Miguelángel Verde Garrido | 12th November 2016
Donald John Trump’s victory in the 2016 United States presidential elections has shocked the country and the world. The offensive discourse that characterized the President-elect’s campaign has left the US starkly divided. Women and minorities are rightly concerned about their human and civil rights. Days and nights of protests have followed the electoral result. The international community is also concerned about the implications of a foreign policy that would be characterized by stalwart insularity and disengagement from the political, economic, and military alliances and strategies that the US has nurtured since the end of World War II.
(Photo credit: Chris Piascik | Flickr)
Donald John Trump has become President-elect of the United States of America.
Within the US, this is a moment of profound contrasts in opinions and emotions, mostly influenced by how people casted their votes and what those votes meant to them. In the rest of the world, the moment is similar, although for very different reasons. Unable to have influenced the elections beyond social media, the globe wonders what the Trump administration will mean for their own states’ politics, economies, and relations with the US.
There is much to consider and write about until Trump’s presidential inauguration takes place, but today it is important to consider at least the following:
The US elections were not “rigged”. Even if Hillary Rodham Clinton had won the elections, they would not have been “rigged” either. Those who criticize democracy for not providing the electoral results that they wanted, either within or outside of the US, should remember that if Clinton had won, then they would have celebrated democracy. Similar condemnations of democracy have followed the British and Colombian referenda. To be clear, democracy is the best of our political systems not because it ensures the most desired results by means of elections, but because it establishes clear rules that determine how citizens can access political power as well as the terms in which that power is returned to the state and accessed by others in time.
There is certainly much to improve in democratic political systems (for example, the outdated consensus that some of the most important political decisions we make require only a simple majority among the electorate or, in the US, that the electoral college system continues to be desirable), but arguments for electoral elitism have implications and consequences as dangerous as the most undesirable of democratic decisions. Furthermore, it is important to remember that by sabotaging Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) subverted its own democratic values and procedures. We will never know whether or not he would have defeated Trump in the presidential elections or, if elected, would have helped to alleviate the present discord within the country.
On the state of the union
For many years already, the US is intensely divided over a number of socio-economic, cultural, and political matters. A number of socio-political movements, spanning the entire spectrum of political ideologies, have emerged as a result. Despite the fact that the Republican Party has control of the executive and legislative branches of government, and will probably appoint a judge of their liking to the Supreme Court, it is crucial that civil society continue to strive in order to further liberal values. Although the Trump presidential campaign has allowed the darkest groups among the US far-right to voice themselves loudly, it is important to remember that neither is the far-right committed to the Republican Party in its entirety nor is the Republican Party in its entirety committed to far-right politics.
When Barack Hussein Obama was elected president, his “Yes We Can” slogan never prepared us for the continuation and expansion of drone warfare and mass surveillance, his failure after eight years to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center, or the most intense persecution and imprisonment of whistleblowers 