14 November 2020
I have never been swirled by such foreboding that it would take me more than the festive Lamps Festival to bring me to keel. As predictably, the great American parody which is Trump Presidency is on full throttle, now the vain glory is no longer one of buffoonery, and one does hope that President Obama’s comments while partisan, are taken for what they are, a serious player’s observations- that throwing American democracy under the bus for personal rhetoric is a new low in the Republican camp. I was least surprised about Lindsey Graham, or Mitch McConnell and even Mitt Romney, while understanding that Trump has taken more than the soul of the GoP. It is striking how senators fear that admitting Trump’s defeat and annoying the line taken by the Trump Team would impact not just Georgia’s reruns but also the crucial 2022 elections which would allow Gerrymandering of Congressional Districts. I don’t grudge the Republican caucus from accepting Trump’s obduracy and pettiness, because, no Republican candidate has managed to increase the vote share of the party like Trump has in almost four decades. Trump mind you, picked up an additional 10% of national votes and while the mobilisation and voting participation was highest ever, so when the Republican senators hope to retain their senate majority, they are acutely aware of this reality. So if you now look at the Biden victory, it is equally a remarkable coalition of former Republican White elders, college graduates, youth of all colour and persuasion except by racism, misogyny and religious fundamentalism. It is clear that Bernie voters, Obama voters, and Biden voters managed to pull off what is a record mandate for a President elect, a clear 5 million plus votes tally as a victory margin, a massive 50 % plus of the popular vote as a percentage, and hence the Democratic victory is exemplary in itself.
I know folks are spoofing the conduct of Rudy Gulianni, the rumours emerging from the White House itself, the various law suits filed and the Trump campaign’s fund drive to ‘fight legal battle and stop the election from being stolen’. Equally I am acutely aware that ‘Stop The Steal’ has been going on even before 2016, promoted by Roger Stone, that Fox News and Sky News are Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch’s efforts to promote White Supremacist agenda and neoconservatism. In fact, contrast to rest of the Western Compact, the treatment of Biden candidacy was most skeptic in Sky and other Australian media, including the questions being raised about results of the election! It is another matter than Biden by supporting the Japanese over Senkaku has shown how wrong the Aussie hawks were in assessing him. Yet, one can do only so much against the blatant and the biased!
What the centrists need is a fix that will ensure that Trump and his team’s blatant conduct comes at a cost. In none of the frivolous law suits, were there any fines. Yes, news anchors did stop Trump’s feed when he took the WH Briefing Room as arena for spewing his nonsense about valid votes and invalid ones, however few recalled how the US Post was crippled before the elections by Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. What we need is to get after the media, mainstream, non mainstream, the QAnon groups, everyone, who parroted this line about electoral fraud in the run up to 3 November, the actors who ensured mail in ballots were less than welcome, who delayed its sorting, and who made voting difficult in this momentous election! A point made by Congresswoman Cortez. AOC called for a general sweep of all these elements, which was criticised by several liberal handles as reminding them of a Nazi pogrom! Well, I ask a simple question? If liberals are going to get themselves twisted into knots over how they want to take a position to counter the RW, then the cause is lost. Without a sense of forcing accountability, of getting the RW offenders to be held to task, how will the liberal base ever get a sense of comeuppance served? It is in a epical sense, just forgiving Shishupala every time, not severing his head after his 100th trespass! Such a free pass will undermine the liberal caucus! And beyond partisan frame, it will undermine as Obama repeatedly warned, democracy itself!
So if the normative political and social recourses are frustrated, then it opens the pressure cooker situation to all possibilities. Remember that Afghan veteran MicahJohnson who shot police officers in Dallas https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/dallas-police-shooting.html in 2016? A society can only see so much, and then we had much more organised Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd. So we have to understand, that whether it is insurgent or demonstrative violence, I can foresee a kind of vigilante movement organising every where, to target those who are using loopholes and schemes to get away. (Unlike US where even Fox News has shown journalistic credentials a little, in India these Rwanda Radio icons we have gathered, curiously many of them are children of veterans or related to defence families, are looking at such denouements. It will happen, because, apparently there is no other way to get after them. To get them to account.) So if you got the drift, you have understood the case AOC is making in USA. I feel, that accountability for falsehoods must be enforced at a minimum. I also feel that Biden administration must not come in way of efforts by young turks in the Democrat ranks to get after the Trumps as NY’s DA has warned the present First Family. I was troubled to hear Biden’s remarks about Trump’s legacy! Trump’s only legacy has been ‘one long lie’! As Trevor Noah put is best- the biggest and first scandal of Trump Presidency is the first one- how did he get there? TO THE WHITE HOUSE! Even Fareed Zakaria has finally warned today that ‘mongering could haunt America for years’ in his Washington Post column.https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-contempt-for-democratic-norms-could-haunt-us-for-years/2020/11/12/0d65b0ba-252e-11eb-8672-c281c7a2c96e_story.html
However my contention is that Mr Trump is merely a manifestation of what has been an exploitation of liberal values by right wing neoconservatism. The refusal to muck with falsehood, the strategies employed by liberal values of hearing the other side and responding in a calibrated manner have led to a lopsided narrative dominance from the RW. It allowed a ‘birther movement’ spawned by Trump which sought to delegitimise the Obama Presidency and we can see many parallels since in all democracies. Labour MP and former leader Jeremy Corbyn is one prominent victim, Bernie Sanders is another. We know in comparison to seasoned campaigners like them, a Rahul Gandhi or an AOC are sitting duck neophytes for such delegitimising narrative. So I believe that they must learn how to swim out from the muddle in which their politics has been cast by their baiters, that they must use every ruse or angle available. Again in epical terms, if the Pandavas did not deploy stratagems in Kurukshetra they would never have had their victory in 18 days. It is the winner who crafts and carries forth the torch of Dharma. So I must concede that in their duel of Post Truth World, stratagems must be employed however dodgy they may seem. Like Boris Johnson’s unmistakable enthusiasm in reporting to the British Parliament about his conversation with President Elect Joe Biden suggests, Mr Biden has a few in his armoury too and is unhesitant to employ. Truth cannot bide its time or turn. It must wrest whatever opportunity it can spot, manipulating openings where they don’t exist, to recapture the narrative from falsehood.
So on this day of Festival of Lights in 2020, I believe that this Anno Horribilis Corona is simply a reset and the reclamation of liberal values and truth is a journey that appears long drawn out for American polity. Perhaps by 2023, a polity will emerge which could offer leadership to the ‘Free World’ once more.
indiarubberman.com 