THE CRITICAL ELECTION
Below are my summaries of some answers that analysts have given to a question that is on many minds across the world and in the U.S.: “How can millions of Americans want a man convicted of felonies, someone who so easily and frequently utters plain lies, to be their president?”
One answer goes like this: “Gas and groceries were cheaper during the four years, 2016-20, when Trump was president than they are now.” Since polling has found that voters see prices, i.e. “the economy,” as the issue that concerns them the most, this perception of an easier economy during the Trump years is of undeniable significance.
A second answer is to this effect: “Many voters have swallowed the line that there is a connection between illegal immigrants and crime on America’s streets.”
It is no wonder that Trump denounces his political opponents as the "enemy from within" and “peppers his remarks with graphic accounts of murders and rapes of young women, false tales of violent gangs taking over small towns, and debunked claims about immigrants eating stolen pets,” which is what this Reuters story claims:
A third answer goes like this: “Between the two, Harris and Trump, the peace candidate is Trump.” Although in the current contest J. D. Vance, Trump’s ticket companion, is a participant rather than an “analyst”, he (Vance) has offered this explanation of support for Trump:
“A lot of old Neoconservatives, they have a fundamental difference with Donald Trump on the question of peace and war. I believe Donald Trump is the candidate of peace.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c87x011e0q3t
On the war in Ukraine, his team has repeatedly underlined Trump’s oft-expressed opposition to spending American money on wars abroad and to sending American soldiers to fight such wars.
Somewhat different, however, is the war in Gaza and Lebanon, and the hostility, connected to that war, between Israel and Iran, which in a few unthinking minutes can become a regional or even a world war of massive proportions.
To many Americans, this Middle East conflict has seemed fundamentally different from wars elsewhere, for Israel’s dominance in the Middle East has long been regarded, strangely in my view, as being critical to America’s security. Moreover, Trump has claimed that Netanyahu, who received strong White House backing during Trump’s presidency, remains his warm friend.
However, for this presidential election Michigan is a crucial swing state, and the Arab vote in Detroit and elsewhere in Michigan matters greatly. This reality may go a long way to explain Vance’s claim that Trump is “the candidate of peace”.
By turning one purple state into red or blue, a few hundred votes in that state can decide who enters the White House. That small tally can overturn the wishes of a majority of all who vote across America.
This awareness, I should add, also explains another noticeable phenomenon, which is the persistence of Trump’s bid for a thicker slice this time of the black vote.
Four, when Trump claims that he wants to Make America Great Again, what many Americans hear is that he wants America to be “American” Again. With such a wish a number of Americans are likely to agree. Trump evokes nostalgia for an age when white American males appeared to occupy the centre of the national and indeed the world stage. It was also an age when condescension to people of colour seemed sufficient to fulfil the constitutional (and moral) requirement of equality.
That age disappeared decades ago. Today America’s streets, planes, trains, boats, and buses, as also its movies, songs, and billboards, speak to the great changes that have taken place. In most of their great cities, Americans present themselves as a richly coloured people, representing almost all of humanity.
However, much of America lives outside the big cities. In rural U.S., which is a large area, and in Inner America, as distinct from coastal America, whites are preponderant. These happen to be the pro-Trump spaces where direct or indirect calls to make all of America “American” again are received with favour and often with fervour.
What is wonderfully forgotten in this exercise is that the predominantly white America of a warmly recalled earlier age was neither indigenous nor homogeneous. That America was made by wave after wave of diverse immigrants from different parts of Europe, by Africans who were brought in chains and by their enslaved descendants, and by the remnants of those who had inhabited the U.S. from coast to coast and from North to South centuries before their land was colonized by Europeans and the locals were driven into isolated pockets.
When “new Europeans” arrived in large numbers in the middle of the 19th century, neither the Italians nor the Jews nor the Irish among them were welcomed with great enthusiasm by the whites previously settled in the U.S. Banishing this not very ancient history from their minds, many in Inner America picture with fondness a time when their “race” ruled the roost, set the agenda, and won the envy of many in the world. They seem to love Trump’s hints of recreating that period.
Although substantial early voting by mail and in person has already taken place, and more will occur before Tuesday November 5, a majority of Americans will probably wait until that day to cast their vote. Which side has the stronger motivation to vote? Will women offended by Republican policies on birth control and abortion mobilize more votes for Harris than are enlisted for Trump by men who dislike the Democrats’ stand on immigration? We don’t have to wait long for answers to questions of this kind.
*
Those wanting better relations among the inhabitants and governments of Asia will be glad to know that Vinod Khosla, one of India’s influential business leaders, has publicly recorded his belief that under the leadership of Professor Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate, Bangladesh will move forward on a promising track. In an article in the Indian news portal, The Wire, Khosla writes that in his few weeks in office Professor Yunus has taken “tangible steps to protect minorities such as Hindus, worked to improve relations with India, suggested that the regional powers reinvigorate the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and made progress on bringing stability to the banking and financial sectors in Bangladesh, which were in disarray when he took office.”
