America 2017: If it happened elsewhere
The leader likes to be praised. Close to the end of his first year in power, the presidential office circulated a memo that featured Cabinet ministers congratulating him on his efforts so far.
The foreign minister, who once allegedly called the leader a “moron,” now said he was taking the world into a new era of “strategic and economic cooperation.” The defense minister, who had struggled to check some of the leader’s rash decisions, gave him “high marks” for fighting terrorists. The finance minister, mocked by the opposition as a consigliere for oligarchic power, applauded the leader for pushing through economic reforms that mostly line the pockets of the oligarchs.
It was the leader’s deputy, though, who was most effusive with his praise. “Thank you for seeing, through the course of this year, an agenda that truly is restoring this country,” he said. “I’m deeply humbled, as your vice president, to be able to be here.”
The leader probably needed this. He has had a tough year. He was spoiling for a fight on the day of his inauguration, delivering a short, dark address that warned of “carnage.” His war with the media escalated that very day, as the leader smarted over reports that crowds cheering his ascension were smaller than those that greeted his predecessor, an ethnic minority politician whom the leader loathed and had tried to smear as someone not truly from the country.
The leader was probably sensitive about the fact that he had come to power despite the majority of the population having voted against him. Thanks to a political system codified hundreds of years ago, when some men in this country still owned others as property on the basis of their skin color, it all made sense. The leader somehow insisted (and keeps insisting) that the vote gave him a popular mandate that his predecessors, with far larger vote shares, never had.
Ironically, though, his signature political achievement this year was a mammoth tax overhaul that gives huge rewards to the corporate firms and financial elites the leader once decried when seeking election. In reality, they represent another base of support for the leader, who, well before entering politics, was a scion of metropolitan privilege, the name behind a real estate empire and a television celebrity.
There’s still an ongoing investigation into connections his camp had with a foreign power, one that is thought to have meddled in his favor during the election. The leader profoundly resents this probe, especially as it rounded up some of his aides, and lashes out far more at his opponents at home than his counterpart overseas who apparently authorized the interference. Indeed, the leader has spent the past year being rather cozy with a series of strongmen abroad. His die-hard supporters, meanwhile, want to see a genuine purge of their supposed enemies in the civil bureaucracy, or what they call the “deep state.”
Now, the leader has moved the presidential court to a winter residence far south of the capital that happens to be his own property. Known to bear grudges and bridle at criticism, he surrounds himself with his family. His daughter is a prominent adviser and spokeswoman for the regime; his son-in-law, a tycoon princeling who once mismanaged a small media house, serves as an envoy to kingdoms and republics elsewhere. His other children launch public attacks on his opponents, questioning their patriotism.
The leader’s loyalists have dabbled in some opportunistic schemes. At one stage this year, the brother of the education minister was promoting a surreal plan to outsource a war in a faraway land to mercenary companies under his watch. He hoped to pique the leader’s interest by promising him access to vast mineral deposits beneath that nation’s soil. More gravely, unearthed financial documents revealed the means by which a number of prominent advisers to the regime have avoided paying taxes on their vast wealth through offshore schemes. Although such revelations generated more outrage in other countries where such behavior is considered unpatriotic and unfair, few people batted an eyelid in the leader’s country. It’s a nation, after all, where many admire the gilded fortunes of people such as the leader.
Critics of the leader therefore see his “populism” largely as a sham, distinguished primarily by divisive rhetoric and policies. Even before entering office, the leader often signaled his antipathy for minority groups. When a group of fringe neo-Nazis marched in a university town, his tepid response outraged many people
His ubiquitous slogan — hailing nation “first” — taps into an earlier moment in the country’s history when influential fascist sympathizers mobilized under the exact same banner. His supporters lambaste the phenomenon of “identity politics” in the country. But the most homogeneous group of voters in the country is that which supports the leader.
The leader says these people in the country’s hinterlands were once “forgotten,” but no longer are. He is fixated on “restoring” his country to a mythic past, although it’s unclear what that means for the future. Not long ago in the country, after all, most minority groups didn’t have equal rights. He is obsessed about getting the rest of the world to “respect” his country’s primacy again, but after a year of lashing out at allies and offering up churlish threats, he has presided over a marked slump in global attitudes toward his own nation. Undeterred, the leader wants to block immigration and build a vast wall along the country’s southern border, though very few serious people believe it will make much of a difference.
The leader’s many opponents have wrung their hands over what to do about his time in power. Some are pushing for impeachment, shocked at how the leader has so brazenly attacked the norms of the republic and even now seems to be inching his country toward new, needless wars abroad. Others, gesturing to a phantom “resistance” movement, believe they can sweep out the leader’s allies in upcoming legislative elections.
They say the leader does not represent the nation’s values, and is not “who we are.” But the leader still can count on significant, entrenched support. In his own party, there were quite a few figures who initially balked at his rise to power. But the vast majority are now sheltering beneath his banner. And so, as a divided nation heads toward a new year, both sides may have to accept that the tensions of the moment are no aberration but exactly a reflection of “who we are.”
(With apologies to Slate’s Joshua Keating, who popularized this genre of online commentary quite some time ago.)
Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post.