Donald Trump’s White House ‘Waapsi’

The great mistake many made, especially political scientists, was to unwisely think that democracy would be an enduring feature of the international global order. It was felt that wave upon relentless democratic wave would make democracy spread to every corner of the world, even China and Russia. In American writer Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, a demagogic candidate called Buzz Windrip wins the race to the White House in 1936, edging out Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the nomination by promising hope to the hopelessly poor. This is a book that should be read widely as it feels like it was written for our time. It challenges most peoples’ complacency about the certitudes of democracy. The novel’s central character, the editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper, Doremus Jessup, reflects on perverse assumptions that Americans are prone to making: “Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine; Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.”

Democrats have only themselves to blame for their hopelessly unimaginative election campaign that banked on Trump’s despicability to deter voters. There was the Gaza genocide of an elephant in the electoral room, parked there courtesy the formidable American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which neither the Democrats nor the Republicans had spine enough to call out for what it was. The “Israel has the right to defend itself” nostrum became the American equivalent of the “Four legs good, two legs bad” slogan in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Democrats did not heed early-warning indicators from the crucial swing state of Michigan where understandably upset Arab voters contemplated a vote to punish the Democrats, either by voting for the Green Party’s Jill Stein, or unbelievably, Trump himself. An incredible 42% of voters in the Arab-dominated city of Dearborn in Michigan voted for Trump.

What the Future Holds

Trump’s victory may very well mean an end to democracy in the near future. There is no reason why the pieces of the democratic kaleidoscope, so rudely shaken by the Trump victory, cannot fall back in place in a more resplendent pattern in the future. That would require some thinking on the part of American citizens. Unfortunately, “thinking” becomes a rare commodity in the capitalist cornucopia of America. It is not available to the unemployed, socially dislocated workers of the de-industrialised rust belt of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. If out of despair, the rust-belt voted for Trump, should you really blame them from the condescending heights of liberal elitism as Hillary Clinton did?

Then there are the privileged who can ‘buy’ their way to think, the bright youngsters who get to go to America’s fabled universities, the Ivy-League on the East coast and the likes of Stanford and Berkeley on the West coast, peppered with the bright academic recruits America attracts in large numbers from across the world, and most certainly from India. The majority of them are too burdened by student loans, turning them into slouched academic workers, forever lost in the forested footnotes of their abstruse theses on the arcaneness of neoclassical economics or post-colonial theory, so tragically missing the wood for the trees. America requires blue sky thinking, but not the one packaged in corporate power point presentations, but the one that can match the unending openness of the blue skies over the expansive prairies of the country.

And yet, a promising sign was the campus protests against Israeli actions in Gaza. These protests have outstripped the 1960s anti-Vietnam war protests. That “flower power generation” as it was called, could be coopted into the capitalist structure as it transformed itself in the 1970s. The radical young voices of the 1960s could be domesticated by the relentless logic of a transformed post-Fordist capitalism. The existing capitalist structure may not be able to coopt today’s young student protesters, which means that the future may critically hinge on them.

Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, who recently retired from Columbia University, addressed some of those students outside the university and told them that they were on the right side of history. In an interview published in the British newspaper, The Guardian (October 8, 2024), Khalidi expressed happiness that he would no longer be a “cog in that machine”. He also shared his horror at the way universities and higher education have become a ‘‘hedge fund-cum-real estate operation”. That also explains why big blue sky thinking no longer happens in American universities. To redeem its democracy, courtesy its universities, the ideas of one of America’s most brilliant academics, the late 19th- and early 20th-century economist Thorstein Veblen should be heeded. In a 1918 book, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Veblen argued that matters of higher education should never be reduced to “business principles and pecuniary gain”.

Democracy’s Last Chance Saloon

The unseating of Trump in the Biden Presidential victory of 2020 was a kind of last chance saloon for democracy. The first year of the Biden presidency was actually not bad, as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act pumped massive amounts of money to lift the American economy out of the Coronavirus-induced slump. Then in early 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened and Biden committed the US to the defense of Ukraine’s sovereign integrity. The following year in 2023, as Israeli aggression on Gaza began after October 7, Democrats could not commit themselves to the sovereign integrity of Palestine. Here was hypocrisy that could not be hidden, as is hegemony’s wont. The Biden presidency went completely downhill after that and with it have gone all hopes of redeeming liberal-democracy electorally. Kamala Harris in her short-lived presidential campaign, dully copy-pasted the Biden line.

There was hope in the Biden presidency and it was best embodied on Biden’s inauguration day when the young, Black, Harvard- educated Amanda Gorman read out her poem The Hill We Climb. In a bright yellow coat against a brilliant blue Washington sky in late January 2021, she proclaimed that the “norms and notions of what just is, is not justice”. Gorman seemed to capture the prosaic political philosophy of John Rawls in poetry. Here was another Black person’s ringing rhetoric, rising for a brief moment, only to come crashing down against the rocks of racial injustice that is modern America. Twelve years earlier the first Black man to enter the White House, Barack Obama, had with the deft defiance of his eloquence, roused a crowd by saying, ‘‘Yes, we can!’’ After Trump’s defeat in 2020 and shortly afterwards in 2022 when demagogues like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil were beaten and the young Gabriel Boric was elected President of Chile, it seemed that the far-right could be beaten electorally. Alas, fascism is proving that it is not so easily electorally flushed away.

As the drum beat of war does not seem to end in the Middle East, the concerned cosmopolitan citizen may have to adapt that famous slogan of the runaway globalisation that has got us into this mess in the first place, by countering fascism both locally and globally. One way of doing that is to boldly envision a new world order that is more decent, more democratic, more equitable and more hospitable (Arranged in the lexical ordering preferred by American political philosopher John Rawls). It is one that must guarantee housing, healthcare and education (not arranged lexically) as public goods. Public goods that spread what economists call a positive externality, that is not confined to rational individuals, but whose benefits redound to society as a whole. It must tackle the two most crucially existential issues that could spell calamity for humanity: climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). It is contained in one word that most Americans have unthinkingly recoiled against—Socialism.

(Views expressed are personal)

Amir Ali teaches at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU, New Delhi

(This appeared in the print as 'Trump’s White House ‘Waapsi')