Trump tweets New Year’s greeting to his many enemies
Donald Trump sent New Year's greetings to his "many enemies" in a backhanded tweet on Saturday in which he gloated…
US presidential election of 2016 has been behind us for more than a month. The election victory of Donald Trump rattled all major European allies of the United States. It has caused consternation among most liberals in the United States and abroad. Donald Trump’s blatant exploitation of the sentiments of the majoritarian white electorate brought the persistent racial tension in the United States out into the open again. His direct attack on the ill effects of globalisation for the American workers and his promise for their bright future under his rule enthused an electoral base that has been taken for granted by the apparatchiks of the Democratic Party. He seems to have taken cue from the tactic used by the Modi-Shah duo during the 2014 general elections.
The US Presidential election is a big circus that starts from the Primaries, and often long before that. The whole world follows the process with rapt attention as the President of the United States effectively controls a large part of the globe. It is big business and the sole goal of every candidate is to win by any means. As a successful businessman, Donald Trump developed an instinct for what it takes to win all the way to the final battle with his rival in the Democratic Party. But the entire US political process is far more complex, and most people do not care much about all the intricacies involved in that. Otherwise, there would be less commotion caused by the election victory of Donald Trump.
Let us start with the presidential elections. The first surprise this time for a casual observer was the fact that Hillary Clinton got significantly more popular votes in the country than Donald Trump (48.1% against 46.0%), but Donald Trump won the election by garnering a considerable majority of the electoral votes (306 for Trump against 232 for Clinton, with 2 still undecided). This is nothing new. It happened in the 2000 presidential equation when George Bush defeated Al Gore in a bizarre vote counting dispute. The essence of this anomaly is the strict federal structure of the US Constitution. Each state has, in effect, a separate election process with the winner elected on the “first-past-the goal” system, as in India. Each state has a certain number of electoral votes based on the population. The winning candidate gets all the electoral votes allotted to that state. The total number of electoral votes in the country is 540, which means that a candidate needs to have at least 271 electoral votes to become the President of the United States.
States on the west coast and the Boston-Washington corridor along the east coast of the US have been solidly Democrat since the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam protest movements of the Sixties. Racial minorities and liberal whites that form the core of the so-called rainbow coalition supporting the Democrats are largely concentrated in California, the east coast states and Illinois (around Chicago). These states, particularly California, Illinois and New York have large population and, consequently, provide substantial electoral votes for the Democrats. By contrast, ultra conservative white Evangelical Christians form the majority in most states in the heartland of the USA whose religious beliefs did not change much from the nineteenth century. They have been solidly Republicans for generations.
The South that came out of obscurity during the last fifty years has a queer political history. They fought and lost the Civil War against the North to protest against Abraham Lincoln’s decision to abolish slavery. The decision was largely motivated by the economic compulsion of supplying labour to the growing industry in the North. With Abraham Lincoln being the leader of the Republican Party, the whites in the South became loyal Democrats. They were shaken by President Kennedy’s decision to send Federal forces to quell the personal resistance of the Alabama Governor, George Wallace, against admitting two Negroes (now euphemistically called Blacks) at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The South also became increasingly uneasy with the rainbow coalition of Democrats in the North. Finally, a large number of ehite voters there became Republicans under the influence of Ronald Reagan.
According to the famous American writer Phillip Roth, the US is now politically split with 45% voters solidly for the Republicans and 45% are solidly for the Democrats. Barring 4% of voters supporting some third party candidate, the election is effectively over the rest 6% of the population. This is why political commentators often say that the voters in Ohio and Florida decide the US election. Ohio in the north has many industrial cities, along with a large rural hinterland. This makes the election results of Ohio uncertain. No Republican became the President of the USA without winning Ohio. Florida, on the other hand, has a substantial Hispanic population, along with a very large white community that includes the retirees. This makes Florida another battleground for the US presidential election.
The election in the rest of the country is mostly a formality, with the results known way in advance. This time it was a bit different, as many traditionally Democratic states voted for Donald Trump, while the rainbow coalition voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. This explains the anomaly of Clinton winning the majority of popular votes, while Trump won a significant majority of electoral votes.
Although the presidential election engrosses the outside world, the President enjoys real power only in the realm of foreign policy. The US Congress, consisting of the House of Representatives and the Senate, largely controls the domestic policy. The House is elected every two years and represents all 435 districts of the Union, while the Senate has 100 members, with each state represented by two senators elected every six years by direct election by voters of the state. With smaller states in the middle of the country being overwhelmingly Republican, the Senate used to be evenly represented by both parties, with a slight bias in favour of the Democrats. The Democrats, by contrast, historically dominated the House, with their traditional hold on the South of the country. With the allegiance of the South going over to the Republicans, they now control both the House and the Senate, and, thereby, have decisive influence on the domestic agenda of the United States. This shift towards the politics of extreme conservatism and the Christian majoritarian rule with a tinge of racism already became the norm even before Donald Trump came to the scene. What Trump really did was to lay bare this shift in the national politics for the whole world to see. His silence over the endorsement of a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader, and his sharing the stage and publicly embracing the former leader of the British racist party UKIP, caused less consternation in the United States than abroad.
The most pernicious effect of the Trump campaign was to legitimise the racist extreme right-wing political parties in Europe. His victory has given a huge boost to the morale of those parties and they are surely going to benefit during his rule. Since Europe has more fractious politics, with the racist extreme right groups not subsumed in one large right-wing political party as in the United States, the respectable right-wing parties in Europe are in a quandary at present. The general elections in France, Germany and the Netherlands would be watershed events next year and are expected to have repercussions in the West for years to come. The extreme right-wing parties in Europe sympathise with the ultra nationalist policy and strong leadership style of Vladimir Putin. With Trump taking over power in the United States, relationship with Russia in the future might be of major political significance. If the West makes rapprochement with Putin’s Russia, it could effectively challenge the increasing domination of China on the world stage. India might come in handy for the West in this high-stake game in international politics. Whether the Islamic countries would ever be able to form the third block in this ‘clash of civilizations’ is anybody’s guess at present.
The writer is former Dean and Emeritus Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Twente, The Netherlands.
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