For my
regular readers it is no secret that I am not particularly fond of our 45th
President, not of his style, his substance (or lack thereof) or his character.
But, as I wrote a year ago in my column ‘The Next Four Years’, the voters chose
in November of 2016 to give him a chance and we should respect that. The good
thing is that Presidents in the United States are term limited to a maximum of
eight years and that they have to go back to the voters to ask for an extended
mandate after the first four years. In addition, they (their actions and
policies) will be assessed in mid-term elections which have the capacity to
deny them support in Congress and thus clip their wings before they become a
lame duck.
I have to
believe, but I have been proven wrong about just about every prediction I have
made about # 45, that this President will pay a price in the court of public
opinion every time his presidency is subjected to the democratic process of
free and fair elections. The sketchy results from the 2017 State and Local
elections cannot really be interpreted as a verdict on the current federal
administration, but they hint at a repudiation of conservative-republican
candidates and policies. The mid-term elections of 2018 will be the first true test
of whether we will have entered an era of nationalistic populism or are just
going through a period of aberration.
Yes, there
are people who don’t care about the federal government or what it does at all
and just want to hear the man in the White House use the same rhetoric they
like to use when confronted with opinions that differ from their own or when contemplating
the lack of respect and dominance America commands abroad. These people cherish
the satisfaction of ‘telling them like it is’ and despise political
correctness, diplomacy and compromise. But rational people will be results
oriented. They will want to judge politicians on how well or poorly they
deliver on their campaign promises. Their chance to do that comes at the voting
booth. I surely hope that the percentage of voters willing to live by promises,
kept or not, and slogans, is not high enough to keep delivering electoral
victories. We will have to wait, until November 2018, and see.
In the meantime,
we will keep wondering where America will be heading. Will it revert to picking
up its century long role of a global pathfinder, a living representation of the
values expressed and enshrined in its declaration of independence and constitution,
or establish a new normal in which a narrowly defined self interest becomes the
norm not only for federal policy but also a model for personal conduct.
The
fundamental difference that sets the new normal apart from the old is the
axiomatic belief in the zero-point game: ‘There can only be winners and losers,
not winners and winners’. In the new normal, the United States would have left
Japan and Germany to fend for themselves after World War II had ended. The
Allies had won and the Axis lost, as simple as that. Recovery from the Allied
inflicted war damage would not have been an American responsibility. The new
normal despises losers and idolizes winners. Winning means that you were right
all along. The concept that a treaty or a multinational agreement, like NAFTA,
the Paris Climate Accord, or the Iranian Nuclear Framework Agreement, can
advance the interest of all parties is alien to the subscribers to the new
normal. If America does not get it exactly its way, the deal can simply be no
good, it must have been poorly negotiated. From this rationale, the new normal
had every reason to reject the TPP framework even before it had been fully
negotiated.
The new
normal is pessimistic and cynical. In the new normal there is no ‘give and
take’ and – in political terms – there is no reaching across the aisle. It
looks at every challenge as a zero-point game: ‘We can’t all be winners,
settlers and immigrants, protectionists and free-traders, Christians and
Muslims, conservatives and liberals, rich and poor, healthy and sick, educated
and uneducated, white and black and Latino’.
If, God
forbid, the 2018 and 2020 elections were to establish the new normal as the lay
of the land, it will signal a complete abandonment of traditional American
values, beliefs, and aspirations. There is no denying that America has always
harbored self-centered, cynical, and confrontational elements, but most of the
time and over the long run they have been kept at bay by a moderate, rational,
optimistic, and forward looking public opinion.
Will the
regular order prevail and bring America, by means of the voting booth, back on
the course of leading the world by example and in a collaborative mode with
other peace-loving nations, or will it require a life altering shock to the
system, like a nuclear conflict, a cyber war, an economic collapse or a popular
revolt? That is the existential question.
