What The US Election Tells Us About America

'Nothing in the present circumstances permits such a benign reading of the US election, unless of course one has been deluded into thinking that America is and remains exceptionally great,' writes Vinay Lal.

Image: AFP

It appears, at least as of this moment, that Joe Biden is poised to legitimately claim victory and prepare to head for the White House in January 2021. A considerable segment of the American people will feel greatly relieved and what many characterize as the ‘nightmare’ of the last four years appears to be coming to an end. Biden had, among other things, declared this election as a referendum on ‘decency’ and many Americans will doubtless feel grateful that their country, long accustomed to viewing itself as the world’s greatest power, the leader of the free world, and as a shining beacon of freedom and hope to the rest of the world, has had its reputation restored. There were fears that the election would be marred by violence but even international observers have declared themselves satisfied that the election has been conducted fairly, even if the Trump campaign team has filed suit to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted in Pennsylvania, and indeed little effort appears to have been spared in ensuring that voters had multiple options to cast their ballots in the midst of a major public health crisis.

However, nothing in the present circumstances permits such a benign reading of the US election, unless of course one has been deluded into thinking that America is and remains exceptionally great. The most brutal fact that must confront every observer is that, whatever the final outcome, nearly half of the electorate that went to the polls cast their lot with Donald J. Trump. He seems on the verge of losing the popular vote by around the same margin of 3 million by which he lost the popular vote in 2016. The balance of power in both the Senate and the House of Representatives has tilted a bit here or there, but in every other respect the election results seem to suggest that nothing, absolutely nothing, transpired in the last four years. Some of the most wretched politicians, all beholden to Trump, have able to keep their seats and some have even retained them with a thumping majority. That Trumpism without Trump will endure and flourish is all but certain. It is as if time had come to a standstill in the last four years. This is a fact most chilling to comprehend.

For days before the election, there was much talk of a Biden landslide. The polls were nearly unanimous in predicting a solid win for Biden. But let us leave all this aside, since election polling, far from being anything even remotely resembling a science, is on the whole an unintellectual exercise and interesting largely to those who find thinking rather difficult. The most germane fact is that the US has become pitiable in the eyes of the world. The most powerful and richest country in the world, which dominates the world’s headlines and is inescapably part of the imaginary of people everywhere, has been unable to contain the coronavirus pandemic while impoverished countries such as Vietnam, which the US sought to bomb into extinction five decades ago, and Cuba, which the US has sought to isolate from the rest of the world through a brutal regime of sanctions, blockade, and political repression, have succeeded admirably in altogether halting the advance of the virus. The US death tolls exceeds that of every other country in the world, and exceeds the death count in India by around one lakh. Around 1000 people are dying in the US every day and yesterday over a lakh people tested positive. All this has not merely happened under the watch of Trump: not only has he been declaring since March that the virus is disappearing, but the helter-skelter of the policies of his administration have led tens of thousands of Americans to a premature death. And yet almost 50 percent of the voters evidently cherish him.

There is far more, of course, to Trump’s shenanigans, deceit, skullduggery, and criminality. He described Mexicans as rapists and his contempt for immigrants (especially from, to use his own language, “shit-hole” countries) is palpable. He excluded Muslims from the US with preemptory “Muslim bans” and would all too gladly deport the Muslims that are in the US if he had the power to do so. Though he has described his wealth as running into billions, and his golf courses, office buildings, and luxury residential towers are tastelessly adorned with large bold letters bearing his name, he paid all of $750 in federal income tax in 2017 and there have been years when he paid no taxes at all. Waitresses, clerks in grocery stores, store attendants, and deliverymen habitually pay more in taxes than Trump did, but the President attributes this to the fact that they are “dumb” and he is “smart”. He prides himself on his ability to engage in massive tax evasion and is equally a swindler, judging from published records about his career as a developer and owner of luxury properties. At least twenty women have come forward with allegations of sexual impropriety or assault on the part of Trump and his various pronouncements leave no doubt that he is a misogynist. But the indictments against Trump constitute a story of Biblical proportions, far exceeding the Biblical admonitions against adultery, greed, larceny, and other sins. He is at heart a white supremacist and has lost no opportunity over the years to suggest that the United States is fundamentally a white Christian country and that all others live in it at the pleasure of the master race. American cities have burned many times before he took office, but he has set the country aflame with his openly declared love of white nationalists and barely disguised hatred of “the radical left” and the “Socialists” who allegedly “hate our country”. And yet almost 50 percent of the electorate decided this election to cast its lot with him.

Joe Biden has said on many an occasion that “the American people at heart are decent, honorable people.” Referring on the day before the country went to the polls to the rancor, hostility, and bitterness that have characterized the entire election season and American politics with its deep divide between Democrats and Republicans in recent years, Biden remarked: “It’s not who we are, not what America is.” What this election has demonstrated is precisely the opposite: though some might take heart and encouragement from half of the electorate’s repudiation of Trump and everything he stands for, the other half of the population has shown that the cruelty of the Republican Party, a party which celebrates obscene wealth, xenophobia, racial hostility to non-whites, misogyny, crass masculinity, a frightening insularity, and a fierce determination to ensure that white elites can enjoy their dominance within the US and American hegemony around the world, is entirely acceptable to them. If that is the American way of life, then the world must stand behind the firm rejection of this way of life. What the Election of 2020 has shown is that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for the rest of the world to turn to the US and it is time for them to allow their imagination to run without the United States of America.

(Vinay Lal is a writer, blogger, cultural critic, and Professor of History at UCLA)

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