If I were American, I’d probably be sick by now of the whole election circus, and of foreigners telling me what went wrong with my country. Popular vote versus electoral vote, gerrymandering, and the blah blah blah of Facebook.
But I’m not American, and several days later I’m still trying to fathom it all. Not in the spirit of 20/20 hindsight, but to try to learn what can be learned from this incredible drama, as unsavoury as it might be to us on the other side of the Wall-to-be.
With a stacked executive/legislative deck bent on climate denial, and a raft of other issues that will have direct international repercussions, what will now happen is of urgency to the non-American world citizen. (There’s also the post election mayhem: someone ripping a woman’s hijab off in the street, racial insults, and what could well be counterproductive, violent post-election protests).
The view from here suggests that America is a land divided not by party affiliation but by inter-class cold war. You could add bitter regionalism into the mix. So we soon-to-be-undesirables scratch our heads trying to understand how the land of the free, the touted paragon of democracy, could be host to such mutual discrimination; how the land where equal opportunity is practically enshrined in the constitution could be the setting for such entrenched elitism.
The melting pot of the world seems to have paradoxically produced a perfectly striped layer cake instead of a well-blended, rich stew.
We know nothing happens without a concordant set of causes and conditions. In the now famous ‘vote against’ scenario, it is clear that long before the disgraceful, last minute disclosure of ‘additional emails’ by the FBI director, the scales were so delicately poised for a plunge to the right that almost any twisted piece of disinformation would have done it.
To put it into “third world” perspective: the poverty line in America is several notches above what we would consider poverty here in Asia. Clearly this was no food riot by starving masses. To be fair to Obama, he tried hard to run the gauntlet of a hostile legislative branch to institute meaningful changes that in the long run would benefit the so-called disenfranchised and ‘middle America’. While “in the long run” was good enough for the politicos, for the Middle American that translated into ‘in the meantime’ - where they seemed to fall through the cracks.
Whether this was actual or merely subjectively perceived by the disenfranchised coal miners et al, it was a time of psychological pain. Who came to talk them about their problems? Who took the time to reach out and establish workable programs for them?
Somewhere along the line, bitter Middle Americans acquired a self image of “the forgotten ones”.
Quite a few ‘liberal’ American friends here in Indonesia do spend a lot of time lamenting the narrow minded Middle America: rust belt, bible belt, etc, etc. I’m not so sure that if I were a privileged American I wouldn’t do the same. In truth these laments are often ever-so-thinly disguised disdain. The long-distance view from here suggests that parts of the two coasts of America are like thin cultural brackets that strive to contain a hinterland that’s mythologized but not understood. Or perhaps, understood but not recognised as an inherent part of a mutual relationship.
If this elite decries the lack of nuance amongst the people of Middle America, it is equally guilty of its own blind generalisations. How would they know - when do they actually spend time there? When was the last time they actually spent time with a steel worker in Pittsburgh? Or had a proper conversation with a lower middle-income family in the Midwest? Or visited with Native Americans? Or for that matter hung out in the inner city ghettoes, not stumping for votes, but just being there? If they did so, the nuances would surely become much clearer.
Not to go overboard - there is no need to deify the rural Middle. It’s a simple fact that most rural areas anywhere are less worldly and less exposed. In America, the dominance in these places of the white lower middle class adds to inward-looking attitudes and ignorance of the world around. Patrick Thornton points out that his hometown in Ohio was 97% white, and he suggests that ‘more Americans need to see more of the United States.’ Rural areas also form the backbone of countries like the USA - ignoring or snubbing them makes the problem worse, not better.
The choices and subterfuges that the DNC elite made and brought upon themselves reflected a foolish snobbery. Why was Joe Biden, a highly electable person who is much more ‘of the people’ than Hillary could ever be, in view of the dire nature of the situation, not at least encouraged to take up the candidacy despite his earlier demurral after his son died? Why was Bernie Sanders, who challenged the establishment, the very cause that motivated voters in this election, red-flagged as ‘unelectable’? Counter to any realistic, intuitive strategic thinking, the DNC chose a candidate who represented the very thing that Middle America clearly had begun to resent the most: the entrenched establishment who ruled from their coastal Ivory Towers. Hillary, despite her dubious track record and iterated half-truths, became the hope her party elite pinned their ambitions on - yet in Middle America she became the icon of the disconnect.
That so much effort is put into controlling media and the flow of information is reminiscent of the Cold War: in this case, America against itself. But the people refused to buy the ‘journalistic’ put downs; they didn’t care. Trump is flawed beyond any excuse. But he was their brick through the living room window of the establishment.
In reality this disconnect, the chasm between the haves and have-nots, the central elite and ‘the rest’ is a worldwide problem. It starts with disregard for old wounds - racial discrimination, disempowerment, social injustice, economic inequity, and so forth - that have never healed. Leaving them to fester is the first step to creating social time bombs. And this is happening around the world.
Time and time again, the communities of the wronged and disregarded become the fertile recruiting grounds for revolution and extremism. If we spent a bit of time studying history we would know this for fact. And having studied the consequences of such situations – wars, terrorism, political upheavals – we’d likely be keener to break the pattern. But instead we stick our heads blindly into the sand, and think it won’t happen on our watch.
As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in an interview, it’s important to listen to the deeper things that even extremists are saying, there is likely to be a modicum of truth that should be at least considered: that modicum of truth that gets people to join such causes. We shouldn’t be afraid of dialogue, not necessarily to agree but at least to understand. In the Archbishop’s words: “I think we need to grow in our self-assurance that is not scared of being challenged, that the truth we uphold can stand up to the closest possible scrutiny.”
Here in Indonesia, we need to pay attention: our nation is younger, our politicians far more fractious, and our democracy far more fragile.