SOMETHING interesting is happening at the US Presidential elections. It usual for supporters of a particular candidate to go crazy over their candidates during sorties. But for a candidate to also attract equally enthusiastic protesters wherever he is, that is an unusual phenomenon. Republican front runner Donald Trump is now hounded by a mob who are not exactly fans of his incendiary rhetoric against blacks, women, Muslims, immigrants, gays, and the mentally challenged.
There had been signs that a polarizing political situation was coming to a boiling point. As early as mid last year when the campaign season saw Trump consolidating a wide section of American conservatives to his side, there were already indications that those at the opposite end of his bigotry would not take things sitting down. Brave activists would attend his rallies and these individuals would disrupt his speeches in a show of personal courage, risking bodily harm from his rabid supporters.
But things came to ahead this week when students and faculty from the University of Illinois Chicago, came out into the streets to stop a campaign rally inside school grounds forcing Trump to cancel his appearance. There were occasions of sporadic violence when the two camps met each other in these public venues. Tear gas has been used by the police, and not a few have been arrested.
There are indications that the events in Chicago and Kansas were just the beginning of a looming series of violent confrontations between supporters of Trump and what is fast shaping to be an Anti-Trump movement composed of minorities alarmed over the brazen inflammatory remarks of the strong contender for the Oval Office. His harsh rhetoric of deportation against illegal migrants and extreme condescension with America’s Black population have not just consolidated the opposition, but alarmingly also emboldened to come out of the woodwork the latent racism and bigotry of White America.
The world watches in bated breath as the US of A careens towards chaos. Elections marred by violence is nothing new to the rest of the world. But for the supposed icon of democracy the world over, a nation that sees to it that dictatorships and megalomaniacs oppressing their citizens are toppled, to finally have a taste of its own medicine is more than an interesting situation. It is an alarming jolt of reality that should worry even the most jaded of political observers. Especially if seen from the global context of the rise of right-wing political parties in the UK, Germany, and the Philippines.
Yes, there is something eerily familiar with the popularity of Trump to the candidacy of two local candidates for national office. One is the strongman from the South who vowed to stamp out drugs and corruption in six months. The other, of course, is the son of the original strongman whose father tore this nation apart for more than two decades to be fed to his army and his cronies. What is common among these politicians both from the US and in the country is that they appeal to a particular set of authoritarian dispositions that a section of the public craves for.
Joseph Weiler of the University of North Carolina has been able to dissect Trump’s seemingly meteoric rise to power by ascribing his current popularity to the attraction of authoritarianism. In an online article, Weiler identifies the set of attitudes that is attracted to authoritarianism with the following core beliefs: “1) an especially strong propensity to divide the world into us vs. them and a concomitant intolerance of outgroups perceived as threats to… the existing social fabric; 2) projecting strength in the most straightforward, uncompromising way possible; and 3) the related perils [paranoia] following from the breakdown of law and order.” The “bombast, nativism, the relentless focus on strength and weakness, winners and losers,” he continues, make them particularly attractive to a paranoid society eager for reprieve from the chaos of the present disposition.
All these are of course the upshot of the failure of global capitalism in resolving the problem of chaos resulting from massive long-term global and local inequalities. But there are specificities to every social context. The social undercurrent fueling the social paranoia in the US is of course the specter of 9-11 and the seething racial divide tearing the country apart. Here in our shores, it is the anarchy of the rule of oligarchic families that have failed to deliver even the most basic of social expectations regarding political leadership for decades - a semblance of order in our public spaces.
Unlike the US, however, whose underclasses are now putting up a fight against Trump’s authoritarianism animating the candidacy of the promising alternative and self-proclaimed socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, there seems to be no such hope for us here in these parts, at least in so far as elections as a political exercise is concerned. We are stuck between the representatives of authoritarianism and the other factions of the oligarchic elite who are equally fascistic anyway.