Mayday, mayday, a big bang is
coming up as America is crash-landing on the upcoming elections day, when a new President and Congress are to be decided, and the world should brace for impact! Why? Because there is
going to be a huge mess regardless of who'll win the Oval Office and Capitol
Hill.
If the Democratic party runner Kamala Harris wins, the Republican opponent Donald Trump will set in motion what he’s already consistently rehearsed since the last 2020 election he lost: an adamant denial alleging that the election was “rigged“. If Trump wins, he’ll start large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him, sent him to courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years, and he'll try to dismantle constitutional order. In both cases, law enforcement, security structures as well as armed groups of citizens, and spontaneous crowds will act, disrupting public safety and business as usual.
A disastrous crash in American society seems inevitable with unforeseen consequences. Let me put forward a scary one: civil war-like developments may unfold.
Irreconcilable Divisions
American society has been characterized by deepening rifts for a good part of the 21st century. The economic divisions that lingered throughout the 1990s erupted in the 2011 Occupy movement led by the economically disadvantaged majority (the alleged 99-percenters juxtaposed to the super-wealthy one percent of Americans). It was a powerful earthquake that capped tectonic changes in the global economy unleashed by globalization, which lured capital to economies in transition (China, Indochina, India, East Europe) and disrupted American labor markets (less demand, smaller pay). [1] The impoverishment of the masses, a staggering loan burden on individuals, homelessness, and unaffordable health care occupied the minds of various streams of the Occupy movement. In the end, a few years later, the movement dissolved, and capitalism survived, but not without a financial rescue by the government and the workings of security forces. Dissatisfaction with income inequality and with key institutions (banks, government, big corporations) remained.
If this economic hardship applied equally to American working people regardless of their ideological orientation, the election of the first President with African roots did not. Old political and cultural divisions resurfaced and new ones erupted. White supremacists revived racist traditions born with America’s primal sin of slavery (granted, inherited from the British colonial period). Battling the legacy of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, reviving old fears of the Anglo-Saxon majority, and adding new conspiracy theories like the “great replacement” (allegedly, non-whites systematically replace whites across the globe). [2] All this intoxicated the public space.
The anti-racist Americans pushed back. Still, both camps used the black race roots and appearance of President Obama to their advantage: Supremacists strived to prove a growing “disenfranchisement”, whereas anti-racists strived to prove the truism that a black person can run the highest office in the country. The adversaries blew the same horn even though Obama’s mother was a white woman, and so he is half white and half black (fathered by a Kenyan immigrant). It appears that the uniting potential of his half/half background was in nobody’s interest in the nation focused on emphasizing differences rather than similarities.
The divide over the racial issue indeed characterizes the main division in American society today between conservatives and liberals, represented in the Republican and Democratic parties. The conservative camp embraces racist ideas, anti-abortion (“pro-life”) laws, unrestrained gun rights (purchase, own, carry, expose), creationism and closer ties between religion and education, opposing the LGTBQ exposure, strict law and order, and restrictive immigration policies. Liberals hold diametrically opposed views. And then comes Mr. Trump to foment the disintegration of the social fabric.
Crowdsourcing Political Power
The former President/the second-term hopeful belongs to the conservative camp but that’s only by pragmatic necessity. Trump is no ideologist and could go along with any party that feeds his interests if not the party he’d establish (an option he’s tinkered with). He is no politician either, despite riding wildly through the political circus for about a decade. If politics is an art of reconciling different interests and aggregating them into feasible governance decisions and practices, Trump isn’t there. Rather, he’s still a hard-handed business owner who views the whole country as his own business he can rule at whim.
Trump understands that managing by a stick-and-carrot method works in national politics as in organizational politics. He’s been assured so with taking over the Republican Party years ago and reassured he’s still controlling the party even after losing the election after his first term in Office, getting impeached twice in the House, and being sued multiple times for various offenses and crimes. However, Trump is still missing the differences between business and the political sphere. Society is a few orders of magnitude beyond a business firm in terms of players, interests, tactics and strategies, fight-and-flight developments, chance events, etc. Not even the largest corporation matches society in complexity. The implication is that autocratic governance of a country isn’t the same as running a centralized company. At least, an extensive mechanism of state oppression must be kept in motion to rule over citizens’ minds and bodies and contending power circles, which indeed happened in 20th-century Europe and elsewhere.
