'There are ominous portents of an isolationist administration not only building a physical wall to the south to prevent unwanted immigrants from entering the land of milk and honey, but also trade walls not just against China, but all nations,' foresees Sreekant Sambrani.
Life imitates art, and how!
And sometimes, it imitates itself as well.
That's the inference I draw from the just concluded election in the United States.
That needs some explanation.
From 2010 to 2019, Netflix ran a highly acclaimed and popular television series, Orange Is The New Black. It told stories of several women, including some very respectable members of the upper middle class, who were inmates of a newly-privatised minimum-security prison.
Orange referred to the colour of their jumpsuits in the penitentiary and black is, of course, always trés chic, as in the little black dress.
Americans have chosen to send their former president Donald Trump, with his trade mark tuft of orange, back to the White House again. He ought to be wearing an orange jumpsuit himself, as a convicted felon, but fear not, he will not be doing so any time soon.
He will work double extra time to have that stain on his character (oh my, how my numb fingers have conspired against me to gift a character to this epitome of amorality!) using all the levers of power at his disposal yet again. Of course, some spinless members of the judiciary may spare him the trouble by doing this for him.
Orange has yet another significance in the present context. During the 1960s, at the height of the war in Vietnam, the US used more than 75 million litres of a deadly herbicide as a defoliant to reduce the forest cover that protected the Vietcong. This chemical also had devastating effects on humans, especially unborn babies who could be deformed.
Many pillars of American industry, including Fortune 500 companies such as Monsanto and Dow Chemicals produced the toxic compound, called Agent Orange. That led to great turmoil on US campuses, where students did not permit these companies to recruit.
This columnist has vivid memories of many such demonstrations in which he participated as a graduate student.
Another era of the new Agent Orange ably backed by some rogue corporates, unleashing his wrath on all and sundry institutions and persons, especially those who value decency in public life, seems to have just dawned.
***
I realise these word plays and rambling recollections of history are digressions -- they are actually my defence triggers activated by the realisation of the depths to which the world polity has sunk.
The US was the last shining city upon the hill, as Ronald Reagan, the last universally admired Republican, referred to it in his farewell address to the nation in 1989. Reagan was once feared as a reactionary by the liberal intelligentsia, but he has since turned out to be everybody's beloved, slightly goofy Uncle Ronnie.
No such redemption is on the cards for Donald Trump, nominally his political descendant many generations removed.
Early in the 2024 election season, a Trump resurrection appeared inevitable, especially since the incumbent President Joe Biden showed clear signs of being past his best before date.
A disastrous presidential debate sent the Democratic chieftains into a hurried huddle which dumped Biden and anointed his vice president Kamala Harris as the party standard bearer. So exhilarating was the show of support and cheer for Harris at the August Democratic convention that her election seemed not just possible but almost inevitable.
She possessed all the requirements for the job: Experience of high office, unblemished personal record, and a multiple minority status: Gender, race and ethnicity. Megabucks poured into her campaign following overwhelming endorsements and elocutions by the liberal political elite.
But her polling numbers then seemed to have got stuck in mid-spectrum.
It would have been logical to expect that a combination of endorsements, funds, large gatherings at her rallies and the continuing disclosures about the Trump shiftiness and shenanigans would culminate in a possible landslide win. That never happened.
Poll after poll showed her running neck and neck against Trump nationally. Worse, she remained deadlocked with Trump in the seven battleground states (since electoral outcomes in the die-hard deep Red and deep Blue were foregone conclusions, the way these states voted would determine who wins the presidency).
Initial concerns led to deepening worries, so much so that many pundits started fearing that Trump had an edge. The great poll guru Nate Silver confessed to his gut feeling of a Trump victory, even as he cautioned us against trusting anyone's gut, including our own gut and his as well.
When I read these melancholy messages from the frontlines, my first reaction was to treat them as nothing more than cautionary signals. After all, we had been there before. In 2016, we wrote off Trump against Hillary Clinton as we believed the poll numbers which consistently favoured her.
Once bitten twice shy, we were warning ourselves as the sly Trump was once again facing a powerful woman as his Democratic opponent.
