This week, it has really been a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire across the pond in the US. You could sense the world breathe a sigh of relief when Joe Biden pulled out of the race after a series of serious blunders – including calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ‘President Putin’. But that relief lasted mere minutes before people began to think ‘what now?’
Well, the choice for the most powerful job in the world is between former prosecutor Kamala Harris and convicted criminal Donald Trump. Common sense will tell you that Harris surely has the upper hand for the Democrats – but she really doesn’t. Trump has just cheated death, escaping with a bandaged ear that has become a new icon of the Trumpist Republican Party. All Western politicians say they’d take ‘a bullet for democracy’, but very few actually have. That’s some trump card for Donald.
But I don’t want to get bogged down in predicting who will win and what it means because there’s something of much greater concern here. Are these two candidates still really the best America’s got to offer for the world’s top job?
Maybe you’re getting some déjà vu. That’s because a similar question was posed to Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer during the UK General Election. In fact, it’s a question which comes up in almost every conversation I have about politics these days, which can be brutally summed up as: ‘they’re all as bad as each other’.
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Politics is supposed to be about igniting change, representing everyone and celebrating the best humanity has to give. That’s why people died for your right to vote. But what a shame it is that a growing number of people don’t vote at all – or vote tactically out of spite – because they feel so disenchanted by the political system.
It’s beautifully ironic that populist figures like Donald Trump in the US, Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage in the UK, and even the likes of Marine Le Pen in France all position themselves against the establishment to cut the cronyism and win back public trust – only dragging the entire political sphere deeper into the mud.
How many times do I have to say it? Populism doesn’t work. Because populism is all about style with no substance. On the surface, it’s fixing what nobody else has fixed before. But underneath it’s divide and conquer politics that pits one half of the nation against the other to win votes – just as Farage has spent his life rallying a nationalist British army against predominantly non-white foreigners.
But if populism doesn’t work, how come people endlessly fall into the same trap? How can they fall for the latest crook to take to the stage, when all the other cronies before now failed to keep their promises? How is Trump even in the race, when anyone else would currently be serving a prison sentence?
The answer, very simply, is that there is no mainstream inspiration – so people look to extremist outsiders, whose rhetoric is utterly polarising. But at least it is clear where they stand: against the dull as dishwater establishment.
We’re all obsessed with the US presidential race at the moment, so let’s start there. Trump’s victory in 2016 shocked the world. But it shouldn’t have done. Yes, Hillary Clinton was the most qualified candidate you could ask for as a former First Lady, a secretary of state and as a Senator. But she became the face of America’s broken politics – bringing no new ideas and endlessly defending old ones. You can’t flog a dead horse, which is why Trump won.
But there’s a reason a populist like Trump couldn’t win a second term come 2020. When his outlandish proposals were actually put into policy substance – like building a wall on the US-Mexico border – they failed to comply with reality. And then Trump officially became one of the very people he has always criticised: a crook, who jollies about town with secret documents and pays porn stars hush money. The populist spell broke, and Biden was the elder statesman Americans craved.
Having said that, you seriously cannot tell me there wasn’t someone more energetic than a then-78-year-old? In this sense, Biden’s presidency was doomed from the very start. The top job came too late, right at the end of his 50-plus years in US politics – and as such the horse had already bolted. If it weren’t for Biden’s lack of energy, charisma and inspiration, I do not believe Trump would stand a conceivable chance of winning in 2024. But again, populists feast on the rapidly rotting carcass of our political establishment.
My point is this. The reason we are having to deal with such outlandish populist extremism in our politics today is because there is a lack of fresh inspiration in the mainstream. If Americans were truly aboard the Democratic donkey, there would be no room for a Republican elephant emblazoned with Trump’s outsider name.
Equally, if the Conservatives were a strong enough force in the UK, right-wing alternatives such as Farage’s Reform UK wouldn’t have a leg to stand on to haemorrhage the Tory vote. The same goes for moderate protest parties like the Liberal Democrats, who have risen like Christ from their near-extinction in 2015 to win a record 72 seats in 2024. If Starmer’s Labour had a truly inspiring vision for Britain, the red rose would’ve hoovered up nearly all of those yellow birds to win an even bigger majority.
It is unbelievably sad that being a dutiful democratic representative – one of the pinnacles of human life – has hit such an uninspiring dead end. I stress this is not to say that all representatives are bad – far from it. The quality of national leaders, on the other hand, is dire. And we need leaders with fresh, bold ideas to guide us all to the light of greater human improvement. Unfortunately, the calibre simply isn’t there – a concern I have expressed countless times with Keir Starmer at the helm in Britain.
So, to come full circle to Kamala Harris. The odds are against her. Is the US ready for its first female president? And will people be enchanted by a former-Vice President casting spells from the same old book of magic tricks as Biden?
Time will tell whether she can be the motivating leader the world is crying out for. But let us be clear that, if she fails the test of time, Donald Trump and the anti-establishment populists will rise again, and the wait for a breath of non-toxic fresh air in world politics shall go on.
Image: The White House
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