Who will win the US election in two weeks’ time? Is it of any consequence? I suspect Harris may have a slight edge, but unless she secures a significant victory in the popular vote which is matched in the electoral college there will be a backlash from the Trumpers on a far greater scale than 2020. Even if she wins big, there’s still likely to be a turbulent response, not least from an orange skinned old man fearful of missing out on his last chance. Even if this doesn’t spill out onto the streets it will certainly do so in the next Congress where virulent partisanship will make governing the US virtually impossible, and that’s even if the Democrats were to win control of both Houses (probably unlikely). This is after all the recent history of American politics. I stumbled across a book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (Thomas E, Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Basic Books, New York 2013). This is a very good primer on the relatively recent development of ultra-partisanship which has particularly overtaken the Republicans. Given its publication date, there is no mention of Trump in this book, but practically all the elements of what it means to be Trump were being lined up 20 or 30 years ago. Newt Gingrich can take a lot of the credit for this. Here’s something he said in 1984: ‘You have to give them [your opponents] confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.’ (p. 36) This is really about doing media, not politics in the old fashioned sense of making things work on The Hill. Gingrich sought to wreck the system (such as it was) in order to proclaim that the system was broken, and only the new insurgent force of reborn Republicans could set things right. The path to Trump has been a long time in the making and he is merely a kind of recipient shaman (and showman)channelling the ineluctable fears and hatreds of followers who have given themselves up to him. I would place him somewhere on the spectrum up to Jonestown. But he himself didn’t prepare the groundwork.
The trouble is, does my original question have an answer? Does the outcome of this election have any consequence? Well, maybe for women in the U.S. Maybe, on the margins for healthcare. Who knows, maybe for a more isolationist America, something which would be cheered by leftists the world over. The competition for votes in the US seems less concerned with policy than it is with personality. In Gingrich terms, it’s reduced to a shouting match. He should get the credit he deserves for turning things upside down.
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