The FRACTURE of the United States

In an un­usual han­dover, held in the ab­sence of the out­go­ing pres­i­dent and under threat of armed as­sault on the main gov­ern­ment build­ings of dif­fer­ent states in the coun­try, Joe Biden took of­fice as the 46th pres­i­dent of the United States of Amer­ica in Jan­u­ary. Two weeks ear­lier, a mob of ri­ot­ers vi­o­lently stormed Con­gress, urged on by the out­go­ing pres­i­dent and seem­ingly with the con­nivance or sym­pa­thy of the Capi­tol po­lice. The im­ages from that day are more per­ti­nent to a ba­nana re­pub­lic than the world’s great­est democ­racy. In fact, ‘Who is the ba­nana re­pub­lic now?’ was the head­line in the Kenya Daily Na­tion on Jan­u­ary 8.

The ri­ot­ers, who seized and de­stroyed of­fices in Con­gress over sev­eral hours, did so in the name of free­dom, democ­racy and the Con­sti­tu­tion, con­vinced that there is an in­ter­na­tional con­spir­acy led by De­mo­c­rat lead­ers, fi­nan­cial and big tech ty­coons, mem­bers of the Wash­ing­ton es­tab­lish­ment, Pope Fran­cis, Barack Obama and Hillary Clin­ton of course, and an in­ter­na­tional pae­dophile net­work seek­ing to im­plant com­mu­nism in the US and do away with the pre­cious free­doms the “pil­grim fa­thers” brought with them when the Mayflower ar­rived off the coast of Mass­a­chu­setts on No­vem­ber 11, 1620. A con­sid­er­able num­ber of Don­ald Trump’s 74 mil­lion vot­ers, in­clud­ing some se­nior Re­pub­li­can lead­ers, are con­vinced of such a con­spir­acy.

The un­der­ly­ing prob­lem Biden and Ka­mala Har­ris face now that Trump’s tenure has come to an end is that su­prema­cist and far-right groups like the Proud Boys, the Na­tional So­cial­ist Club (neo-Nazi), and ultra-con­ser­v­a­tive in­de­pen­dent evan­gel­i­cal churches (on Jan­u­ary 5, the Chris­t­ian na­tion­al­ist group Jeri­cho March or­gan­ised marches around the Capi­tol - like the bib­li­cal Joshua and the Is­raelites sur­round­ing the city of Jeri­cho - to pray for the de­feat of “dark and cor­rupt” forces - the glob­al­ists, so­cial­ists, com­mu­nists, and lib­er­als – who stole the elec­tion from the pres­i­dent anointed by God) today have the sup­port of 25% of Re­pub­li­can vot­ers, some­thing which was un­think­able four years ago. Even worse, ac­cord­ing to polls car­ried out by CBS News/YouGov and PBS New­shour/Marist Col­lege - pub­lished by The Wash­ing­ton Post on Jan­u­ary 13- al­though the ma­jor­ity of all cit­i­zens (87%) and Re­pub­li­cans (79%) dis­ap­prove of the as­sault on the Capi­tol, 21% of Re­pub­li­cans ap­prove of those who en­tered Con­gress vi­o­lently, 43% de­scribe their ac­tions as “pa­tri­o­tism”, 50% as “de­fense of free­doms” and 47% be­lieve it was “a le­git­i­mate protest” (www.​was​hing​tonp​ost.​com/​politics/​2021/​01/​13/​lurking-​beneath-​surface-​gop-​plenty-​sympathy-​those-​who-​stormed-​capitol/).

The prob­lem fac­ing the Re­pub­li­can Party is there­fore also a very se­ri­ous one, be­cause white su­prema­cism, which has the Con­fed­er­ate flag as its sym­bol of iden­tity, is rad­i­cally op­posed to the legacy of Abra­ham Lin­coln, the Re­pub­li­can pres­i­dent who abol­ished slav­ery in the course of the civil war (1861-65). Ul­ti­mately, Trump is po­lit­i­cally fin­ished, but the seeds of Trump­ism have taken root and caused a socio-po­lit­i­cal rift that will be hard to close. What was on the point of hap­pen­ing in the US is sim­i­lar to what is hap­pen­ing in Hun­gary (and partly in Poland) - de­fined as il­lib­eral democ­ra­cies by Fa­reed Za­karia in 1997, that is, “de­mo­c­ra­t­i­cally elected regimes, often re-elected or reaf­firmed through ref­er­en­dums, who daily ig­nore the con­sti­tu­tional lim­its of their power and de­prive their cit­i­zens of basic rights and free­doms.”

Biden will also have to deal with an econ­omy that has de­te­ri­o­rated in re­cent months, with the loss of jobs made worse by the pan­demic, which has al­ready caused over 400,000 deaths (largely thanks to Trump’s dis­as­trous man­age­ment of the health cri­sis; the US is the coun­try with the most deaths, fol­lowed by Brazil, with over 220,000 vic­tims, where pres­i­dent Jair Bol­sonaro is a lead­ing Trump dis­ci­ple). As an im­me­di­ate shock mea­sure, Biden has pledged 1.9 tril­lion dol­lars to com­bat the health emer­gency and pre­vent a re­ces­sion: 1 tril­lion in di­rect cheques of 1,400 dol­lars to all house­holds and 440 bil­lion to aid small and medium-sized busi­nesses. The sit­u­a­tion is so del­i­cate that in its main head­line this month’s For­eign Af­fairs asks whether Amer­ica can even re­cover.

The an­swer is that Biden can gain le­git­i­macy and re­spect by con­trol­ling the pan­demic, fight­ing cor­rup­tion, re­open­ing the US to the world (re­turn­ing to the Paris Agree­ment on cli­mate change, re­vers­ing the most con­tro­ver­sial mi­gra­tion poli­cies, re­open­ing transat­lantic di­a­logue, re­think­ing global health se­cu­rity to pre­vent fu­ture dis­as­ters, re­defin­ing re­la­tions with China and Mid­dle East poli­cies...), and push­ing for a two-stage eco­nomic plan, with im­me­di­ate mea­sures such as the an­nounced shock plan to help the un­em­ployed and fos­ter re­cov­ery and broader struc­tural re­forms to re­gain the ground lost by the US econ­omy in the past few years.

Yet, un­doubt­edly the most dif­fi­cult and un­cer­tain task in terms of re­sults is to reknit a coun­try deeply frac­tured by racial and re­li­gious dif­fer­ences. In this sce­nario, the De­moc­rats gar­nered the sup­port and votes of African Amer­i­cans, His­pan­ics (ex­cept for anti-com­mu­nist mi­nori­ties - mostly Cubans - and sec­ond- or third-gen­er­a­tion Chi­canos, who are often very con­ser­v­a­tive) and, in gen­eral, women and much of the lib­eral and busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als in the big coastal cities. But at the same time they have ig­nored poor white work­ers and small and medium-sized busi­nesses hard­est hit by glob­al­i­sa­tion, who were cap­ti­vated four years ago by Trump’s pop­ulism. It should not be for­got­ten that, de­spite los­ing the elec­tion, the for­mer pres­i­dent got 11 mil­lion more votes than in 2016. If Biden and Har­ris fail to heal this rift, in four years some­one can again pick up the pop­ulist dis­course of il­lib­eral democ­ra­cies.

in­ter­na­tional