immediate policy issues that usually dominate in US elections – and in most democratic elections worldwide – were set aside in this US election cycle.
American voters are being asked to consider issues of imperial greatness, racial differentiation, the shutting out of migrating people on the basis of race. If, for example, women’s rights activists and feminists had hoped that the first female candidature would spark discussion of gender justice, they were disillusioned. Instead, the election discourse became full of crude sexual rhetoric and idiom (among other, similarly lurid, things).
In a sense, it must be seen as a digging up of the dregs of American civilisation, an exposure of its dark underbelly in the full glare of the camera lights and splattered across the world on TV screens and websites. But this dredging up of the ‘dirt’ has been so helpful for Americans to squarely confront their own ideological reality, their range of mindsets.
Surely this brutal exposure of sexism and racism on the one hand, and elitist duplicity and manipulations on the other has helped American society to learn of its previously unacknowledged foibles. Will this not help that society to learn lessons and move on? The very fact that most fundamental issues of political culture and civilisation are being debated so hotly and so transparently must be seen not as a shaming of America but as the wonderful working of a modern liberal democratic system at its highest operational pitch – elections.
To continue with that example of sexism : thanks to US news media, we Sri Lankan men have been given a solid dose of samples of sexist behaviour in the most overt and explicit manner. Now, can anyone deny that such notions as the arbitrary ‘man-handling’ of women do not lurk in many a male mind?
Most significant, however, has been the heated debate about America’s continued imperial dominance.
The Donald Trump slogan of making America “great again” is surely an explicit recognition that the United States is, finally, losing its super-power dominance. Indeed, the very public questioning by Trump of the US’ NATO responsibilities as well as its responsibilities in relation to other strategic alliances, has, already further weakened those alliances.
After all, all the allied states concerned will now factor in the possibility of Washington not immediately responding to alliance military requirements. It was not important for the Republican candidate or for his audience that these alliances were all crucial for the US’ continued global dominance. These alliances were simply reduced to the dimension of financial costs. In any case, the language of ‘super powers’ is no longer valid in the emerging multi-polar world where even a guerrilla movement (however barbaric) without any state structure can thumb its nose at the most sophisticated military forces, if momentarily.
Whoever wins in those United States, the world has watched a nation openly confront many of its hidden devils. We can then watch how a democratic system can have the sophistication to begin to deal with them. What the elections have shown is that the system is bigger than any narcissistic billionaire or wily sophisticate.
The societal divide has become so bitter that even the covering US news media is shocked by the intensity. Some 82 per cent of American voters say they dislike both main candidates. Whether or not a President Trump builds a wall on the Mexican border or whether a President Clinton attempts to assert dominance over Syrian skies (both highly unlikely), at least there has been some valuable introspection by the American citizens themselves about the nature of their polity and their own political culture.
We can, and should learn, too. What about our sexism? Our racism? Our elitism? And our blind self-love?