What in particular feeds Trump’s wings are his MAGA followers (Make America Great Again) – the Trumpists, his devoted voting machine, and partly the recruitment basis for street fighters that showed up during his rule and finally stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. Make no mistake of equating MAGA supporters with conservatives. For example, Trump’s Vice President Pence is a conservative but no MAGA supporter. Trumpists share conservative values and add some more. They are for strengthening the police, protectionism, isolationism, and leaning toward an authoritarian attitude and a strong leader. Trumpists uncritically buy every word of their leader, including the denial of lost 2020 elections and numerous conspiracy theories (e.g., Covid-deniers, anti-vaxxers). They ardently follow him as if he’s a cult leader, filling his rallies, spreading his word through social media, and following his marching orders to intimidate opponents if not inflict worse damage. If Trump takes aim at the institutions of the republic, the balance between legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government, and even regular elections, MAGA will follow all this obediently.
Trumpists originated in the U.S. and spread to Canada, Latin America, Europe, and possibly elsewhere. I was shocked to face such people outside North America, who babbled about Trump’s messianic role in fighting evil across the world. In the U.S., typical MAGA supporters are older, retired, Christian, men, earning income at the lower middle-class level; about 30% have at least a college degree. [3] We could see former marines and police officers among violent protesters on January 6, 2021. But there are also supporters with higher academic degrees and prestigious jobs, and they are spread across the country. These insights undermine the belief that MAGA is confined to the blue-collar and rural populations.
Trumpism is a populist movement, where the leader crowdsources political power, to use the contemporary management term. A billionaire who pretends to be in the same boat as ordinary people by using various rhetorical tools. [4] The man whose hairstyling costs more than the annual salary of his typical supporter, gets under their skin by speaking simply, showing anger and hate straightly as simple guys do, mocking the political machinery in D.C. as if speaking their mind, promising to defend them against “deep state” (the usual evil suspect) as well as immigrants that take their jobs and even “eat their home pets”, assuring them of material wellbeing he’ll bring to bear and a mythical resurgence of the golden past…
He leverages this crowd-controlling power to gain support in the Republican Party and silence the traditional conservatives. Power over the masses is the reason why that party has clung to Trump despite his losses, legal troubles, and the demonstrated and still promised undermining of the American Constitution and Republic. Democrats warn about this by portraying Trump as a threat to democracy and national unity but in vain: MAGA refuses to listen, the Republican Party lost its identity, and others either don’t make sense or don’t care. Does the other side really want a democratic republic and one united nation, as liberals assume?
Civil War Prospects
Calling out civil war may sound like a pessimistic exaggeration. The term is usually associated with the war between the Union and Confederate states in the 1860s. But a hundred years later, the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the Vietnam War unfolded over the years, with violence on city streets involving opposed groups as well as establishment defenses. Half a century later, the Black Lives Matter movement arose and culminated in 2020 due to revealed cases of police brutality. It coupled with ongoing street brawls between leftist and rightist violent, armed groups. These events resemble civil war acts, even though they may not fit the orthodox definition of such a war. The upcoming elections will surely follow suit and may trigger something worse.
The ball is in Trump’s yard. If he loses, he’ll just continue to deny the regularity of elections and repeat doggedly that he won. The “Stop the Steal” protests will reemerge, lawsuits get reenacted, protesters fill the streets, right-wing armed groups awake, their leftist counterparts respond, election officials be threatened, the police and FBI become very busy, and so on. The final counting of electoral votes could be accompanied again by rampant violence. The traffic, commerce, work, education, and whole public life could be derailed for a significant period. Timing of disruptive developments could be tricky to predict so that there’s a calm before the storm (as in an old song).
Should Trump win, he’ll start to rule by pardoning himself and his supporters for various misdeeds they committed. Then, he’ll unleash a large-scale revenge against everyone who impeached him in the House, supported the impeachment in the Senate (although it didn’t pass), accused him in courts of law, and criticized him in the past four years. He’ll install loyalists in federal law enforcement institutions and the military, grab more executive powers, and fill again the innermost power circle with his family members and sycophants. Most of the mainstream media (he calls (“fake news”) will be sidelined and pressured. Tracking down undocumented immigrants and mass deportations will unfold. Enter his possible tinkering with the Constitutional right to vote, having in mind the dream of every dictator to obscure and eventually disable it. (He promised the MAGA crowd to alleviate them of the voting burden after this election.) This grave scenario might be somewhat moderated by a prospective Democrat majority in the House/Senate. Still, the American political system already skewed toward executive power will provide a broad basis for monarchic rule. Serious consequences would follow for large parts of the world as well, but that’s another topic.
[3] https://sites.uw.edu/magastudy/demographics-group-affinities/
