America must now face the things it leaves unsaid

This past week, I attended the 2016 Academy of Management (AOM) conference in Anaheim, California. 

My three-hour session sought to respond to the following question:

What are important concerns and issues in Africa, where management scholarship can provide impactful insights that do not receive any attention by Western scholars at the moment?

The conference, which attracted more than 12,000 participants from across the world, focused on how we can make organisations more meaningful. 

Africa featured prominently, especially through the emerging Academy of African Management. But what really interested many academics I met was what the rest of the world thought of the ongoing US election. I was asked this question many times.

It is becoming clear that the ideologies that defined American politics for centuries appear to have been thrown into the gutter.

Surprisingly, the prevailing politics have been building up since the start of the Tea Party movement. Republicans find themselves trapped between an amorphous institution and their ideological base.

Unlike the Reagan-Thatcher era, when economists like Milton Friedman stood behind conservative capitalist philosophy, the Tea Party was an amalgamation of frustrated extreme nationalists.

So when Donald Trump says he wants to cut taxes across the board, it is a cut-and-paste strategy from the past, which even more experienced conservatives, like Newt Gingrich, do not believe in.

This, however, does not mean Trump is not a threat to Hillary Clinton. A significant number of people like Trump’s style. They enjoy his straight-shooting harangues and love to listen only to conservative media that deprives them of balanced reporting.

REGULATED MEDIA

Many academics here are not happy with the media.  It is stuck somewhere between reporting outrageous comments from the Trump campaign and shaping the national political agenda while being skewed towards non-issues. 

Some think media should be regulated so that it can objectively cover the political campaign. This may be a hard sell, considering that objectivity in itself is subjective, not to mention that the free press is an important principle, enshrined in the American constitution. 

The media could, however, help citizens decipher truth from unproven claims made by campaign teams.

Whilst Democrats claim that Trump is mentally unfit to govern, Trump says Hillary is “unstable,” adding that “Honestly, I don’t think she’s all there.”  The media, if it wanted, could stop this mudslinging. Maybe it knows more than is being said. 

Mudslinging serves no democratic purpose, other than to demean the face of a superpower that many emerging democracies look up to.

Democrats too have their own problems. They will be damned if they openly woo conservative orphans, and damned if they concentrate on assuring their traditional base of victory, or ignore the Sanders liberals.

NADER AND PEROT

It’s possible that some Democrats are complacent, perhaps thinking that Trump has destroyed himself beyond recovery. 

Social media is inundated with calls for a third party candidate, with some saying they will cast protest votes this coming election, although doing so would amount to not voting at all.

There is rising interest in an independent candidate among conservatives who don’t support Trump, but this too would ruin prospects for the major candidates.

There are people who hate Clinton without any basis and fervently believe Trump’s allegations that she is a liar. Such people could end up voting on the basis of untrue accusations.

Third party candidates have largely had no impact on US presidential races. Perhaps the one who came closest was Theodore Roosevelt, who came second, and only because he had been President twice before running for a newly-formed Progressive Party against his fellow conservative, William Howard Taft. 

He failed, but not before splitting the conservatives so much that Woodrow Wilson won the presidency.

More recently, Ross Perot and Ralph Nader were prominent independent candidates, who spoilt the election for George H.W. Bush in 1992 and Al Gore in 2000, respectively.

Even as the US goes through the most turbulent electioneering in recent times, its political history still offers many lessons for emerging democracies. 

It has managed to build a common, identifiable American national culture, despite the many different nationalities from which its people originate. 

CULTURAL COCOONS

American politics is never centred on personalities, as in many other countries.  The two main presidential nominees have very little control of their parties.

Congress and the Judiciary are well-developed, independent institutions, which can counterbalance a wayward Executive if it were to emerge.

However, the Achilles’ heel in America today is immigration.  Robert Tracinski in his article, “Is immigration a threat to our culture?” reveals the undercurrent in today’s politics:

curbing immigration is about preserving our culture, specifically our political culture, from being diluted by hordes of newcomers who were raised in an alien culture that doesn’t value liberty. The idea is that our native-born citizens’ fierce commitment to liberty is in danger of being overwhelmed by immigrants’ Third World culture, and we will get a corrupt, illiberal Third World government to match.

Liberal academics think immigration is positive for America.  Conservative academics and some policy institutions think differently, and also argue that technology could be America’s greatest enemy today. 

In the past, immigrants had no option but to assimilate and become part of the American dream.  With the advent of digital technologies, immigrants are glued to their own cultural cocoons. They may never adapt to the popular American culture.

Some immigrants may never assimilate, preferring to be accommodated within their own – intact – culture. 

Santa Ana, where I stayed during my conference in Anaheim, is predominantly Latino and Hmong. Street adverts are in Spanish and Vietnamese, and flipping through the TV reveals many Spanish and Vietnamese channels. 

That is, perhaps, why many fear that continually isolating communities may trigger an avalanche of divisive small political parties, like we see in developing countries.  Ideology may be irrelevant once this happens. 

Britain’s internal tensions are due to the rise of small nationalist parties that now threaten the country’s unity.  Fractionalisation of any country brings deep-rooted divisions that may be difficult to heal.

YOUTH BULGE

Africa’s progress has suffered greatly because of the many fault lines created by small tribally-based political parties advancing sectional interests. We may, perhaps, never recover, unless we build binding ideologies we can subscribe to.

Immigration to the West will persist if we in the Third World continue to neglect our youth bulge, which is where trouble begins. Even if the West is not saying this openly, it is one issue creating more extremists there.

When Trump said he would fence out the Mexicans, his message resonated with a fearful, but significant, population that is likely to vote for him although they abhor his message publicly.

For this reason, it should not surprise anyone if Trump emerges the victor. The emerging crisis in the West is partly a problem of the developing world, which certainly has a role to play in creating a better future. 

Yet aside from the impact of our misrule on Western nations, we may also be stoking some violent revolts in the days to come unless we address the youth crisis internally. 

The Economist of August 6, 2016 carried a story titled, Look forward in anger, which detailed how Arab leaders treat young people as a threat. 

The young interviewees reveal what is an open secret: that they may be forced into a revolt.  It is not hard to decipher why many of these young people are joining terrorist groups.

It isn’t just the Arab world struggling with the youth bulge.  Africa is worse off, which is why hordes of young Africans die in the Mediterranean Sea as they try to cross into Europe.

BERLIN WALL

Yet Africa has solutions. Our population dividend can plug the developed countries’ population deficit without leaving our home countries. 

Academic discourse, like we had in Anaheim, can help African countries to optimise agricultural value chains and create thousands of jobs. 

Further, we need constructive engagement with the West to leverage technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and take up outsourced jobs. 

Finally, we need to plug into global innovation systems to take up labour-intensive jobs such as animation and gaming. With these interventions, we shall help create a more tolerant world.

The 2016 US elections are unprecedented and may be the boiling point of things that aren’t said. Some conservative security experts have warned that Trump is dangerous to US national security.

Others think the media will eventually play its rightful role and begin to set the agenda, instead of the anti-Trump messaging they are now feeding the American public. 

Of course, more professionalism might be helpful but what if the media also agree with the undercurrents?  They are perhaps the only ones who can help voters choose the right candidate by clarifying the real issues. 

It is entirely up to Americans to choose the direction of their country but the more the country is divided, the weaker it becomes at a time when Russia is flexing its muscle. 

The world may be approaching another period of post-Berlin Wall anxiety, and we all have a responsibility to help change course.

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business. Twitter: @bantigito