America’s slide toward a hardline regime headed by an impulsive Donald Trump is consternation enough. Now the losing side’s trench warfare against him is giving far greater reasons for alarm.
During the election campaign, the American model of liberal democracy was held to ransom by mesmerized voters in thrall to Trump’s dramatic disregard for facts and reasoned thought.
Now it is being besmirched by the sullenness of those who failed to prevent his victory. Suddenly many custodians of liberal democracy from almost all sides of American politics want to reject the system’s central pillar, the electoral college established in 1787, because it would hand the Oval Office to a person they detest.
Many voters feel so deeply disturbed because Trump is not beholden to anybody, not even to the Republican Party that gave its name to his climb to the pinnacle of global power.
None of the traditional centers of power in America’s electorate have influence over him. Even big business is impotent because he won without its money. That makes Trump seem like an elephant without the mahout sitting on his neck with a pointy goad.
The problem is that his cabinet choices reveal him as an elephant turning rogue, inebriated by power. That would be like the opium-addled elephants that kings used to scatter enemies in the ancient days when wars were fought without armed drones and cruise missiles.
Like a stoned elephant, Trump might destroy the power centers of US politics that have ruled for decades through the two-party system controlled by grandees and corporate financiers.
He may also upset the system of economic and military allies who have profited for decades from America’s “manifest destiny” to lead, without pulling their weight. But these are not reasons enough to put American democracy in jeopardy.
For outsiders, it is not at all reassuring that the US is turning into the “Divided States” marked by such implacable differences inside the electorate that each protagonist seems willing to sacrifice democracy itself.
It is understandable that the voters who constitute American democracy may no longer find its 230-year-old structures useful for some of their agendas. But Trump is an outcome of those structures not their cause.
These are the people who have loudly pushed America’s version of democracy upon the world’s developing countries using all elements of US power since World War II – money, military interventions, big business and the entire United Nations system.
Their democratically-elected governments have regularly intervened in the internal affairs of numerous countries and changed regimes using covert intelligence and military actions for nearly a century.
Americans have long used their electoral-college democracy with gerrymandered party redoubts to justify their exceptional right to bring other countries to democracy, and then lead all the world’s democracies.
Now, those voters are faced with having to bow to a man who they think could bring dishonor upon them in the world’s eyes. Or worse, he could cause foreign policy disasters including trade wars and possibly a Third World War.
So, they have begun trench warfare against Trump. They say he lost the popular vote by over 2.5 million votes and that should override the less than 70,000 votes that threw the electoral college into his lap.
They are trying to overrule the electoral college system or at least turn enough electoral college members against Trump to delegitimize his victory, after one of the most hard-fought campaigns in US history.
Trump’s short-sighted voters shot American democracy in the knees. Now, his frustrated opponents seem set on bringing the knee-capped system to prostration.
That may land worse blows upon the reputation and replicability of America’s model of democracy than four years of a Trump administration upon America, its allies, friends, admirers and others around the world.
Trump did not win surreptitiously or by coup d’état. He won fair and square under the rules of America’s system of elections and the US Constitution. It would be shameful to delegitimize him through political wars of attrition while he is the president-elect.
Those who oppose Trump should fight at every step, if they wish. But after he occupies the seat of power. Then pour onto the streets and visit nightmares upon each member of Congress.
Other democracies do not have an electoral college system to protect sparsely populated states against being crushed politically by others with larger populations.
Trump’s path to power would have been cut off there although unlike America, people in the weaker regions would continue to suffer without adequate hearing in the national parliament.
From a foreign affairs perspective, Trump continues to be a scary person surrounded by former generals and predatory corporate warriors. But American voters have not yet lost the international goodwill collected over seven decades.
This may be a good moment to think a little more clearly on how to oppose Trump’s policies without causing others to lose more respect for the workings of American democracy.