Lessons from US election

It appears that Joe Biden will, by the slimmest of margins, be the 46th president of the United States of America. To be accurate, he will be history’s book entry as such. In the light of Biden’s waning cognitive faculties, the exercise of executive power will likely increasingly be that of vice-president Kamala Harris.

But Biden’s victory, if it survives Trump’s predictable resort to the courts, reveals a reality very different from the Democratic Party-led media narrative before the election. It turns out that Trump’s 2016 victory was not the momentary aberration of a nation that would recover with nothing more serious to show for its brain fart than some embarrassment.

Despite a terrain that overwhelmingly favoured the Democrats – economic uncertainty and joblessness; the administration’s Third-World response to Covid-19; a waning US reputation internationally; and a media that shamelessly pandered to Biden – the right has not been routed.

The Democrats failed to win the Senate and they face a reduced majority in the House. And the likely loss of the presidency was by a whisker. Given that Trump is as deeply loathed by many conservatives as he is by the left, that is astonishing. It shows that assumptions that Republican support is ebbing inexorably, dependent as it is on a dying constituency, that of old white males, is wrong.

Another obvious lesson, one that the Democrats are incapable of learning, is the limits of wokeness as a vote catcher. Overwrought transgender sensibilities, intersectionality, white fragility and deep thoughts on what is appropriate pronoun use, are fringe issues.

Most voters, including many on the left, clearly don’t give a gender-fluid toss. If Trump’s last roll of the dice does reach the US Supreme Court, it will be an interesting stress test for a judiciary that has, for almost two and a half centuries, mediated with considerable skill the competing interests of the executive, the legislature and “We the People…”.

In the past, the sequentially partisan appointment of justices nudged constitutional interpretations first this way, then that way, but over time in a generally progressive direction. Trump’s string of conservative appointments has made it possible to replace a nudge with a shove and in so doing, may unleash a backlash that changes the entire judicial landscape. It’s not all negative.

A salutary effect of the Trump years has been that American assumptions of the innate superiority of their nation and their democratic structures lie shattered. Bitter social divides, long successfully glossed over, can now be seen to have become worse and will have to be addressed.

And in one important aspect, this election has given a renewed glimpse of one of the most critical factors to the health of a democracy – citizen participation. To vote is to believe that your voice matters, even if you are only one person among 330 million.

Voter turnout this year has been the highest since 1900 and by far the biggest in the modern era. Faced with implacable opponents of opposite ideological stripe, both sides organised and campaigned. And the individual voters turned out, often in the face of efforts to discourage them, to record their preferences.

Compare that to South Africa. As things have got steadily worse, voter turnout here has steadily dropped. We appear to have no confidence in our abilities to rearrange our political landscape by filling out a ballot.

Maybe one of the world’s oldest democracies can still teach one of the world’s youngest a thing or two.

William Saunderson-Meyer.

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