A Dreadful Prospect

No one, other than Americans, should care about American politics. But we all do, and must, even though, as they say, all politics is local. The statement is true, of course, because an ordinary voter considers and lives his life in local terms. The question that, inevitably, he has to ask himself is, what is there in it for me?  In answering it, seldom, if ever, would he take into account larger issues outside his daily orbit as being relevant to his enjoyment of life or the pursuit of happiness.  A candidate seeking office is, therefore, constrained to stick to local bread-and-butter issues if he is to convince voters to cast in his favour. Ambitions and designs in the wider America and beyond are better left undeclared until voting is over and the candidate is well on his way to taking up his seat and position himself to pay back those who bankrolled his campaign. Then, and only then, would he or she begin to declare opinions relating to more global issues. Up till then, local affairs dominate and the needs of the local man- or woman-in-the- street, fearful of many things, remain paramount: “Losing” one’s job to a low-wage worker in a far-off China, for example or, even more shockingly, to an immigrant “swarming” into his community, grateful for a wage, however small. Such circumstances provoke an intensity of feeling that generates a nightmare vision of an enemy within, poised to snatch bread away from children’s mouths. And not only that: The invader may be seen also as the purveyor of new practices and rituals that undermine the comfortable certainties of a Christian God. Nothing could be more calculated to strike dread.

Enter one Donald J Trump, a man experienced in the arts of reality television, a medium designed to scramble the brain. In his case, it is not only what Trump says that allures, but how he says it. The body-language and hand gestures speak in more copious volumes than his words can ever do. People compare Donald Trump to Hitler but, for me, the man is reminiscent more of Mussolini than the German dictator. But however you cut it, the coming disaster of a Trump presidency cannot be underestimated. Mr Trump knows the buttons to press to ignite the base elements in the constituency that perceives their livelihood and religious certainties threatened by inward flow of Mexican and Moslem hordes primed to take away jobs and subvert belief. Part of the Trumpian vision, therefore, involves building a wall and getting homeland security to exclude those of a certain faith, not to talk of bombing the crap out of ISIL.

Meanwhile, the mainstream of Trump’s party, the GOP, stands by impotently in furious disapproval. To be sure, disapproval is not based on moral or even ideological grounds. It is just that the party’s preferred candidate would be one less likely to lose against the Democratic Party’s candidate, come November. But the Republicans have only themselves to blame for the place they are now in because of the hatred they foment and harbour against Obama, by which calculus, anything Obama is bad, no matter how common-sense. That article of faith, developed and entrenched during the past seven or eight years, transforms itself into the currency in which America’s wretched hope to purchase redemption. A dreadful prospect.

Too bad the rest of the world will catch the backdraught.

Tell Fren Tru