When I arrived in New York from Delhi on March 21, 2020, JFK airport wore a deserted and forlorn look. All of three other passengers joined me on the flight from New York to Boston. In the months that followed the most scientifically and medically advanced country in the world was brought to its knees by the utter mishandling of the pandemic by an inept and insensitive administration in Washington. Systemic racism ensured that vulnerable minorities suffered and died in disproportionate numbers. In such a situation of unprecedented social stress a white police officer’s knee on a helpless black man’s neck triggered a wave of protests across US cities by a rainbow coalition of idealistic youth.
By the time I was ready to board my flight in New York back to Delhi on November 6, 2020, the television screens brought the reassuring news that Biden was poised to overtake Trump in the crucial state of Pennsylvania and thereby win the Presidency of the United States. The catastrophe of a second term for Trump had been averted. Like so many of my faculty colleagues and students, I felt a sense of relief, but no euphoria. The pandemic continued unabated. The color line still divided America down the middle.
Yet the victory of Joe Biden-Kamala Harris over Donald Trump-Mike Pence still holds meaning in America and for the world. It showed that democratic mobilization could halt and turn back the triumphant march of majoritarian tyranny. And it raised a glimmer of hope that xenophobic anti-immigrant nationalism could perhaps be transcended by an openness to global exchanges and invocations of a shared humanity.
The result of the American election is not as close as it is being made out to be. In a two-party system a margin of well over 5 million in the popular vote and a nearly 4 percentage point difference must be regarded as a clear and decisive win. It is America’s weird and outmoded electoral college system that has created the optical illusion of a narrow victory. In the rust-belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania the turnout of Democratic voters who had stayed home in 2016 made the crucial difference. In Georgia and Arizona, the civil rights icon John Lewis and the war hero John McCain took their revenge from their graves against a boorish Trump who had disparaged and disrespected them in life and in death. Stacy Abrams galvanized the African-American electorate in Atlanta and the young Latino vote around Phoenix struck a punishing blow against Trump’s unbridled racist rhetoric and cruel immigration policy. Only in Florida did the Republicans successfully paint Biden and Harris as radical leftists among the Cuban-American community in Miami-Dade.
Faced with barely disguised racist and gendered attacks at Trump’s rallies, Kamala Harris was a model of grace and dignity. Indian and Jamaican by heritage, she is African-American by upbringing, education and choice. The Biden-Harris ticket won well over 90% of the Black female vote. Domestic racial and gender justice will have to be high on the new administration’s agenda. Yet the fact that both Biden and Harris trace their roots to British colonies – Ireland, India and the Caribbean – does matter in shaping their outlook on the world. Biden’s tepid slogan “Buy American” is far removed from Trump’s strident “America First”. Having served as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as Vice-President, Joe Biden will re-engage with the wider world. The first steps of his administration will be to rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accord.
What might Trump’s defeat portend for other democratically elected authoritarian leaders. Majoritarianism masquerading as democracy undergirds the authoritarian turn in contemporary global politics. Trump is not unique and is of a piece with Modi, Erdogan, Johnson and Bolsonaro in the manipulation of religion or race-based majorities by whipping up ultra-nationalist protests against globalization. Narendra Modi precedes and rivals Trump in the use of the language of citizenship and illegal immigration to mask virulent anti-minority prejudice. While I was campaigning in the 2014 elections, I heard with great consternation Modi’s proclamation that on the day the results were to be announced he would drive all “illegal immigrants” across the border of Bangladesh. The citizenship crisis that erupted in December 2019 could be traced back to the tenor of the election campaign in 2014. Trump adopted that rhetoric in 2016 as did Boris Johnson in his Brexit campaign.
Across the pond from the United States it will be Boris Johnson’s far-right Brexiteer government that will be the first domino to fall in the wake of Trump’s defeat. Dominic Cummings is to Boris Johnson what Steve Bannon was to Donald Trump in the early phase of his Presidency. The impending departure from 10 Downing Street of Dominic Cummings, the diabolical author of the “Get Brexit Done” and “Take Back Control” campaigns, does not bode well for Johnson’s prospects of serving a full term. Labor under Keir Starmer is well-poised to win a future election. Also, mainstream Conservatives in the UK are less supine than Republican Senators in the US when it comes to the government’s violation of law. It will be a harder struggle for the opposition in India, partly because it is still early in Modi’s unfortunate second term and partly due to the challenges of building a credible federal front against him. However, Trump’s discomfiture will rattle other authoritarians of his ilk, including the one who fawned on him in Houston and Ahmedabad.
This is not to under-estimate the poisoned legacy of Trumpism that Trump will leave behind. The Yale historian Tim Snyder has warned in a recent article in the Boston Globe to take seriously the threat Trump represents even during the transition as he spreads disinformation and goes about undermining the legitimacy of American democracy. “Constitutions break,” Snyder had written in his New York Times review of Benjamin Hett’s The Death of Democracy, “when ill-motivated leaders deliberately expose their vulnerabilities.” His worries are not entirely unfounded. However, come January 20, 2021, a demagogue refusing to concede defeat will be deprived of the use of the instruments of state power. That moment will demoralize the votaries of white supremacy in America as well as Trumpian leaders preaching political chauvinism and economic autarky in other parts of the world.
