It’s
official. The unthinkable has actually happened. Yes, of course, I am talking
about the upset win of Donald Trump in one of America’s most dramatic
presidential elections ever. Even as the world blinks in disbelief, the
unlikely winner prepares for his entry into the White House as the 45th
President of the world’s only superpower. This despite a series of
controversies, radical Right policies that have drawn criticism even from
Republicans, racist and sexist behaviour, and a lack of conventional political
experience.

However
election experts might explain Trump’s win, which the Guardian calls  “one of the most improbable political
victories in modern US history”, it is obvious that the voters’ support for Mr
Trump — a realty baron and TV star with little or no political experience — has
been a resounding rejection of the establishment forces that had assembled
against him. Policies and ideals that have been so deeply ingrained into the
country’s politico-economic bases that they seemed inevitable and unchangeable
have been rejected, so that the country faces a scary, uncertain future.

But
that is not the whole, or even the chief significance of the upset victory that
Trump has managed to claim for himself so dramatically. The real importance of
this election to the highest office in the USA lies in the potential impact it
would have on countries throughout the world. This is not merely because the
USA is a global superpower and therefore its socio-political destiny influences
the course of the world. That, of course, is true. But this particular US election
has been important for another, bigger, reason as well. This has been the first
US presidential election after the political ideology of rightist
ultra-nationalism — tinged with a near-xenophobic hatred of the racial, ethnic
and religious ‘Other’ — raised its ugly head throughout much of the world.

Indeed,
in recent times, the stress of global events like economic meltdown, political
turmoil, escalating terrorism and persistent civil wars has resulted in a
meteoric rise of intolerance and belligerence in people’s hearts.  It is this intolerance of difference that has
been the chief trait of the political and public culture of the contemporary
world since decades now. Differences of religion and opinion, of ethnicity,
manner of dressing, lifestyle and diet, and, of course, the differences of skin
colour, have resulted in an intolerant solipsism the world over.  We have been growing more and more selfish
both as individuals and as nations (witness the reaction of the European
countries to the migrant problem); and, on the inner landscape, we have been
growing increasingly self-centred but at the same time destructive of the ideal
of democracy that buttresses the notion of individual rights. In political
terms, all this has ensured that the world over both people and governments
have been showing a marked predilection towards fundamentalism of various
descriptions and towards variants of the political Right, with the attendant
rise of ‘nationalism’~ often rather narrowly and prescriptively defined — as
the dominant trait of global politics. This brand of ‘nationalism’, moreover,
is permeated with a vitriolic Islamophobia that equates global terrorism with
the religion of Islam and refuses to acknowledge that terrorism and the
violence it engenders have no religion save that of hatred. This rightist,
xenophobic ‘nationalism’ has emerged as a threat to the spirit of democracy in
Europe, reeling under the twin blows of weak economies and the influx of
refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. In India — the ‘world’s
largest democracy’ — this political ideology currently rules the roost, so
much so that religious and political ‘intolerance’ has become a perennial topic
of public discourse. And in the USA — historically prone to puritanical
fundamentalism — this has led to the incredible victory of Donald Trump.

It
is in this global context of the rise and rise of rightist fundamentalism — toxic
to individual rights, toxic to world peace, and potentially fatal to democracy
itself — that Trump’s win has to be viewed. It is unfortunate for votaries of
democracy everywhere that anti-establishment angst in the world’s oldest
democracy found no better alternative to staid politics than to turn to
orthodoxy, solipsism,  divisiveness, and
an almost jingoist nationalism. Today when Mr Trump declares that as a nation
“we (the USA) must reclaim our destiny” what we hear is not the call of a
leader to a better future, but the siren voice of a demagogue that would take
the country back to its puritanical past. The upsurge of anti-democratic
fundamentalism the world over has come to a head, dramatically. With apologies
to T S Eliot, isn’t this the way the world ends?  With a bang, not a whimper?

—
Suparna Banerjee

(The
writer is an academic.)