Using an African cliché for the Trump problem misses its US roots
‘He’s going full Robert Mugabe,” tweeted Samantha Power, the respected academic and former US ambassador to the UN, just after 2am on Friday in what was neither the first nor the cleverest “hot take” comparing US President Donald Trump’s post-election conduct to that of an African dictator.
As political leaders, pundits and analysts around the US have wrestled to account in real time for Trump’s claims of electoral fraud, his demands that the vote count be halted, and his repeated threats to challenge in the US Supreme Court the electoral results which at last check were very much going former vice-president Joe Biden’s way, Africa has made repeated and clumsy appearances.
And yet this is a quintessentially American election: characterised by racial and ethnic animus stoked by elected political leaders on a national scale. It is also taking place within an irregular electoral system which is devoid of all the checks, balances and institutions that exist in functioning democracies around the world — including those in Africa.
With 73.5-million votes and counting in his favour, Joe Biden is set to win the popular vote by the biggest tally in US political history — eclipsing both Trump’s 69.5-million votes and the record number previously set by Biden’s running mate in the 2008 election, Barack Obama.
In the US, however, this simple winning tally is not actually the number that matters in a presidential election: 270 Electoral College votes is the brass ring Biden had yet to grasp at the time of writing.
That target, bizarrely, remained in sight for Trump, despite the fact that he had no hope of catching up to Biden’s popular vote total. This is the consequence of a political system that — as Pretoria University academic and political analyst Dr Sithembile Mbete rightly points out — was designed to preserve white supremacy in the US rather than reflect the popular will of the people.
In the late 18th century, when the North was densely populated with white Americans who enjoyed full suffrage and the population of the South included over half a million enslaved Africans, the Southern constitutional framers campaigned to use population numbers that included enslaved people to calculate the number of electors in the Southern states, regardless of the fact that the enslaved Africans did not have voting rights.
This ensured that Southern voters had an outsized influence over the outcome of federal elections — without ever having to consult the enslaved people they claimed, through the Electoral College, to represent.
The US’s political system today cannot be divorced from this original sin. Nor can the entitled, dictatorial behaviour of its incumbent president.
The political axiom “Land doesn’t vote; people do” has begun to gain traction among opponents of the Electoral College system in the US. The slogan is a reference to the fact that the Electoral College system today still enables sparsely populated states with fewer voters to have an outsized influence on US electoral outcomes — particularly when it comes to the presidential and Senate races.
It is this very specifically American system that has given rise to the emergence of a rank populist who can comfortably threaten to cling to political power despite losing the popular vote two elections in a row.
Trump is the product of a uniquely American political and historical context, not the reflection of some imagined African dictatorial bogeyman on the other side of the Atlantic.
US politics has been brewing this perfect storm of white supremacy, racial violence, institutionalised bigotry and xenophobia for generations — indeed, for as long as the country has existed.
As Africans, we should take umbrage at the repeated insinuation that the characteristics of a Trump presidency have their origins here, outside the borders of the US. We may suffer from a plague of failed leaders on the continent who have clung to power too long, to the detriment of the people they were originally elected to serve, but that does not mean that American leaders may look on, perplexed as one of their own tramples on basic democratic values.
Trump did not have to learn how to deny his people the franchise from Robert Mugabe, or Yoweri Museveni, or Paul Biya. That injustice is built into the DNA of the US political system and is reflected in its society.
The Trump presidency may be dead, but “Trumpism” lives on in the 69.5-million Americans who voted to re-elect him.
Once he is inaugurated as president it will fall to Biden to lead his country by democratic example. And it will fall to the people themselves to think long and hard about how much longer they are willing to live with a broken electoral system — one that was designed to enable white slave-owners to co-opt the will of the African people they claimed to “own”.