We need a sober leader to secure global order

US President-elect Donald Trump at his election night event at the New York Hilton Midtown hotel in New York City on November 9, 2016 when he gave his acceptance speech. PHOTO | MARK WILSON | AFP

What you need to know:

  • Globally, Trump’s win has pushed back the frontiers of liberal democracy.
  • It has denied America the chance to elect its first woman president in over 200 years, described by President Obama as the most qualified American presidential candidate in history.
  • Trump’s strident rise to power is undoubtedly the greatest triumph of the ultra-right-wing in Western politics.
  • It is also a mortal threat to the international liberal order.

Donald John Trump is here. His election as America’s 45th President is perhaps the greatest upset in history. Like the Brexit, few saw his victory coming. But this column did.

On May 8, 2016, I warned that “Trump is coming,” arguing that “Trump’s decisive victory in the Republican Party primaries has established him as one of the strongest forces in American politics with a 50-50 chance of winning the presidential election scheduled for November 8, 2016.”

The shockwave of Trump’s victory rent the air. Media headlines told of a near apocalyptic moment, the “Trumpocalypse” as America’s and the world’s nightmare.

Three reasons explain why Trump’s victory is a nightmare and an existential threat to America’s democracy and the global order.

First, Trump has exposed the inherent gaps and flaws in America’s liberal democracy based on the United States “Declaration of Independence” that states “that all men (and women) are created equal.”

Trump’s election has thrown the doctrine of equality in American democracy into a disarray.

In other democracies where “every vote counts”, Hillary Clinton would now be sprucing up ahead of her swearing in on January 20, 2017. She scored nearly 400,000 votes above her rival, garnering a commanding 50.2 pc (60,467,601) of the popular vote against Trump’s 49.8 pc (60,072,551). But Trump won the college (electoral) votes, whose logic many champions of democracy hardly understand.

PUBLIC DEBATE

Although this system may have served America well in the past, Trump has thrust it into public debate. Anti-Trump protests across the US that erupted hours after Trump was declared winner are citing it to claim that “Trump is not my president.”

Post-election violent protests across cities and college campuses across the United States are sadly reminiscent of what has become the bane of African democracies. If America was on the African continent, it would by now be a subject of urgent meetings by the United Nations Security Council as a threat to global peace!

However, the American elite respects the doctrine of “peaceful transition of power” irrespective of the outcome as the hallmark of democracy and a tribute to its maturity.

The second lesson is that populists and demagogues are perhaps more dangerous to democracies than terrorists. Trump has stormed to power riding the wind of blatant racial bigotry, intolerance and hate, which elsewhere has pushed violent extremists to the killing fields of the world from Afghanistan to Yemen, Syria to Iraq, Somalia to Libya and Nigeria.

As President, Trump’s power will be laced with resurgent racism, which might embolden other negative forces of racial prejudices and abuses in global governance.

'WHITE POWER'

Sparking the resurgent racism was the election of Barack Obama as America’s first non-white President in 2008, which aroused the fears that “White power” in American politics was coming to an end. 

Rightwing intellectuals stoked the fear of the demise of “White power”. A year after Obama’s election, Samuel P. Huntington published an article titled: “The Threat of White Nativism” in the Foreign Policy Magazine of October 2009, predicting that: “A plausible reaction to the demographic changes under way in the United States could be the rise of an anti-Hispanic, anti-Black, and anti-immigrant movement composed largely of white, working and middle-class males.”

Presciently, he foresaw the rise of “White nativism” as a movement protesting their job losses to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, and the displacement of their language.

Trump seized the leadership of the “White nativism” movement as a founder of the so-called “birther movement” which challenged the very legitimacy of President Barack Obama simply because of his African heritage.

The “White nativism” movement was given impetus by the Tea Party Movement as a protest against “Obamacare”.

Trump has tapped into the veins of this white fear of blacks and immigrants to win power. 

NEW LIFE

Xenophobia, Islamophobia and blatant racial bigotry breathed new life into old White racist movements, particularly the Ku Klux Klan. In its quarterly newspaper, the Crusader, the group hailed Trump’s candidacy as “moving the dialogue forward.”

His promise to build a wall between the US and Mexico, anti-migration rhetoric and racial bigotry appealed to blue collar and middle class White voters.

But the perfect storm that has swept Trump to power is the humiliation of critical segments of the American society by liberalism’s social agenda, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

As the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs rightly warned: “It would be foolish to ignore the anxieties and anger of those who have flocked to Trump with a passion they have shown for no other presidential candidate in decades.” This provided the fertile ground in which his populism and message of hate thrived as these angry Americans found a voice in Trump who promised to “make America great again” by swinging the pendulum of power to the far right.

His triumph has thrust to the centre-stage of global politics an angry people who were previously written off as a small irrational, ignorant, racist, xenophobic, nativist, reactionary and angry people in the fringes of the American and other Western societies. 

PUSHED FRONTIERS

Globally, Trump’s win has pushed back the frontiers of liberal democracy. It has denied America the chance to elect its first woman president in over 200 years, described by President Obama as the most qualified American presidential candidate in history. 

Trump’s strident rise to power is undoubtedly the greatest triumph of the ultra-right-wing in Western politics. It is also a mortal threat to the international liberal order.

Trump’s attack on Obama during the campaigns unveiled a new drift towards isolationism and nostalgia for the “empire” captured by his signature slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

While in office, Trump has to make good his promise to halt the decline of America’s “informal empire” signified by the challenge to its commercial, strategic and military dominance by Europe, the resurgent Russia and emerging powers in the global South, particularly China.

As President-elect, Trump’s abrasive style has eroded America’s soft power as its most powerful asset in global leadership, leaving the world without a credible leader.

 

Prof Peter Kagwanja is chief executive, Africa Policy Institute.