#83 An American Story: 2020
This newsletter is really a public policy thought-letter. While excellent newsletters on specific themes within public policy already exist, this thought-letter is about frameworks, mental models, and key ideas that will hopefully help you think about any public policy problem in imaginative ways. It seeks to answer just one question: how do I think about a particular public policy problem/solution?
Welcome to the mid-week edition in which we write essays on a public policy theme. The usual public policy review comes out on weekends.
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- RSJ
The US 2020 elections are headed to the Supreme Court. It is a race too tight to call at the time of writing this. The postal ballots might make a difference, but they will take time to count. Trump is ahead in the key battleground states and he has maintained for a long time he doesn’t believe in the integrity of postal ballots. Democrats believe the postal ballots will be overwhelmingly in their favour. No one can be sure of that. Trump will claim victory based on the votes cast in the ballot. A long legal battle looms that will further polarise the American society.
What have we learnt from these elections so far?
Trump will win more votes than he won in 2016 elections. This might confound pollsters, network TV pundits and mainstream media columnists. But we aren’t surprised.
Trump fails any definition of decency. He is devoid of a single virtue that makes for a good human being. He has no conviction about any policy issue that America faces today. All he cares about is taking a position that will consolidate his base. He’s the very definition of a politician without a moral compass. The opposition to this should have been an adherence to time-honoured American values of decency and generosity. Instead, the genius of Trump has been in how he has made his detractors look like a bad version of himself.
The vocal and visible opposition to Trump has come across as sanctimonious, illiberal, out-of-touch leftists. They revel in shouting down anyone occupying the middle; they call out those with a nuanced view of race as racists and they cancel voices different from theirs with the hysteria of a lynch mob. Trump has played his part by raising the spectre of a leftist uprising and feeding to conspiracy theories. But let there be in doubt, the loony left has driven more people in the middle to Trump. This after Democrats had chosen a centrist candidate in Biden. A more radical candidate would have meant a Trump landslide.
We don’t like quoting ourselves in our own newsletter, but we can’t help this one. In our previous edition (#66; World Politics Watch) we had written:
“This is what Trump wants the choice to come down to. Biden is forced to move left and defend (or not condemn) what Trump calls ‘anarchy’ or the ‘American carnage’. Trump then has the best of both the worlds. The centrists will compare likely anarchy ahead with four more years of Trump. And the strident left will keep pushing Team Biden away from the centre.
Political or electoral choices aren’t made on what you favour. Instead, they are driven by your deepest fears or anxieties. You vote to avoid them coming to a pass. The great ‘middle’ of America fear anarchy and the upending of their way of life most. That’s what Trump is banking on. He sees the left playing two ‘blinking’ games at the same time. One with Biden and another with those in the centre. Trump is doing everything for the left to win both. Because then Biden will nudge further left and the centre will move to him. That’s his best option now.”
“…. Trump is manufacturing an environment that will engender this neurasthenia in the run-up to the elections. A middle class, middle-aged ‘whitelash’ is his best bet. Will he pull it off?
I won’t bet against him.”
I expect the left to learn the wrong lessons from these results. Not because they are incapable of learning the right ones. Instead, they seem keen to wallow in some kind of righteous anger that is hollow and impotent. Their search for ideological purity will push them to find leaders who will command fanatic following from an ever-shrinking base.
A Real Discontinuity
We often tend to overestimate the importance of an event as it happens. Trump’s win in 2016 was then touted as a major discontinuity. It did represent a change but not as dramatic as it was made out to be. However, this time it is going to be different. Whichever way the Supreme Court goes, there isn’t going to be any reckoning in the Republican Party like it would have been had Trump lost soundly. The solid conservatism that defined the GOP along with a commitment to free trade, open borders and a belief in small government is gone forever.
A new party will have to emerge for upholding these values. The GOP won’t be able to shake off Trumpism anytime in near future. We will have clones or worse, the members of Trump family, run this party machine for foreseeable future whose only commitment will be to coalesce into a majority the sum total of all base instincts that animate a society. And, trust me, there’s a lot there to coral and the opposition will make their work easier.
This is a template that will be picked by others around the world. This pushing of the boundaries of decent behaviour that will elicit worse reactions from your opponents which then consolidates your base is a model ready to be adopted by other populist leaders. We have been writing about the mortal threat to liberalism and the shrinking space for the middle over the past few months. The US 2020 election has blown a hole through that middle. It will be tough to recover and it may take decades before the repercussions of these results are understood by the people. It may sound a bit dramatic, but this is how an end of political order feels like.
From Online Echo Chambers to Streets
Lastly, the polarisation and echo chambers that are a feature on social media might spill out on to the streets. There have been many instances of this in the run-up to these elections. This is now going to be beyond the control of a single movement or a single leader. Any minor instance now will have the potential to snowball into a battle on the streets. America will have no time for the world. It will continue to retreat into its own morass of divisiveness. There’s no immediate path to reconciliation or consensus and the voices in the middle have been drowned out or completely discredited already.
If the fractiousness of the past four years were tiring, you haven’t seen anything yet.