Things fall apart

Is it over yet? Safe to peep out between my fingers? OK, tell you what: on the count of three, we all uncover our eyes together... one... two...

Ugh, what a mess! OK, I can’t tell you exactly what we’ll all see tomorrow – that’s today, if you’re reading this – but it’s a fairly safe bet that the sight won’t be pretty. And not just because the winner of the US Presidential will be known by then, and my gut feeling tells me it will be Donald Trump. 

To be honest, I think the actual choice of the American electorate, at this stage, is beside the point really. What we witnessed in this US election campaign is a foreboding of the possible collapse of the entire democratic structure itself. And while I’m normally the first to argue that other countries have no business poking their noses in what is ultimately an internal electoral decision by a sovereign State... the pattern unfolding in America is not much different from that in Europe, all the way down to tiny Malta. As such, it affects us all.

There are clear, visible destabilising agencies at work. They seem to be more busily at work in the USA than elsewhere, granted.... but that also makes sense, because America has been a democracy longer than most places. Certainly much longer than us.

OK, let’s consider the possible outcomes, of which – surprisingly, for a country of 340 million people – there are only two. On the surface, it is hard to imagine two more utterly different candidates in every conceivable way. One a woman, the other a woman-groper. One a long-established political veteran, who has occupied various government roles; the other a newcomer who hurtled into politics like Tazz the Tasmanian Devil (whom he even vaguely resembles). 

Even on the rare instances where policy was debated in this campaign, Clinton and Trump proved to be diametrically opposed on practically everything. One an internationalist, the other an isolationist, etc. One pursuing more international trade deals, the other promising to erect trade barriers.

It is as though they are standing on either lip of an unbridgeable chasm, that is about to suddenly gape wide open. It doesn’t matter who actually wins under those circumstances; the country will fall apart either way.

Scratch a little deeper, and the situation becomes infinitely more precarious. Apart from being so irreconcilably different from each other, both camps have been systematically eviscerated by internal ruptures of their own. It is debatable which side suffered more in this regard: again, they present antithetical manifestations of the same scenario. 

In Donald Trump’s case, the chosen Presidential nominee was abandoned in droves by his own party, The Republicans... yet not so visibly by the electorate itself. Clinton’s camp, on the other hand, emerged strengthened at party level from its brutal confrontation with Bernie Sanders... but remains deeply unpopular with huge swathes of typical Democrat voters, for reasons that would be too complicated to go into here.

Much has already been written and said about both parties’ internal problems, and how they might affect either candidate’s chances. But nowhere near enough, I fear, about the consequences of either actually winning under such circumstances.  

If Trump wins today, it would be technically against the odds... latest polls have him three percentage points behind (which is within the standard margin of error). This in turn means that he can only win by clawing into categories of voters who wouldn’t normally vote Republican. There is no shortage of such categories... the only problem is that Donald Trump has systematically insulted or outraged every single last one of them, almost on an individual basis. Starting with women, who account for 50% of the electorate... and who also have a woman candidate to vote for.

On paper, it seems impossible: yet it clearly remains within the realm of possibility, for one reason that has largely been overlooked in this election. The people’s hunger for change.

If anything, Trump’s ascendancy – mirrored by that of Bernie Sanders, another outsider who defied prognostics – only illustrates just how urgent this desire has become. Some people have already publicly argued that a ‘change for the worse’ is still a ‘change’... and still, therefore, more preferable to the status quo. Extreme reasoning, perhaps; but then again, it has been a rather extreme election.

Another possibility is that the American people – and not just them, naturally – have begun to see through the facade of campaign propaganda in far greater numbers than ever before. They know they are effectively being duped into a ‘choice’ of only two candidates, neither of whom has any real intention of actually changing how the system fundamentally works. Real power, they can perceive, does not rest with elected Presidents, but with the country’s military-industrial complex. These voters could easily conclude that a powerless President Trump would shake things up far more drastically – possibly even unintentionally - than an equally powerless President Clinton. And they could well have a point.

Trump could, of course, destabilise democracy in other, far less innocent ways. From day one there has been a thuggish element to his populism, and its effect on people... and, for his own political ends, he is already trying to dismantle popular trust in the electoral system itself. His ‘rigging’ claims are not as random or irascible as they are made to appear: they are a part of a clearly thought-out strategy to undermine a future Clinton Presidency from the outset.

Having said this, a Clinton presidency will in a sense already have been undermined, even without Donald Trump to sabotage it. This is largely because Clinton’s main obstacle in this campaign was not Trump himself – no typical Democrat voter would be attracted to him anyway - but winning back the huge chunk of her own party that DIDN’T want her to win the nomination... to such an extent that many are likely to vote for Green candidate Jill Stein instead, or not vote at all.

That, too, illustrates the lengths to which today’s electorate will go, to force a change that won’t (and can’t) arise through the system itself. Even if Clinton does win the election, and handsomely too... she would have been propelled into victory by a desperate coalition: hammered together not to elect the first female US President, but to avoid what the various components consider (rightly or wrongly) an unmitigated disaster for the country.

If Clinton wins, that fear will be buried under the rubble of Trump’s defeated campaign. And when the dust settles, the dynamics will be totally different. There will be no more glue left to gel the precarious Clinton coalition together: her own voters are likely to become her most outspoken detractors; she will not necessarily enjoy the automatic popular support needed to implement reforms; in brief, the problems that dogged Obama’s administration are likely to seem a walk in the park by comparison.

Even if President Clinton overcomes such immediate obstacles, a sizeable chunk of the electorate will still be left feeling cheated and exploited for the umpteenth time... coerced into voting for the lesser of the two evils, and thus reluctantly complicit in the preservation of a status quo they themselves wanted to vote against.

I could draw all sorts of parallels with the political situation here, and all sorts of other countries too. But there’s no point, as I’m sure you all can too. Personally, don’t see how that sort of structure can possibly hold up for much longer than it already has. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and all that. Who knows? In the US, it might all come tumbling down before our very eyes today. 

But unless something is eventually conceded to the growing chorus of voices demanding genuine change – in the United States of America, as everywhere else – it will all come crashing down in flames sooner or later.