American election

A friend asked me who I thought would win the 2020 US presidential election. I replied that I knew who would lose: the people. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the other bizarre battlefield called the Electoral College vote. And I should not call it a battlefield because there is no contest involved. It’s a mechanism put in place by the fathers of the US Constitution to put a check on what was called the “excess of democracy”, meaning people’s desires could be wrong and there should be a way to undo popular decisions made with such emotions. Turns out, it is the Electoral College that in 2016, helped catapult an unwilling and unfit candidate to the White House, whose campaign was all about emotions.

Whoever emerges victorious in the 2020 election, the one undisputed fact remains that this is not a democracy or I have been reading about democracy in Martian textbooks. Having spent more than a decade in America, I have watched many American citizens being able to vote but clueless about the seriousness of it. Many educated and able people who would decide better, cannot vote. A naturalised Pakistani-American citizen I talked to had no idea that one could vote early too. Another asked me which of the candidates was better for Pakistan. Hardly ever can I not comment but listening to such things from eligible voters is absolutely mind-boggling.

If the Electoral College does its magic this time too then the con artist would win. If the media propaganda about Russia collusion, Ukraine scandal, and then the mind-numbing number of deaths caused by the pandemic do its magic, then the war criminal would win.

If on the contrary, Trump wins the popular vote, then that would mean a further erosion in the morality of the people’s thinking. It would be a true testament to the dehumanised mentality of the majority American voters. I labelled the media campaign mentioned above as propaganda partly because media outreach is propaganda, not necessarily in a negative sense, and partly because Biden supporters and voters are divided over several issues. Some include the pandemic, racial inequality, and so forth. Trump’s Twitter propaganda proved to be stronger because his voters are mainly and overwhelmingly considering the economy as the major factor. And that exactly was the noise Trump was making.

It is widely known that Trump prefers visuals and dollar signs in watching presentations even in intelligence briefings. He does not like words and gets bored. A Trump victory would prove one thing among others, people also like visuals and dollar signs instead of rational approach toward solving problems such as climate change. Trump dances in his campaigns, insults anyone he dislikes, talks about trivial yet spicy topics, in a language that is not only not literary but also unbecoming of a president.

Lo and behold, his rallies are overcrowded. Maybe it is not just Trump that revels in irrationality, maybe we, the people, also do. Either the enemies of the people’s wishes will win (Electoral College) or the wishes laden with emotions shaped by constant noise and visuals will. Either one doesn’t sound like a rationally credible way to go about the affairs of the state.

The two areas where either outcome can affect us all are: if Trump wins, we will inch closer to not only further climate disaster but also the window for action will get narrower. If Biden wins, there may be some action for climate change but belonging to the traditional class of presidents, Biden would most likely invade a bunch of defenceless countries and likely not end the war in Afghanistan in the foreseeable future. Either problem is not what people want but it’s the best we can get with what we call democracy.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2020.

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