The Tribune

A democracy is as strong or as parlous and unstable as its institutions and the willingness of leaders and citizens to accept and abide by democratic laws, norms, conventions and traditions.

For nearly four tumultuous years Donald Trump, with the connivance and complicity of his enablers and sycophants, including Republican Congressional leaders, has inflicted excessive damage on the American democracy and system of government.

His maniacal and incessant assault on democracy has culminated in the refusal to abide by basic norms of democratic stability and decency and continuity of government in thus far refusing to accept the will of the American people by ensuring a smooth transition to a new President and administration.

The bizarre and declining state of American democracy is reminiscent of those authoritarian and undemocratic states America perennially lectures in human rights reports detailing checkered or fully fraudulent election contests in which dictatorial leaders and strongmen steal elections and refuse to concede to the will of the people.

US President-elect Joe Biden calls it “an embarrassment”. It is much more. It is decidedly worse. Many aspects of American democracy are in a perilous state.

For those of us who have observed and in some instances admired American democracy and elections for decades, we have grown accustomed to a certain stability and the generally orderly transfer of power at the federal level in the modern era.

This writer and others have at times critiqued those who fetishize American democracy and who fail to recognize that its Electoral College system and apportionment of Senate seats, among other features, are antiquated.

The 2000 presidential election, in which the presidency was handed to George W. Bush by the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, was a disturbing reminder of the fractures and the structural weaknesses of the American political and electoral system.

Still, there was a general sense, even by critics, that the leaders in the American political class still adhered to certain basic norms.

Mythology

Many believed certain things could not happen in America, religiously lionized by its ardent admirers as: “the world’s greatest democracy” and “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave”, both features of American mythology.

The nature of magical thinking is the belief that something cannot happen because it has not happened before or appears to happen infrequently. Many thought Donald Trump could never win the Republican nomination for President or the presidency.

Many thought that the kinds of authoritarian leaders found in other countries or historical periods, could not rise to power in the United States of America, the country which has unceasingly lectured the world about democracy.

But with the rise of Donald Trump and increasing evidence that a number of democratic traditions are more of a sort of patina or showpiece for many Republican leaders, who conveniently use the props of democracy for their white privilege and corporate economic agendas, many in America and around the world are deeply distressed about the fragile and dangerous state of American democracy.

For four years Donald Trump has thrashed, ignored or circumvented many aspects of American democracy as an intimidated Republican establishment acquiesced to his bullying and threats. His cult of personality has ballooned and continues to metastasize like a cancer poisoning the entire body politic.

Quite a number of historians, scholars and commentators, both liberal and conservative and not given to hyperbole, are alarmed at the degree of nativism, isolationism, white privilege and supremacy, xenophobia and chauvinism in full flight and represented and fuelled by Donald Trump.

These deep tectonic plates of American life are in feverish flux, resulting in a series of ongoing political earthquakes, which is resulting in extraordinary damage and shock waves which will continue for some time.

Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, a conservative, offered his thoughts on the outcome of last week’s general election.

“It’s clear now that far too many of Trump’s voters don’t care about policy, decency, or saving our democracy. They care about power. Although Trump appears to have received a small uptick in votes from black men and Latinos, the overwhelming share of his supporters are white.

“The politics of cultural resentment, the obsessions of white anxiety, are so intense that his voters are determined not only to preserve minority rule but to leave a dangerous sociopath in the Oval Office.”

There are a number of black Bahamians who support Donald Trump, especially black men who like his supposed toughness and strength, which are really forms of toxic masculinity.

Convenient

Some black Bahamians support Trump because of religious and other reasons, such as his convenient positions on abortion, Israel and China, positions which he appears to hold mostly for political reasons but which are likely not deeply held.

The cliché that Republicans are better for The Bahamas is a misnomer in many ways. The matter is entirely more complex, with Republicans better for The Bahamas on some issues and the Democrats better on others.

But what is disturbing, is the number of white and black Bahamians who support Donald Trump despite the overwhelming evidence that he is a white supremacist who views black people with utter contempt and who has discriminated against black people throughout his business career.

Some of the very same black people who would loathe being treated by white Bahamians as inferior, happily support a white supremacist American who views them as inherently inferior. Magical thinking has so many forms or permutations.

The threat to democracy we are witnessing in America is a reminder that human civilization remains fragile and must be renewed in each generation.

Writing in The Boston Globe, Yale University Professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century”, noted: “Democracy can be buried in a big lie. Of course, the end of democracy in America would take an American form. In 2020 Trump acknowledged openly what has been increasingly clear for decades:

“The Republican Party aims not so much to win elections as to game them. This strategy has its temptations: The more you care about suppressing votes, the less you care about what voters want. And the less you care about what voters want, the closer you move to authoritarianism. Trump has taken the next logical step: Try to disenfranchise voters not only before but after elections.

Snyder continued: “The results of the 2020 elections could be read to mean that Republicans can fight and win on the issues. Reading the results as fraudulent instead will take Republicans, and the country, on a very different journey, through a cloud of magical thinking toward violence.

“If you have been stabbed in the back, then everything is permitted. Claiming that a fair election was foul is preparation for an election that is foul.

“If you convince your voters that the other side has cheated, you are promising them that you yourself will cheat next time. Having bent the rules, you then have to break them. History shows the danger in the familiar example of Hitler. “When politicians break democracy, as conservatives in Weimar Germany did in the early 1930s, they are wrong to think that they will control what happens next.

“Someone else will emerge who is better adapted to the chaos and who will wield it in ways that they neither want nor expect. The myth of victimhood comes home and claims its victims.”

Every democracy, including ours, must be renewed through the eternal vigilance of leaders and citizens, including through greater civic education and an appreciation of history and an understanding of our system of government.

What we are witnessing in America is one of the best arguments yet to reject the simplistic, uninformed arguments of those who would asininely encourage us to spoil our ballots and other such notions which would further undermine our democracy.