The Island Editorial

‘Dump Trump’

14 November 2016

 

Everyone is keenly watching the post election tumult in the US, the biggest exporter of democracy in the world. Riots, which broke out following the recent shock win of President elect, Donald Trump, who proved his detractors, pollsters, media moguls, political analysts and animal oracles wrong, have raised serious questions about the wellbeing of US democracy.

No one expected Americans to kick over the traces in this manner without respecting a popular verdict. Something seems to have gone wrong. What we are witnessing in some US cities are the worst protests since the Occupy Wall Street agitations in 2011.

The US democracy is, no doubt, resilient enough to withstand shocks and the anti-Trump riots are likely to fizzle out after emotions run their course. The Clinton backers’ consternation is understandable. No sooner had the polling closed on Tuesday than they, going by polls predictions, thought their heroine’s election was all over bar the shouting though the Trump backers knew ‘it aint over until the fat lady sings’. However, the fact that many Americans have refused to come to terms with reality and accept their President elect does not augur well for US democracy, widely considered a role model. Their unruly behaviour has brought into question the success of the much-flaunted social integration and ethnic reconciliation processes in the US.

Clinton got it right when she declared, in her concession speech, the other day, ‘The nation is more deeply divided than we thought’. Trump said, in his victory speech, that the time had come for wounds of division to be bound. These wounds are apparently festering and something more need to be done than just binding. Trump has lost the popular vote and his success as ‘the President of all Americans’ will hinge on his ability to win over those who have openly rejected him and taken to the streets. Those who are pressuring Sri Lanka, which has emerged from a protracted bloody conflict, to learn from western democracies including the US lessons of reconciliation, should realise that their gods have feet of clay. Race relations in those lands are not so rosy as they are made out to be and we have to depend less on foreign models and adopt an autochthonous mechanism to achieve reconciliation, which is the be-all and end-all of national progress.

Some pollsters have claimed that educated white Americans backed Hillary Clinton and Trump won mostly with the help of the so-called rednecks and trailer trash. This conclusion is not independently verifiable though widely thought to be valid. However, the argument that Clinton was the favourite of the minorities seems to hold water if the elections results in the states with large numbers of minority voters are any indication. Florida, however, was an exception.

Voting patterns indicate that Trump won because the conservative white America struck back with might and main while the keenness of the minorities and the anti-Trump whites to elect Clinton President did not translate into votes as such. If the black Americans, Hispanics, Asians and other such groups who were attending the Clinton rallies in their thousands and shouting themselves hoarse had voted more enthusiastically, the final result would perhaps have been different.

The outcome of the Trump-Clinton battle for presidency is the opposite of what we witnessed in this country, last year, when the votes of ethno-religious minorities tilted the balance in favour of Maithripala Sirisena in the presidential race. The Joint Opposition (JO), without owning up to the blunders its leaders made while in power, alleges that the US was among the foreign powers responsible for bringing about last year’s regime change here with the help of minorities. If so, the question is whether the modus operandi of the Obama administration, which threw its weight behind Clinton, who depended on the minorities to win the presidency, came a cropper at home?

One may wonder whether America’s post-election woes are consequent to bad karma, as it were, resulting from its alleged involvement in engineering uprisings against some democratically elected leaders elsewhere and making economies scream to achieve that end.