Abani Baruah
The whole world is acknowledging Joe Biden’s victory as the 46th President of America as a ‘new day’ for democracy. Suddenly, to the whole world, the outgoing President Donald J Trump has become a villain.
But before discussing his downfall, it is worthwhile to analyse his rise in American politics. It is a fact that America is basically a capitalist country. But rightly or wrongly, too many Americans believe that the Democrats are Left-leaning socialists; the Republicans always try to depict many Democrats like Bernie Sanders as communists. But the fact remains that in the last two decades or so, liberal politics has lost its steam in the USA.
It is because, all over the world, the so-called socialist or liberal politics compromised a lot with the capitalist world around them. For this they lost their considerable influence amongst the middle-class and the lower middle-class population.
Political parties like the Labour Party of England, Social Democrats in Germany, Likud Party in Israel, Democrats in America and in our own country the Congress party have lost touch with the common people. To many people, the recession in the not so recent past was the result of an unholy nexus between the so-called people’s government and the big moneyed group. The way the Democrats in America and the Congress in India colluded and supported a corrupt banking system is a point to ponder. In England, Tony Blair, a former Labour Prime Minister, encouraged a far right wing Republican American President, George Bush, to destroy Iraq on a non-existent ground of harbouring weapons of mass destruction. Even a highly-reputed American army general, Collin Powel, made a fool of himself in the United Nations by giving a video demonstration to prove that Iraq really possessed weapons of mass destruction. All these things eroded the credibility of the liberal political dispensations throughout the world.
This failure of the socialist order gave a worldwide boost to conservatism. The conservative governments in the United Kingdom, India and the USA are a few examples. But so far the USA is concerned, many other factors contributed to the rise of Donald J Trump. From the day Trump decided to throw his hat into the presidential electoral ring, he had taken to falsehood. Perhaps, he believed in Goebbels’ maxim: A gullible populace hearing the same lies repeatedly will believe it to be true. To Trump’s advantage, such populations like the non-college going white Christian Americans were always there to believe and propagate his lies. Further, after John McCain’s death, there is no Republican leader who could openly contradict Donald J Trump. The way Trump removed his top cabinet ministers one after another, and that too through Twitter posts, demoralized the bureaucracy. As a result no one in the White House dared to question Trump on anything. Further, his close advisers like Rudy Giuliani stoked his hatred towards the Blacks, ethnic and religious minorities to a boiling point. The saddest part is that the Republican leaders in both the Houses, who normally keep the President in check, were totally toothless. Gradually the whole Republican Party apparatus had become irrelevant. In the process, by the end of Donald Trump’s term, the Republican Party became his fiefdom.
Now about his fall and the ‘new day’. For about a year-and-a-half, Trump sounded the bugle of voter fraud. The reason was simple. He knew that the Black and other ethnic minorities are afraid of voting in person. As such he bullied the Postmaster General to declare that the Postal Department was not capable of handling the large number of postal ballots. But when that gambit failed, he successfully used the Fox media outlets and others to spread the lies of large-scale voter fraud. He was even successful in organizing the far right Black hater whites of midland America to cohesive WhatsApp groups who were brainwashed so successfully that even after the election result, they refused to believe that Joe Biden had really won.
Even the religious minorities like Muslims and the Jews had understood Donald Trump’s design. His design was too attractive for Middle America, a citadel of white Christian Americans. For this he banned Muslims from five countries of the Middle-east. But he fully exempted Saudi Arabia. Why? Because of his business connection? For all this, he lost many votes from the religious minority sections also.
In spite of his repeated attempts, the American institutions stood like a rock. Almost daily after the election day, Trump at the behest of Giuliani, a politician and legal luminary of doubtful integrity, filed case after case in courts of almost all the States of the United States of America. But even the Trump-appointed Supreme Court judges upheld the integrity of the American electoral system. As such the magic number of electoral votes (306 in Biden’s case) was not changed. Even the woman whom Donald Trump elevated to the Supreme Court hurriedly refused to entertain Donald Trump’s design.
But the concept of ‘a new day’ was born on January 6 last. On that day, a mob instigated by former President Trump himself stormed and vandalized the Capitol Hill building, widely regarded as the symbol of American democratic values. These incidents unified 65% of the Americans against Trump and his cronies. From that day, most of the Americans waited for January 20, the day Biden took office. To them it is ‘a new day’. For us also it is a new day because it signifies the victory of democratic forces over the authoritarian attempts to destroy democratic values.
