Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

            Pardon me if I begin with some political truisms. (A.) Democracy, under whatsoever constitution,  is a very flawed system, but it’s still the best we’ve got. (B.) There are no such things as Utopias. Ideal societies are always fictional. Any attempts to construct ideal societies in the real world always lead to disaster, usually in the form of oppressively-controlled totalitarian states. (C.) Following on from this, only the very gullible believe that a change of government, in a democratic system, will suddenly lead to a harmonious society in which all social problems are solved. In the politics of democracy, the beat goes on. Discussion, argument and opposing opinions will continue to be aired, sometimes in strident and angry form. I might also add that, in democratic societies, we rarely vote for the clearly-good against the clearly-bad. We usually vote for the bad against the worse, or the mediocre against the pitiful.

 

            I say all these familiar and demonstrably true things in the wake of the latest American presidential election. At time of writing, Donald Trump is the lame-duck president, still playing games of pretending he lost because the election was rigged. But his conviction in these protests is now waning. I assume (or hope) that by the time you read this he will have conceded. Alas, a little ghost whispers in my ear that, in the very unlikely event this election really was rigged, it would not be the first time in American history. No sane historian now would disagree that there was much documented voter fraud in the election of John F.Kennedy in 1960, and possibly such fraud won Kennedy the presidency, given that his winning margin over his rival Richard Nixon was miniscule.

            Be all that as it may, Joe Biden has clearly won the election of 2020.

            And now is everything going to change and will a new broom sweep America clean?

            Nope.

            Bear in mind that, as in the election of 2016, there was no landslide. The predicted “blue wave” of Democrats did not happen, and Biden won by a whisker. Put simply, nearly as many Americans voted for Trump as voted for Biden. The country remains politically polarised and there are noisy extremist movements, small in numbers but still capable of doing much damage, on the fringes of both the Right and the Left. On this side, Proud Boys, white supremacists and unreconstructed Confederates. On that side the left-fascist Antifa movement and the parts of the Black-Lives-Matter movement that normalise rioting and looting. The great mass of Americans don’t approve of either tendency, but these movements still make the evening news and still influence how people vote.

            For me personally, it’s a matter of wonder that a country as large as the USA was incapable of finding better and more capable candidates for the presidency. Donald Trump has his own unshakeable fan-base, but is seen by most of the world as crass, crude, unsubtle, unprincipled and an opportunist with authoritarian tendencies. But who did the Democrats dig up to oppose him? Joe Biden is a tired old political hack of no particular distinction whose one claim to fame is that he was the (powerless) vice-president of Barack Obama – and when it came to campaigning, Biden’s shortcomings as a speaker were so obvious that (breaking long-observed conventions) Obama came out of retirement to cover for him at many rallies. Biden was chosen by the Democrat party because his name was recognisable and because he was clearly a compromise. They had to balance the party’s more radical wing (“progressive” is the buzz-word that is often used) with somebody bland and staid. So they cooked up the ticket of recognisable, dull Biden to woo more conservative voters; and more leftish woman Kamala Harris to get the feminist and ethnic vote. The ticket didn’t really enthuse many, but it was enough to pull the Democrats over the line with voters who were more anti-Trump than they were pro-Biden-Harris. I won’t linger long on the fact that, during the primaries and when vying for her own nomination as candidate for the presidency, Kamala Harris was loud in denouncing Joe Biden as a sexual predator on the basis of accusations made against him. Presumably she has now forgotten these denunciations and complacent media are not going to remind anyone of them.

 

             Some people have entertained the scenario that Biden, ageing and frail, is merely a gap-stop president, who will conveniently fade away (or die), smoothing the way for Kamala Harris as the First Woman President. I don’t know how plausible this idea is. But in the event that it comes to pass, I would be happy to see a woman as US president – for the same reason I have given before. Having a woman president would rapidly take away the mystique that, for some people, still surrounds the idea of women as world leaders. It would soon be discovered that a woman in office would make the same sort of decisions made by men in office. And the beat would go on.

            There is one thing about the US election that greatly heartens me. For the last four years, American late-night TV comedians - Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, Jimmy Kimmel and the smug and self-important Bill Maher – have served a steady diet of anti-Trump commentary and foolery, swamping any other topics appropriate for satirical comment. For many months we have watched, regularly, Stephen Colbert’s monologues. At first we found them funny. Trump was, after all, a ripe target for ridicule. But after about the nine-thousandth anti-Trump joke we found  Colbert’s comments predictable and as boring as campaign slogans. Now, with Trump out of office, Colbert might find other targets to hit. Who knows? He might even find fault with the incoming executive.

            American elections are the business of Americans, but they do influence those of us who are citizens of other countries.

So here are two comments which will allow me to close this ramble:

            (1.) The American electoral system is absurd as democracies go, and badly in need of an overhaul. Of course there needs to be local and state representation – but the election of the head-of-state should be by direct vote, not entangled in protocols related to the so-called “electoral college”. I am not being superior about this – essentially America’s very flawed system of electing presidents is the same as the old “first-past-the-post” electoral system we used to have. The country is divided into electorates and the winner is the one who can win the majority of electorates. In New Zealand once, as in the USA still, governments were legitimately and legally formed by parties which had won more electorates, but less of the overall “popular” vote, than the losing party. If American presidential elections were by direct vote, there would be none of the nonsense of candidates fighting it out in “battleground states” and appealing to regional voters rather than appealing to the nation at large.

            (2.) I don’t believe there is such a thing as too much democracy, but the American electoral cycle is far too long and messy, what with presidential elections, mid-term congressional elections and then all the primaries in which political parties pick their candidates for the presidency. It means that the country chokes on politics. Solution: abolish the mid-terms, have the whole congress renewed in elections held at the same time as presidential elections, and simplify and abridge primaries. Allow them, say, three months max. for them to sort of who they want as POTUS. Just a thought.