Ayo Olukotun
There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration”
– United States Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Tuesday, November 10, 2020.
“What we see now (is) a completely manufactured controversy based on no evidence whatsoever, purely to maintain power and to overturn a legitimate election“
– Thomas B. Edsall, New York Times, Wednesday, November 11, 2020.
As a young academic, brimming with admiration for the established democracies of the Western World, I recall asking one of my mentors, Prof. Robert J. Gavin, most recently, an Emeritus Professor at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, why a British politician, for example, would not consider the option of rigging or manipulating an election to stay on in power. “There are several reasons”, he told me, “but the most compelling one is the fear of unfavourable mention in the history books”. Sensing that I wanted to hear more, Gavin elaborated in a didactic fashion that “politicians in the Western world are generally scared of negative press in books written on the evolution of democracy in their countries. They would not want it to be said that it was so and so politician that ruined or truncated the growth of democracy”, the elderly scholar rounded off. I recollect reminiscing to myself that a typical African politician would have said something like, “History books my foot!” considering the well-worn expression that the best way to hide anything for an African leader is to put it in a book which he is sure to never read. So, we have come to associate decency, civility and good manners with the Western democracies, with the United States being the pre-eminent power in that respect. That is partly why the events of the last few days in which President Donald Trump and his Republican Party allies are denying the outcome of an election and obstructing a peaceful and smooth transition, except as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, quoted above says, if it is to Trump himself, set negative trends. In other words, no other outcome will be acceptable to the sitting President and his mobilised followers, who, by the way, are still holding rallies, except a far-fetched victory for the incumbent. What we have, therefore, is the reversal of a moral pecking order, in which a modern American president has borrowed from the playbook of African and Latin American despots.
Did anyone see it coming? Of course, Trump’s erratic, cynical and utterly self-interested behaviour, as well as baffling utterances have all pointed to such a possibility. Those who warned that Trump would be a disaster, who would take the United States down the slippery road to regression, authoritarianism and the possible breakdown of democracy, can now say, ‘Didn’t we tell you so?’ Regrettably, however, such triumphs are cheerless and joyless for what is at stake is the diminution of American leadership and values. To be sure, the practice of conceding defeat to a victorious opponent dates back in the United States to 1896, when Senator James K. Jones, the Democratic presidential candidate, congratulated his Republican opponent, William McKinley, as soon as it became clear that the latter was coasting home to victory. Jones used the memorable words, “We have submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law”. Since then, right until 2016, when Hillary Clinton congratulated Trump, no defeated presidential candidate had violated what has become genteel and much-envied tradition in American politics – until Trump’s current defiance of a much-cherished value, that is.
What is going on, assuming one knows what exactly is going on, is a far cry from the intellectual celebration of American democracy as the end of history by Francis Fukuyama. In the unlikely event that Trump concedes defeat and belatedly congratulates Joe Biden, this interregnum will be long remembered and will have medium and long term consequences for American democracy. There are more frightening scenarios, one of them being that Trump and his supporters may choose to appear on January 20, the constitutionally stipulated date for inaugurating a new President, as the ‘duly elected’ President, setting off, thereby, a constitutional crisis and/or an enforcement of the law by the military. At least, on one occasion, Biden, in response to a question based on that troubling possibility, had answered, “I’m absolutely convinced they (the military) will escort him from the White House with great dispatch”. Obviously, this is a worst case scenario that no one is looking forward to, but who can be sure? For example, way back in 2016, having secured the Electoral College votes while trailing Hillary in the popular vote by 2.8 million votes, Trump claimed that there were three million undocumented immigrants who swelled his opponent’s votes, suggesting that he had won the popular vote as well. More ominously, he had said at the time, though not many were listening apparently, that, not only would he not concede defeat if he had lost the election but also that one of his first steps as President would be to jail Hillary Clinton. Not just that, before the recent election, he had refused to be categorical on whether he would facilitate a peaceful transfer of power but had kept harping on issues such as ballots in the Postal Service, which he claimed would “lead to the most corrupt election in the US history”. In other words, Trump was chipping away at the legitimacy of the electoral system in order to prepare the way for rejecting the results if he did not win. Undoubtedly, we are dealing with an authoritarian personality who is prepared to upset the applecart even if it means throwing his country into jeopardy.
For those who argue that Trump has the support of top leaders in his party, as well as a mammoth gathering of true believers in his cause, whatever that cause is, they should remember that the fascist leaders of the inter-war years in Europe began their careers, not as autocrats, let alone, murderous despots, but as elected leaders. The saving graces, as they have been for much of the past four years, are the resilience of American institutions and the vibrancy of popular democratic forces such as a resurgent civil society. But let no one delude oneself that this is a crisis that will blow away the next day and for which strategies, contingent and long term, will not have to be deployed to contain the peril which Trump has come to represent.
For the rest of the world, by the way, many world leaders such as Angela Merkel of Germany looked forward to the end of Trump’s rule and quickly congratulated Joe Biden, there are important lessons to learn. One of them is that no matter how developed a democracy is, it is ever threatened by the possibility of regression and resurgence of authoritarianism. This is another way of expressing the old maxim that vigilance is the eternal price of liberty. The political class, for various reasons, cannot be relied upon to sustain democratic values, not least, because of the lure of power. At the end of the day, it is the people – ‘demos’ – that would determine the scope, depth and extent of their democratic freedom. America’s travails offer a cautionary tale to struggling democracies concerning the ever-present possibility of power dementia and democratic backsliding.
