A New President in the White House, and a crisis for Liberal Democracy
By Femi Olugbile
On the 20th of January 2025, Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States of America, will be sworn in as the 47th President of the United States of America.
That reality is an extraordinary, in-your-face development that has been much catastrophised, a nightmare so dire it was never meant to happen. The end of American Democracy, the prophets had screamed. The destruction of all the principles and institutions laid down by the Founding Fathers.
The sky has not fallen since the announcement of an election result that was ultimately not a competition but a perfect rout.
Much has been said about the personality of Donald Trump by writers, including this one. His personal and moral deficiencies stick out a mile. He would be unsuitable for public office even in a prototypical ‘banana republic’. The prospect that he might, once again, become the most powerful man in the world, and the leader of the ‘Free World’, left many totally aghast. A convicted felon, docked on issues ranging from bribing a prostitute to suborning an insurrection. A man without grace, who could not accept defeat or stay to hand over to his successor, in the required tradition of American leadership. A man who had tested all the structures of the state and stretched them to their elastic limit.
Analysis in the aftermath of the Trump election victory was brutal, and it essentially put the people of America themselves in the dock. A malign right-wing party had lost its soul, and a supposedly great people had been sucked into to the cult of one man.
Lately, there has been a growing realisation of the need to look at the camp that lost the election, and why they received such a damning electoral rebuff.
Tony Blair – former UK Prime Minister and a prime advocate of ‘The Third Way’, a movement within Liberal Democracy that is supposed to pitch in the centre, catching the benefits of Right and Left political tendencies, has for several years been expressing worry about rising attractiveness of Populism coalescing around ‘strongman’ leaders who are able to cut through the mush and deliver results to their nations, or so it seems. In his view, whenever it happens, it is a failure of the Centre.
From such an out-of-the-box perspective, Trump did not win the election. Joe Biden and his camp lost the people. And that loss may be part of a disturbing trend across the world.
Liberal Democracy is a form of government that combines democracy with liberal political philosophy which encompasses elections, separation of powers between different branches of government, the rule of law, an open society with universal suffrage, human rights, civil liberties and political and religious freedom for all citizens, including minorities.
A core part of the justification for American leadership in the world, apart from its military prowess, is a moral authority derived from being the embodiment of these values, and a right, even a duty, which it appropriates to itself, to spread them across the world. It is also the basis for globalisation and multilateral institutions.
The election of Barack Obama as the first black President of America rode on the back of the assumption that these values define the best state of man everywhere, and that they represent the loftiest attainment of society.
It is generally understood, unfortunately, that a backlash against Obama’s Presidency led to a movement which resulted in the Presidency of Donald Trump, with unleashing of primordial racism and bigotry that is yet to abate.
Incumbent President Joe Biden sees himself as the embodiment of the Liberal Democratic ideal, and, with the structures of his Democratic Party has pushed the boundaries of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) at home and abroad.
If the current state of America is a culmination of that determined effort, it is incontestable that several fallacies, mistaken assumptions and inconsistencies have emerged in the corpus of the much-vaunted Liberal Democracy. How much ‘Freedom’ is too much freedom? Are all minorities equal, with equal entitlement to be propagated and centralised in culture, including being taught to little children in schools? Is defending the rights of people with gender dysphoria of equal merit with defending blacks against slavery? How much of the past can be retrospectively expiated, without bringing the roof crumbling down? What is the received composition of the human family? At what point does life begin, and who has the right to terminate it? How much more immigration can the immigrant nation of America absorb, before its character is changed forever?
Unfortunately, the ‘liberal democratic’ USA of Biden era has ended up with positions on some of these matters that a majority of its constituency are uncomfortable with, even if they don’t say so openly, perhaps because they fear the vengeful retribution of the mob for being ‘politically incorrect’.
Even abroad, Liberal Democratic assumptions are not beyond question.
Is untrammelled globalisation truly the ideal? Are the interactions between states determined by Democratic values, or national interests? Should the Ukraine war be sold to a gullible public as a challenge to Democracy, when it is founded on a quid pro quo that allowed the Berlin Wall to be pulled down, and the Soviet Union to be dismantled, and when a Civil War had been raging in the land for almost a decade before the Russian invasion?
Where is the DEI about the Gaza killings, which most of the world call genocide? How does a Liberal Democratic US President rationalise the cuddling of a Prime Minister Netanyahu who is rude to him and clearly disdainful of his authority, despite being dependent on him, leaving America to carry the can and moral stain for his excesses?
Does Liberal Democracy need to moderate its pretentions and draw some boundaries around its commitments? Is it better to abandon the American pretensions to moral superiority entirely, and deal with the world as it is?
President Joe Biden, a nice, kind man, will be judged harshly by History as a man witout vision or backbone, a wishy-washy ditherer on the key issues of his era, which have called for Leadership.
There is no evidence a Kamala Harris succession would have been different.
The world was sleep-walking into World War 3 over Ukraine, and a hundred years of ‘Biden-ism’ would not have created a ‘2 state’ solution in Israel.
The narrative is not to justify Populism in America, or to imply that things will be better under Donald Trump, although they may well be- who knows? It is to understand why America pulled the plug on ‘Liberal Democracy’, at least for now, and why Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th President, come January 20th.
