By Annie Domini
The United States of America is going through the quadrennial process of electing the 46th president, or re-electing the incumbent despot Donald Trump, heavily challenged by the mild Democrat Joseph Biden. At the time of writing this column, Biden has secured more votes than any president in the history of the United States. But, cannily enough, his lead is razor-thin, thus clearly establishing how popular Trump remains among his supporters. US observers are saying no matter who wins, Trump will remain the “president of Red America”.
Given the slim lead and the humungous voter turn-out, both in person and via mail-in ballots, America is clearly on the edge. The New York Times election needle keeps quaking furiously, and the famed pollsters Nate Silver and Nate Cohn get cursed aplenty over how they underestimated Trump the fan base. This, despite ample evidence on social media, which saw staggering engagement for far-right fake news items, particularly on Facebook, while the mainstream media gradually learned to counter Trump’s blatant lies and repeated incitements to white supremacist violence.
Swing states or not, America right now is a deeply divided country, reminiscent of the mid-nineteenth century civil war era, or the 1960s civil rights movement years. Trump might be an incompetent sociopath but he’s very well a sociopath who entertains via performing overt white supremacy, the deep underbed of American history. Racial fascism and racial capitalism, systemic exploitation of black economic and social labour, is the substratum of American “exceptionalism”, this oldest and flawed democracy. Seething under “universal values” have been policies and systems that have marginalised, devalued and disenfranchised millions for two centuries. Any progressive, democratic, grounds-up movement within America has been about bridging the massive gaps between the historically privileged and their victims. Potential loss or reclamation of longstanding privilege, such as losing the racial upper hand, and by implication, the socio-economic top spot, is the premise on which most of the American elections have been fought. The 2020 polls are thus both typical and unprecedented in accurately representing the tensions underlying American domestic politics.
The similarities, as well as differences, with India are staggering. USA, like India, is a country split wide open over issues so contentious that elections are haplessly failing to resolve them in a bipartisan manner. That almost 50 per cent of the voting population chose a lying racist sexist rape-accused, fraud-accused, almost-impeached Trump is a strong indication over extreme anxieties determining American politics today. It’s not even a clear-cut black versus white binary as Trump is supposed to have garnered support from Latinos, even sections of African-Americans and LGBT peoples. While American writer Isabel Wilkerson compares the American racial structure with the Indian caste system, the multiple fault-lines nevertheless portray a society in deep churning trying to be timelessly repressive in modern ways and resisting the oppressive innovations.
Trumpism and Modism are similar to the extent that both have branded institutions as unnecessary to political success, preferring telegenic performance over substantial critique of any real institutional shortcomings. Both are adept at exploiting chronic grievances, playing off one community of vulnerables against another. Add to that the gargantuan mis/disinformation ecosystems created by the near-totalitarian States that both have created, rivalling Soviet-era Russia in propaganda, but missing deplorably its super scientific temper. In fact, in both America and India, the divisions are, more than anything else, along the lines of information versus mis/disinformation, reality versus delusions, comprehensive democratic equality versus entrenching hierarchies of race, class, gender, religion and nativism.
Yet, there’s a crucial difference between India and America, and that is the institutions in America, despite the abysmal state they are in, still function with some degree of objectivity. In India, the capture of every institution – whether the judiciary, the media, the Election Commission, the tribunals overseeing environmental, land, water resources, forests, etc – is complete. Legislature in India has been made almost redundant with the brute parliamentary majority of the ruling BJP, which steamrolls every oppressive law through Parliament by the sheer dint of numbers and disregard for constitutional values. While the courts in Georgia and Michigan dismissed a despotic Trump’s lawsuit to stop counting the ballots, courts in India disregard any legitimate grievances against the extremely questionable electronic voting machines, and this obsession with quick results in place of accurate results where every vote matters.
Elections alone are woefully inadequate to address the material and symbolic hurts that communities are nursing both in India and America. The world’s largest and oldest democracies are seeing unprecedented churns, seeing civil wars in instalments between the divided segments. On top of that, the ravages of Covid-19 have unsheathed an entrenched irrationalism and disbelief in science embedded in religious fundamentalism of various shades. Even if America evades the Indian destiny that re-elected Narendra Modi in 2019, Red America and Blue America wouldn’t see eye to eye for a long, long time. (IPA Service)