At the time of writing, the results of the mid-term elections on which the future of the Jo Biden presidency in the United States of America is dependant are yet to be declared. However, all the reports suggest that the Democratic Party is all set to receive a stupendous electoral drubbing and may lose control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives to a Donald Trump-dominated Republican Party. If the Republican performance is spectacular, it may even lead to the Democrats losing gubernatorial races in the traditional Blue belt. If that indeed happens, there is a good chance that the presidential election of 2024 could herald the return of Trump to the White House — unless the Democrats manage to give the party nomination to someone who can combine the charisma of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

In 2020, and particularly after his boisterous supporters chose to storm Capitol Hill in January 2021 alleging election fraud, it seemed that the four years of Trump were an unhappy aberration for the American people. The ageing Biden, with his periodic lapses of memory and a penchant for gaffes, may not have been the best man to manage what a section of the electorate imagined was a necessary act of deliverance. But despite his obvious shortcomings, he was the recipient of the vocal anti-Trump vote. The pugnacious Republican candidate didn’t exactly lose the groundswell of subaltern support that had enabled him to pull off a surprise victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016. However, his polarising presidency motivated his opponents to pool all their resources and ingenuity to overpower Trump, albeit narrowly.

Like in India where the advent of Narendra Modi prompted a confused debate on the ‘idea of India’, four years of Trump’s bid to ‘drain the swamp’ resulted in ‘democracy’ also becoming a point of contention. Trump’s supporters sincerely believed that the ancien regime with its overdose of entitlement needed to be hastily dismantled. That was what they meant by democracy. On the other side, those who rallied behind Biden felt that Trump was a complete outlander out to break all the rules of the political consensus and needed to be stopped and banished to the margins of national life. For them, the preservation of democracy meant the marginalisation of Trump and all those who shared his radical assumptions.

Ideally, the issue should have been settled by January 2021 after the proTrump assault on Capitol Hill provoked genuine outrage in an America unaccustomed to seeing a re-enactment of coup politics in their own country. Within a few months, Trump had indeed been marginalised and even banned for life from Twitter and other social media platforms. It almost seemed America was reverting to ‘normal’ politics of gentlemanly competition between the elephant and the donkey. Why did this not happen? Why is the US witnessing a full-fledged ideological slugfest with little or no common ground between the Democrats and the Republicans? Why did the Biden presidency fail to create a viable centre ground for the return of normalcy?

The most convincing account of where and why Biden failed to do what was realistically expected of him (by the centre ground, at least) was provided by the writer, Andrew Sullivan, in UnHerd, a British online publication. “In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-Left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fuelled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern ‘genders’; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; ‘equity’ hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media ‘disinformation’; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went… What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the centre?”

This preoccupation with a contentious social agenda may seem to be at odds with the polls that suggest that economic concerns have driven the sharp swing to the Republicans. With inflation rates touching anything between 8% and 10% and fuel costs sometimes doubling since the Ukraine war, the impression of mismanagement was all-pervasive. This created the space for the unease over the crazy aspects of the Woke agenda to become aggressive talking points for the Trump-leaning Republicans. In hindsight, the mid-term elections — the first real test of public opinion since Trump was ousted in November 2020 — appear to have put a big question mark over the Left-liberal certitudes that have dominated mainstream intellectual discourse over the past two years or so.

This is a theme that could assume significance in democracies outside the US. In India, for example, where a sneeze in North America becomes contagious, aspects of the ‘progressive’ social agenda — particularly those that shape trendy thinking in the cloistered campuses — made a mark in the thinking of the elite opposition to the Modi government. The articulation may have been patchy, but there is little doubt that the celebration of a fragmented society and fringe causes owed much to trends within the US. I found it very interesting that the implications of the US Supreme Court modification of the Roe vs Wade judgment on abortion rights were discussed threadbare in the English-language media in India despite its complete lack of relevance here. It indicated quite clearly that both the sense of mission and the anxieties that shaped the left-wing of the Democratic Party found reflection in an unlikely terrain. How the Left setback in the US will now impact ‘progressive’ thinking in other societies will be quite interesting to observe. The Right, being far more national in its orientation, is unlikely to be impacted in any meaningful way by the recent shift of opinion in the US.