By the time this appears, voters in the United States will be headed to the polls. At last count, 82 million votes had already been cast, a little more than half of the number polled in 2020.
The possibility of a Donald Trump win has caused much consternation, not just in the US but also in the rest of the world, particularly among the US’ Western/NATO allies. Pollsters say the race is tied. Seven swing states and their 93 electoral votes will decide who occupies the White House for the next four years.
The former one-term president, who lost to Joe Biden in 2020, is back and he is making everyone nervous, except his own MAGA followers, many of whom already believe he has won. They also believe, like an article of faith, that if he loses he will have been made to lose and that calls for an insurrection against a presumed conspiracy to keep Trump out. Going by what happened at Capitol Hill in 2020 and Trump’s statement that he shouldn’t have left the White House then has added to the post-election uncertainties: there will be disruption if he loses; there will be disruption if he wins.
Back in 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was debating the Union’s constitution, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were writing essays, debating the minutiae of an effective and stable Union. The 85 essays were published under the pen name Publius in various New York newspapers. Two of those, Federalist 10 by Madison and Federalist 68 by Hamilton are important for our present purpose.
Number 10 is about domestic factions and insurrection. This is how Madison defined a faction: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
He also believed that “So strong is [the] propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts,” even though he went on to list a number of enabling factors that could lead to factionalism and instability.
In the case of Federalist 10, Madison is trying to offset the possibility of factions destabilising the Union while in 68, Hamilton is trying to use the electors as a bulwark against popular passions and demagoguery.
How could the situation be remedied? Madison argued that since the causes of factionalism could not be removed, an effort must be made to control its effects. In other words, better to have a large society under a representative form of government than a small society under a popular form of government — or to put it differently, the idea of republican synthesis to avoid not only the factionalism of direct democracy but also the tyranny of the majority.
Federalist 68 by Hamilton reflected on the process of electing the president, “the Chief Magistrate of the United States.” In order “to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder,” and to elect a “person to whom so important a trust was to be confided,” there should be an intermediate step of electors — “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”
To sum up, in the case of Federalist 10, Madison is trying to offset the possibility of factions destabilising the Union while in 68, Hamilton is trying to use the electors as a bulwark against popular passions and demagoguery.
In 2016, Trump, the demagogue, won through the electoral college while Clinton lost to him despite polling 3 million more popular votes. Similarly, the factionalism Madison feared in one state, which could be offset by having many states in the Union, has spread across the United States.
The other issue is that the Trump tail now wags the Republican dog. In the run-up to 2016, he gatecrashed the GOP and since then he has hijacked the party. In the process, he has also managed to pull the GOP’s far-right fringe, the Tea Partyists, into the party’s mainstream and pushed the traditional Republicans to the fringe. He owns the GOP now.
There are, of course, a number of other factors that have helped Trump do this and they are too many and too varied for our present purpose. What’s important is that on a host of issues the US is divided down the middle. That’s why the vote is tied. That’s also why the more educated, liberal voter is deeply concerned about the current situation.
There is presently no other country whose elected officials’ policies and stances have as great an impact on the rest of the globe. It is an advantage that the US has held since at least 1990 as a formidable force controlling most of the world
One other important factor, at least for a number of Arab/Muslim voters, as also the progressive left-of-centre and left Democratic voters is the handling by the Joe Biden administration of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. They can see clearly, given the overwhelming evidence, that the US is complicit in Israel’s war crimes, Worse, that Israel could not have sustained its savagery without active support by the Biden administration.
Those voters are deeply conflicted. How should they vote? Overlapping in many instances are voters who believe that the two-party, two-candidate system has outlived its utility — that choices are far more complex, internally and externally, for the voters to merely choose between two contenders who do not represent the aspirations of many voters. Those voters are either abstaining, voting Democrat by holding their noses, or voting for Jill Stein, a third candidate, the Green Party’s nominee, who is unlikely to make much of a difference but could cut into Kamala Harris’ vote. That in turn would help Trump. This is why the European Greens called on her a few days ago to drop out.
This is as far as the internal situation goes. But US elections impact more than just America.
In a recent op-ed for Middle East Eye titled, 'Why even liberal-leftist US voters are America Firsters', Professor Joseph Massad presents an important insight: “One of the key responsibilities that critical American intellectuals have always shirked is considering the far-reaching effects of voting in the United States.” This is because “There is presently no other country whose elected officials’ policies and stances have as great an impact on the rest of the globe. It is an advantage that the US has held since at least 1990 as a formidable force controlling most of the world.”
It was in the same vein that Noam Chomsky wrote “There are few realistic options, in the world as it exists, unless the population of the major powers reaches a level of civilisation transcending anything we now see and restrains the violence of the states that dominate the international system.” In other words, as Massad argues, quoting Chomsky, that a “successful opposition to imperial policies can only come from Americans and Western Europeans.”
That hasn’t been the case, as we have noted with reference to Biden’s Zionist policy. Despite massive public protests, Biden continued with his policy. That’s the bed he made and now Harris has to sleep in it, for good or for bad. At the same time, it is difficult to see how Harris would have acted much differently than Biden because the US’ support for Israel is a structural, domestic-political problem.
Be that as it may, the US seems to have reached a point where its internal divisions threaten to destabilise it in precisely the ways that Madison and Hamilton feared. Those internal divisions, in the way the US has set up the geopolitical chessboard in the past decades, will also have a major impact on its foreign policy.
The internal disruptions will finally help in the best and worst ways possible to push the US from the globe’s centre mass to its periphery. This vote, by all available evidence, is likely to put that process in motion. That also means that the uncertainty that has gripped America will also extend to the rest of the world.
Brace yourself for the impact!