Trump will certainly not make America great again

The world and many Americans are reeling in shock and anxiety at the election of Donald Trump as the next president of this mighty, but deeply disunited and disoriented country. All but a handful of opinion polls pointed to the victory of the incomparably experienced Hillary Clinton, to the historic possibility of electing America’s first female president.

But they were utterly, unforgivably, embarrassingly wrong. They failed to pick up Trump’s “silent majority” of ordinary white voters, not just the unapologetic Alt-Right, who quietly cheered on the boisterous candidate who openly said in public what Republicans and racist whites say in private.

The post-mortems will be brutal on the other failures of America’s collective imagination that resulted in this stunning election result: the rapacious role of the media in selling Trump for ratings and earnings, the shortfalls of the candidacy and campaign of Hillary Clinton, the relative turnout rates of the Trump and Clinton supporters, the perfidious role of Russia, Wikileaks, and the FBI.

In this popular American political sport of endless punditry and second-guessing, few will take responsibility for having enabled Trump, few in polite circles will own up to having voted for Trump, much as many whites denied ever having been ardent supporters of apartheid as its noxiousness attracted international opprobrium. Americans chose Donald Trump, a dangerous buffoon, ill-prepared and ill-tempered for any serious job, let alone the presidency of a superpower, even one in decline. It is no prediction to expect that America’s slide into global ignominy will accelerate under Trump’s predictably inept leadership and the country’s apparently irreconcilable racial polarisations.

UNSAVOURY CHARACTER

What does it say about a country that could elect such an unsavoury character, one that could turn all three branches of government to the stewardship of the Republican Party, a party that should have forfeited its right to rule for its glaring political sins of bigotry, obstructionism, myopia, and incompetence. Countries get the leaders they deserve.

Clearly, Trump’s victory is a horrible reflection of the tragedy and farce that is America. The tragedy that such an unfit man could succeed America’s first black president, a man of such remarkable talent and uncommon integrity, decency, and commitment to public service. The tragedy is evident in the country’s inability, and in the Euro-American world more generally, as illustrated recently most graphically with Brexit, to deal effectively with inclusion, integration, and inequality.

Some of the biggest losers from the dangerous infatuation with Trump will be his most ardent followers. African Americans have never been major beneficiaries of America’s largess, not even under President Obama, nor have the millions of Latino immigrants who toil in the underbelly of the American agricultural and services economy.

Trump will not “make America great again”, but will make it hate again with impunity. He will not bring back factory jobs that assured high school educated white men middle-class lifestyles. He will not restore their racist supremacy and deformed masculinities in a world so transformed by civil rights, feminist and gay rights struggles, and victories in popular culture and imagination.

DIFFERENT FEARS

For the world, Trump’s looming presidency elicits different fears, perspectives and expectations. There are fears that the postwar internationalism will be upended by isolationism as the United States, its champion, wallows in rabid white nationalism in a world where the “coloured” nations are on an inexorable rise. International trade agreements, the structural face of neoliberal globalisation, are under threat from a potentially protectionist administration. The global pact on climate change, upon which the very future of humanity and our fragile little planet rests, will face renewed obstacles from one of the world’s greatest polluters. Some predict apocalypse, that the Trump presidency will lead to the demise of the West as we have known it. Some even doubt the future of the Nato alliance.

Right-wing populist forces will be emboldened, especially in European democracies already rocked by Brexit. Dictatorships will cheer the triumph of Trump. Vladimir Putin’s Russia that has done its best to influence the US elections through cyber destabilisation will be especially enchanted. The shambolic and invective-ridden US elections have been a godsend to Chinese propagandists about the bankruptcy of American democracy and superiority of the Chinese system. The same sentiments will find expression in African and other democracies and dictatorships around the world.

BEEN DOMINANT

The structural and ideological underpinnings of USAfrica policy are not likely to change much from the swings of the humanitarian and security paradigms that have been dominant over the past half-century. However, the developmental and democratic inflections that sanitised these policies in the past three administrations are likely to lose their currency.

Overall, the loss of the US democratic model may be a good thing for democrats and democracies in other parts of the world. The Trump conjuncture detoxifies democratic theory and governance from the intertwined tyrannies of American universalism and exceptionalism. It demonstrates the hollowness that there exist “mature” democracies that African countries should import as turnkey projects. It opens up space for serious and creative construction of African modes of inclusive, integrated, innovative democratic developmental states and societies.

With Trump’s election, everyone now knows, if they did not before, that the American democratic emperor has no clothes. Let us proceed to make our own democratic clothes befitting our histories, struggles, and desired futures.

Prof Paul Zeleza is vice-chancellor of the United States International University – Africa in Nairobi.

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