Editorial | Hoping to end the American nightmare

Americans have been saying that today’s presidential election, or, perhaps, more accurately, the culmination of the vote for the next president, between the Republican incumbent, Donald Trump, and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, is the country’s most consequential for decades. They are right. But the outcome is vital not only to the United States (US). It is important to the world.

Who sits in the White House has always been important globally and especially so in the three-quarters of a century since the Second World War and the shaping of the existing international order. First as the leading, and then as the only superpower, America was the presumed guarantor of the global order, with its rules-based systems where small, vulnerable countries like Jamaica expected insulation from arbitrary behaviour by the powerful.

US leadership, however, was validated not only by its economic and military primacy. There was a sense, despite its not infrequent lurches into misadventure, that America was, essentially, a force for good. That imbued the United States with moral authority and the basis for its projection of soft power. There was faith in the strength of America’s institutions and its democracy, built on the precepts of Madison and Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers.

The four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, however, have been as revelatory of the United States and the nature of institutions as it has been of the man. They have confirmed America’s unresolved issues of race and exclusion and the fact that institutions, ultimately, do not exist apart from the individuals who maintain them. Acquiescent gatekeepers with narrow agendas make institutions vulnerable to corruption and corrosion. That is a crisis with which the United States is grappling under Mr Trump’s presidency.

A callow xenophobe of hollow moral core, and a pathological narcissist with a penchant for self-dealing, Donald Trump is absent of philosophy or ideology but for the instincts of an authoritarian. Yet, in 2016, despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, he, by quirk of America’s Electoral College, narrowly won the presidency.

Donald Trump’s reign has been bad for the United States, a perspective, we believe, that is shared by a significant majority of Americans. Domestically, he blatantly stokes racism against black and brown people while denying the country’s historic and unresolved problems of race and economic exclusion. Mr Trump is also a bigot and misogynist. His prevarications are multitudinous and incessant. The depth of Donald Trump’s incompetence, and cynical pursuit of personal interests, has been starkest in his denial of science and his politicisation of the coronavirus epidemic that has killed over 230,000 Americans.

Such corrosive impacts, though, are not contained within America’s borders. America’s global reach obliviates that.

TRASH GLOBAL ORDER

Indeed, Donald Trump’s America First agenda has meant a willingness to trash the global order and replace it with a reformed arrangement whose substance excludes protecting small, vulnerable countries. Rather, what is on offer is a 21st-century version of 19th-century great-power politics. Further, Mr Trump’s denial of science has extended to global warming and America’s walkout of the Paris Climate Accord, enhancing the existential threat to the planet from man-induced rising temperatures.

At the same time, Mr Trump has embraced illiberal, majoritarian leaders of the right like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Andrzej Duda, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Donald Trump’s presidency did not just happen and neither is the fact that he remains competitive in his bid for re-election. It was possible, in part, because he was able to appropriate the Republican Party and the complicity of critical institution actors of politics and state who not only colluded in their own corruption, but facilitated Mr Trump’s expansive interpretations of the power of the presidency.

We suspect that a substantial part of Mr Trump’s effort to remain in office, as is often the case with authoritarians, is self-preservation. But there is far more at stake. We fear for the survival of America’s institutions and what another four years of Donald Trump would mean for John Adams’ observation about the wont of democracies to “commit suicide” or consume themselves. We fear, too, that another term for Mr Trump might further weaken the ability of the world to act in concert to common challenges such as COVID-19 and that countries like ours will be further marginalised in his new global order.

Ultimately, the decision about America’s direction is in the hands of its voters and what they have been doing over the past several weeks, culminating today. Hopefully, unlike four years ago, pollsters and voters are in greater concert on the election’s outcome, and this American roller-coaster ride is nearing an end.