Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Proof that ordinary people have power
Wednesday’s election shows that democracy is alive and well in the United States, writes MICHAEL MORRIS
AWEEKDAY morning, not at 4am anyway, is an unlikely time for a festive occasion, but on Wednesday the gathering of diplomats, politicians, journalists, students and a smattering of the intelligentsia at a plush central city hotel promised nothing less.
Beyond the balloons, the glittering piles of lapel badges and tables heaped with breakfast goodies, the coolers crammed with Champagne bottles hinted at a celebratory climax anticipated if not wholly assured an hour or two after dawn.
All eyes at the US consular event were focused on the innumerable flickering screens streaming live election coverage, dominated from the start by Donald Trump’s misappreciated popularity.
It was still dark outside – bird calls had just begun in the trees in the mall, the wispy strains of a muezzin’s summoning to prayer in the Bo-Kaap just audible above the vigorous hum of a nearby air-conditioning unit. Inside the venue, fortified with coffee, the growing gathering was cheerful, if sleep-deprived.
When I greeted political scientist Keith Gottschalk, he murmured ruefully: “I thought it was only astronomers and the Special Branch who were up at this hour!”
But one among us who was fully alert to the moment was US consul-general Teddy B Taylor.
Reminding the gathering that the US political system was “created when there were no other democracies in the world”, it was natural that the country’s “very different” political system might seem “wacky”.
When he spoke at 4.30am, the counting indicated a knife-edge outcome, prompting Taylor to add: “Our nation will move forward regardless of the outcome. We have the strength of institutions and a commitment to till the soil of democracy until it is a perfect union.”
Hours later, with umpteen of the Champagne bottles unopened, the thinned crowd drifted away in subdued spirits.
At 10.03am, when the New York Times filed its first story on the result, it could not have put it better: “The stunningly tight contest – and the prospect of the unpredictable Mr Trump as president – left America and the world rattled like no election in modern times.”
The rattle, the advance tremor of the rattle actually, reached across the Atlantic and landed with jarring impact in the Morris household, too.
A small – guilty and faintly embarrassing – admission of my own is that I somewhat reluctantly welcome the Trump presidency for the opportunity it provides of imparting some intelligent scepticism to my nine-year-old son. Not that he lacks the natural proportion every child his age already possesses, or that I’d want to nudge him any nearer the boundary of Scepticism’s dauntingly trivial neighbour, Cynicism.
But I do know that open-mindedness is a skill gained by practice, along with the inevitable failure now and then of being proved wrong – and that remaining openminded in the face of such failures is a higher good.
The conversation with my son began when he told me a little over a week ago that he hoped Trump wouldn’t win because “he won’t let any Muslims live in America, and he’ll build a wall around Canada”.
If I cheered inwardly at his budding humanity, I recklessly suggested that I didn’t believe for a minute that he’d do either.
Some days later, returning to a topic he’d obviously been mulling over, my son expressed some disappointment – I was, of course, profoundly relieved, and impressed – at my apparent approval of Trump.
“I don’t understand why you like him,” he said in a tone of probing censure.
“I don’t,” I said. What I meant, I explained, was that the president of the mighty USA is always limited in what he can do, and chiefly limited – as, say, George HW Bush and Barack Obama have been in more or less equal measure – by American national interest, which is never reducible merely to dollars or doltish red-neck enthusiasms and has quite a lot to do with basic human values.
Also, I suggested (perhaps, by now, sounding a little lame) that what politicians say they are going to do is seldom the same as what they actually do, and that there are many complex, often sensible, sometimes good but also bad,
For all the reach of America’s ideas, the bulk of its citizens are not movie stars, celebrities or rap musicians
reasons why this should be.
If I thought this made me seem a paragon of reason, he wasn’t having any of it. It evidently only sounded like evasiveness in the face of an unignorable moral test.
“You have to realise,” he told me in all earnestness, “that you don’t know everything. And you shouldn’t judge someone who has better tech skills.” ‘Who’s that?” I asked. “Me,” he said. This apparent clincher – not wholly true yet not entirely groundless either – exposed his incredulity at my fat-fingered ineptitude in the touch-screen department. If his dad couldn’t manage the elementary mechanics of manipulating an iPad, he seemed to reason, how could he so shamelessly assume a working familiarity with its contents?
The truth is, I never did manage to get wildly excited about the US election campaign – nor, since Wednesday, about the outcome. My sceptical view remains that the difference between – to take recent incumbents – Bush senior, Clinton, Bush junior and Obama is for the most part slight and mainly sentimental.
It’s not the presidents who make America, but America that makes the presidents. And that’s a complexity. The often woeful fate of America is that it has, and will continue to be, misjudged as a homogenous quantity, a singularity, for which single-phrase epithets – the freest society, the most violent, the richest, the most screwed-up, the cleverest, the dumbest – are thought to suffice.
It is perhaps the unearned fate of a nation that could probably be described as the most influential force in the world, from commerce to language, technology to leisure, and every facet of popular “culture” from slang, morality, race and fashion to food, workplace ethics and child-rearing.
It may seem bewildering that such a bellwether state has delivered a Trump.
Yet, for all the reach of America’s ideas, its largesse and, lest we forget, its missiles, in the global space, it is, finally, a domestic polity, and one that most of us always misunderstand. Or, put another way, what we misunderstand is likely the scale and force of its ordinary people, the bulk of its citizens who are not movie stars, celebrities, rap musicians or eastern seaboard intellectuals. The trying thing about democracy is that, when they gird themselves, ordinary people have power, which can be unnerving. Even so, the US remains one of the world’s most robust democracies, buttressed by institutions of persuasive, practised and resolute principle. It might well be a state that can secretly send killers into another country across the world to eliminate a notorious enemy (dramatic events watched as they happened by the sitting president – Obama), or approve nefariously invasive surveillance on a global scale under an almost universally revered leader (Obama), but it is not a society that allows these things to happen without comment, resistance or political activism, all of which are freer than in most states. It does seem a shame that the second biggest democracy in the world could not follow the biggest, India – and a league of other states (Norway, Israel, the Philippines, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Panama, Finland, Liberia, Chile, Lithuania, Costa Rica, Germany, Australia and Britain) – in putting a woman at the helm. Perhaps, considering the list, it is a bit old hat. Equally, considering the equivalently patchy record of women politicians when compared to men, it’s just another sentimental feature that doesn’t really bear much serious consideration. This, I like to think, is a fiercely feminist position. I hope, not only, not even chiefly, for my own sake (and my standing in nineyear-old Jack’s estimation), that Trump doesn’t go and build a wall around Canada, or humiliate America’s large, valued and growing Muslim population. His conservatism is both appalling and dangerous, but he must function in an open society that can be telling in determining the limits of his action. It is worth reminding ourselves that Trump is not necessarily the risk, considering that, under Obama, America has not been a spectacularly hospitable place for Muslims. Or for black people, for that matter. It’s no fault of Obama’s, and not his doing. And that’s the point. Or one point. The other is Teddy B Taylor’s.
American democracy was not an accomplishment so much as a task, a task defined by a continuum of optimism in which the 56th presidential election – “tough” but “non-violent” – was in a sense unexceptional.
“At some point,” Taylor said on Wednesday morning, “someone will accept, and someone will concede, and we will come together as a people and move on. That’s how our democracy works.”