What SA can teach the US once it has got rid of Trump, ‘the Mbeki of America’
My heart sank as I read the opening paragraph of Nikolas Kristoff’s New York Times column last Sunday. The article was about Donald Trump’s colossal failure of leadership, but began with a comparison with former president Thabo Mbeki: “One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in SA in early 2000s as Aids spread there under President Thabo Mbeki. Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found.”
Kristoff went on to describe Trump as the “American Mbeki”. The parallels are so obvious they hardly need elucidation here, save to say that I felt heartbroken for the country’s reputation.
Since returning to the US in 2016 I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of newspaper articles about SA, and all have been about either Mbeki’s mishandling of HIV/Aids or Jacob Zuma’s kleptocracy. I look wistfully to the 1990s when I walked down the streets of America with an extra bounce in my step, not with my head bowed, ready to run for cover. If you told me back then that SAwould be the laughing stock of the world, I would have laughed you out of the room.
All is not lost, though. Joe Biden’s almost guaranteed electoral victory in the presidential elections on Tuesday could change the narrative from the cynicism of the Trump years to a more hopeful vision for the world. As of this writing, the electoral map is blue, which is to say a tidal Democratic wave. The only question now is whether Biden will turn the wave into a blowout by flipping the red Republican states. Many people are so traumatised by Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 that they won’t venture a prognostication. But 2020 is not 2016. For starters, in 2016 many voters thought they would take a risk with a non-politician in the White House. The coronavirus has only aggravated the cost of those decisions.
In this election, democracy itself is on the ballot, and so is America’s reputation as a voice of authority on elections and democracy around the world. For example, it has become clear that the United States has no provision for what happens when a president threatens the legitimacy of the election process itself or refuses to vacate office. So much for American exceptionalism. Biden is confident that Trump will go. “He’ll go,” he said emphatically.
Others have also confirmed that the Secret Service will politely but firmly remove him from the White House grounds. But still the US will need to stand on firmer ground in the event of another Trump-like figure in the future.
In the meantime voters , especially younger voters, are going to the polls in gangbuster numbers. As of the time of writing, 70-million Americans have already voted, more than 60% of the total votes in 2020. In Texas the early votes have already surpassed the total votes in 2016.
Trump’s biggest fear is losing protection from prosecution. Under department of justice regulations, a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. This was once thought to be the preserve of tinpot dictators, not of the oldest, most powerful and richest democracy in history.
Delivering the Nelson Mandela lecture in
Mbeki and Trump could not ... admit to making mistakes, as if that would take them down a notch from their self-created pedestals. They left ignominious legacies of hubris, cynicism and megalomania
Johannesburg two years ago, former US president Barack Obama noted that the world was at a crossroads: “A moment in time at which two very different visions of humanity’s future compete for the hearts and the minds of citizens around the world. Two different stories, two different narratives about who we are and who we should be. How should we respond?” That question now confronts the US as starkly as it did after the Civil War. Will the US continue on the path of turning the clock back to a racial oligarchy under Trump, or will it embrace multiracial democracy under Biden?
And if Biden should win there will be a great deal of repairing needed in the US. His emphasis on restoring the soul of the nation is music to my ears. Over the past two decades I have tried to make the same point for our country. It baffles me that our presidents have never seen their office as a bully pulpit for social values, preferring to hide behind technocratic discourse, forgetting that “a nation is a spiritual principle”, as Ernest Renan put it.
Biden’s challenge will also lie in restoring trust in US institutions. By calling the government the “deep state”, Trump has steadily eroded the trust in the institutions that hold American society together.
However, the problems precede Trump. A political system designed to protect what James Madison called “the minority of the opulent” is fraying at the edges. Despite demographic changes towards a majority-minority society and a more progressive youth population, America’s institutions — from the Electoral College to the Senate to the Supreme Court — are archaic, anachronistic and unrepresentative. The Senate grants the same representation to Wyoming, with its total population of 600,000, as it does to California, with 40-million. The Electoral College means that a candidate who wins a state gets all its delegates in the college; the rest of the voters be damned. Two states — Maine and Nebraska — at least allow for proportional allocation of the delegations.
In the Supreme Court it is hard to see the justices as independent arbiters of the law.
The biggest challenge facing the US is its original sin — race. Therapeutics and vaccines can cure the coronavirus but there is no cure for the racism virus. The reason progressives are on edge is that there are enough Americans who either believe in Trump’s racism or it does not bother them. On this score there is much that SA can teach the US. I cannot think of any country with the collective knowledge on race to surpass SA, except for perhaps the US. The two countries have grappled with white supremacy for five centuries. Mandela is widely hailed as a model for racial reconciliation. He is not the only example of race leadership, but his ability to shepherd a divided nation to a constitutional settlement is one of the greatest political achievements of the modern era.
For reasons peculiar to their own biographies, people such as Mbeki and Trump could not ask themselves such questions, let alone admit to making any mistakes, as if that would take them down a notch from their own self-created pedestals. Hoist with their own petard, they left behind ignominious legacies of hubris, cynicism and megalomania.
With the right leadership, both countries can still reach back to the “better angels of our nature”.