Democracy and American elections

Here’s what last week in American politics has taught me:

Democracy is alive and well; and

Democracy works.

Now I’m not referring to the outcome of the election, though for anyone who knows me well enough will know that I am happy/relieved/satisfied that the Trump presidency is likely at its end.

I’m referring to the election process itself.

Let me explain myself a little bit.

Fascism in the background

I wasn’t prepared, four years ago, for the Trump election. I’ll be very clear. The election of Donald Trump, to my mind, signified a fascist turn for the USA. By fascism I mean a governing philosophy that thrives on the glorification of strength and violence as a means of establishing power, the silencing of criticism and the avoidance of dialogue, the stripping of rights and dignity from those who are different. On emphasizing social divisions as a means of consolidating power. On elevating one group of people by trampling on others. On celebrating exceptionalism, the idea that that the favoured group deserves its favour because of some inherent superiority within itself—“our” greatness versus the shit-hole-ness of others. And on the bolstering of that favoured group through force: deploying armies, creating internment camps, building border walls.

This turn towards fascism helped elect Donald Trump. Trump didn’t create it: he is its embodiment. And in return, whether intentionally or by the way, the Trump reality legitimizes that fascist vision. The result? A state some members of the non-favoured groups took to calling AmeriKKKa.

Lest you think that I am singling out the USA, look around. Fascism is rising everywhere. Its voice is being heard in Brazil, in Great Britain, even in places like The Bahamas where we are ruled by men who are not white. We see it in the violence with which we talk about our Haitian brothers and sisters, in the bruises that Bahamian children and women carry under their clothes, in the words and rhetoric we use to dehumanize those people in our midst who are not heterosexual or cisgender, in the infantilizing of the citizenry in the way we impose our lockdowns. We see it in the separation of the Bahamian children of Ham, locked down in their homes and neighbourhoods, from the wealthy and white who move freely behind their walls and gates. Blackness is contagion, whiteness the badge of good health.

If one is a social scientist, the revival of fascism in the twenty-first century is not something that surprises. Fascism is often a predictable response to massive social change. It offers comfort to those for whom the world works well. It offers the promise promise that the world that has made you comfortable will be kept in place by hook or by crook—by force, even genocide, if need be. It stabilizes the world that is tipping, even if only for a little while.

And the west is tipping.

A diminishing west

Western society, built on guns and whips and ships and planes and bombs and factories and machines as much as on medicine and education and engineering, (and not so much on liberty, equality and fraternity)—is by definition a white male supremacist arrangement. It is individualistic and acquisitive. It rests on possession, on conquest, on dominion over nature (which many people misread as domination). It amassed its wealth not so much by merit and hard work, but by invasion and conquest, kidnapping and genocide, forced labour and forced migration and the establishment of centuries-old, states-wide death camps other people call plantations. And it’s modelled its religions in its own image, ultimately replacing Catholicism, with its paternal God, its veneration of motherhood, and its soft and suffering Christ, with a muscular, well-armed, masculine Christianity: a kind of Teddy Roosevelt of a religion, speaking not all that softly and carrying a really big stick packed with gunpowder.

William Allen Rogers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This world was justified by the idea of civilization as a ladder, with the dark-skinned at the bottom and the white man at the top, bearing the burden of civilizing the rest of the world, by force if need be. And it was bolstered by a population explosion that made Europeans the largest group of people in the world for roughly a century.

This is the world western civilization made.

But in twenty-first century western society, this world that favoured the white, the male, the heterosexual, the hypermasculine, and the Christian is eroding. Something else, something alien, is pushing that world aside.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the reality that gave western civilization its power has been changing the world over. Slowly. Surely. Inexorably.

There has been, first of all, a shift in population. White men are a world minority now. To use the words of the innocuous children’s hymn that sowed racist seeds in our tiny minds, the red, the yellow and the black far outnumber the white in the global population.

This shift in population brings with it a shift in culture. The dominant narrative about the world and our respective places with it is now a hurly-burly of disparate voices, of different stories. Now, as we move into this century’s third decade, that change is bearing real consequence within democracy itself. As the population of white people, particularly of white men, shrinks, so does their democratic power. The world created on the myth of white supremacy, the world that was shaped and dominated for the past five centuries by the European man, is disappearing.

It’s a change that is evident throughout the USA. And that change is terrifying those who remain.

It’s the zombie acopalypse, embodied.

And so, fascism. And so the existence, the popularity, of Trump.

The Trumpist response

Donald Trump, for all his buffoonery, his bluster, his cartoon-friendly vanity and bullying, is a symbol of these dying times. He is, for those threatened by their growing irrelevance in and centrality to the world, a saviour.

I wasn’t prepared for his election. It frightened me. The world is changing, but it’s not yet changed. And times of change are dangerous times. All too often people die in them.

I tend towards pacifism. I support gun control. I would rather have dialogue with a enemy than attack straight away. But I have quietly told every non-white friend and family member I could reach in the USA to arm themselves, because they can. It’s a dangerous time if your skin is not white. Trump as president personified that danger.

Because I look at the world in this way, I fully expected four more years of Trump. Not on his own merits, but because I was not convinced that the American democratic systems were still robust enough to withstand they way they were being assaulted by the American fascist turn. I have watched so many of the checks and balances of the American system overturned or ignored, watched as the fourth estate—the media, that last bastion of a democratic government—grow so fragmented by algorithms and economic profiling that there was no ground left for the dialogue on which democracy thrives.

I had lost the audacity of hope.

The triumph of democracy

This week has taught me something different.

It’s reminded me of why democracy is so powerful.

Why it works.

Why it’s so frightening to would-be despots and tyrants who want to control the world.

The self-same things that put the cracks in the American system are the very things that can repair it: the individual voice, the individual’s power, the individual vote.

American politicians may have abandoned the democratic systems and principles, but the American people have not.

This is why I was not at all impatient that the counting of the vote took—is still taking—so long. It is taking as long as it is supposed to; the checks and balances built into the American democratic system are working, even working well. Let the counting continue, I say. Let the run-offs take place. Let the voice of the American people be heard, and heard in full. Let the voters prevail.

It doesn’t matter to me that so many people voted for Trump. The United States of America is still a democracy, and that is what democracy is: one’s right to hold one’s belief, and to choose according to that belief, no matter what the outcome may be. That half the country supported Trump is no surprise to me at all; white Americans are still a majority—just—and they are trying to hold on to what they have. They have that right.

But so did the people who voted against him as well. And that, too, comprises half the country. It’s a challenging time, and democracy may be strong enough to weather it after all.

Last words

Am I happy that Biden and Harris have prevailed? I am. Happy, surprised, and very cautiously hopeful.

Am I dismayed or surprised that the struggle was so long and drawn out and hard fought? Not in the least.

That struggle is what democracy is all about. And the peace that accompanied it is even more important than the struggle itself.

Democracy lives. Let us watch the whole process, and learn.

And then let us do everything we can to make the democracy we have here at home do the best job it can.