By about 11 am IST on November 6, just an hour or so after the West Coast voting ended, it was painfully clear that Trump was about to create history: Only the second person (after Grover Cleveland in the late 19th century) to win two non-consecutive terms as president and only the second person (after Franklin Roosevelt) to contest the presidency three consecutive times.
He may even be only the second Republican since 1992 to win the popular vote as well as the electoral college.
In the bargain, he seems to have ensured that both Houses of the United States Congress are controlled by Republicans. That gives him enormous power. He has demonstrated amply that he could do what he wants with his own party, which will follow him to the bitter end.
Now he doesn't have to worry about the Democratic opposition, leaderless and frozen like a deer in the glare of the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
That should worry not just the US, but also the world. There are ominous portents of an isolationist administration not only building a physical wall to the south to prevent unwanted immigrants from entering the land of milk and honey, but also trade walls not just against China, but all nations.
NATO and Ukraine will be particularly worried about the Trump 2.0 Europe doctrine. He has already announced that he is against war in general. His closet Kremlin ally, Vladimir Putin, would be only too delighted to hear this announcement and plan an extended and more horrific offensive against Kyiv.
All the European leaders including Keir Starmer of the UK, Emmanuel Macron of France and Olaf Schulz of Germany have their hands full of managing their domestic situations of varying complexities. Now they have to deal with an utterly unpredictable and illogical US president, which would put all their common security in serious jeopardy.
Trump would be expected to support Benjamin Netanyahu to the hilt, which should extinguish all hopes of a lasting peace in West Asia any time soon.
Domestically, Trump has announced already his intention to cut taxes and floated a bizarre trial balloon of abolishing income tax by augmenting customs tariffs. He will, of course, try now finally to undo the Affordable Care (Obamacare) act, with a pliant Congress as his ally.
None of this speaks well for the US becoming a more caring, egalitarian, society.
***
Instant punditry has highlighted several concerns that doomed the Harris candidacy. The first was the general perception that the US economy was in a bad shape, with jobs disappearing and inflation taking a chunky bite of the household budget.
Data-based explanations such as the inflation mellowing and jobs actually increasing, especially in the auto industry, do not seem to have cut much ice with the population in general.
The (imagined) flood of immigrants scared the daylights of the middle class Americans, including first generation immigrants themselves (an instance of kicking the ladder after climbing in, perhaps).
The Trump-Vance graphic reference to Haitian refugees eating neighbourhood pets was bought by the electorate, even though it was patently untrue.
In general, the Democrats were seen as weak administrators. Poor Joe Biden, despite his many achievements, continued to occupy the cellar in approval ratings. And Harris could never shake off her intimate association with the Biden presidency.
'Trump will fix it,' he said. And the US bought it.
***
But in all this we are overlooking the elephant in the room.
In my column on Biden (July 13, 2024), I had written:
'Winners of the presidential elections so far have all been parts of the power elite with just one exception. This elite earlier comprised WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) males. The Anglo-Saxon part disappeared when the Second World War hero, General Dwight Eisenhower, of Germanic descent won the election in 1952. Numerous non-Anglo-Saxon persons occupied high position in corporate America and successive US administrations. John F Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, won in 1960 removing the Protestant qualification for entry into the elite.
'Thereafter, in the last six decades, numerous women and members of minorities state and Congressional elections, but the presidency remained the solid bastion of white Christian males with ages ranging between 40 and 70.'
Barack Obama's election in 2008 is the sole exception to this pattern.
Obama's telegenic, aspirational, appeal may have won him the office, but not smooth sailing of his legislative agenda (including Affordable Health Care, popularly known as Obamacare) in Congress. The opposition was largely due to his being an outsider, demonstrating the continuing hold of the power elite. But post-retirement, Obama seems to have been co-opted as an honorary member of that same elite.
The US electorate must be viewing Obama's victory as a one-off tip of the hat to outsiders. That, I suspect, is one among the many reasons why Hilary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016. That result has been termed entirely unexpected, but in hindsight, it was always going to be difficult for the establishment to make an exception yet again and elect another outsider, this time a woman, following a person of colour, as America's president.
That logic, I am quite convinced, still prevails. That would make a Harris victory over Trump more difficult than what it appears now.
I should have trusted my own analysis, rather than being carried away by all the hype that went with our Kammakka.
