Donald
Trump and the declining prestige of US democracy
The
presidential debates are a poor advert for the western system
Gideon Rachman
YESTERDAY by: Gideon
Rachman
How did it come to
this? The presidential election debates should represent US democracy
at its finest. Instead, the second Clinton-Trump debate centred
around sordid allegations of sexual assault, threats, lies and mutual
contempt.
At one stage, Mr
Trump boasted that Mrs Clinton would “be in jail” if he were in
charge of the legal system. Political rivals to the president get
imprisoned in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. America is meant to live by
different standards.
Sunday night’s
spectacle is not just embarrassing for the US. America is widely
regarded as the “leader of the free world.” So the rise of Mr
Trump threatens to damage the prestige of democracy everywhere.
The damage is not
restricted to the world of ideas. Authoritarianism and
anti-Americanism are on the march, led by increasingly confident
governments in Beijing and Moscow. A strong and impressive US should
be central to rallying the response of the world’s democracies.
Instead, we had the depressing and degrading spectacle of the second
Trump-Clinton debate.
Even in their
current sorry state, the presidential debates have shown some of the
drama and energy that distinguish US politics. Millions of people
around the world watched and discussed the confrontation. The next
session of China’s National People’s Congress will not attract a
similar audience.
It is also true that
neither Xi Jinping of China nor Vladimir Putin of Russia would ever
be subjected to the kind of brutal interrogation to which American
politicians are subjected on a routine basis. Instead, last week, the
Russian Duma sent Mr Putin 450 roses to mark his birthday.
Yet, even so, the
second presidential election debate was a desperately poor
advertisement for US democracy. In some respects, Mr Trump has
actually introduced some of the malign features of Russian and
Chinese politics into the US. One of the strengths of the western
democratic system is that a free press and open debate are meant to
expose falsehoods. Yet Mr Trump sprays out lies like a skunk trying
to repel its enemies. His method seems to be to create such confusion
that the truth simply gets buried amid a mass of falsehoods. This is
characteristic of the current Russian propaganda system described in
an aptly titled book by Peter Pomerantsev: Nothing is True and
Everything Is Possible.
The Chinese
challenge to America’s democratic ideology is more subtle and
perhaps more dangerous because China, unlike Russia, can make a good
claim to be a well-governed country. China is the largest economy in
the world measured by purchasing power parity. The Chinese argue that
their system selects leaders on merit, after decades of rigorous
assessment. President Xi only made it to the pinnacle of state power
after many years of work in the provinces and in different government
jobs. He has been judged by his peers, not the voters, to be
qualified to run the country.
The Chinese do not
yet argue that their system should be applied around the world. But
they do increasingly condemn — as agents of America, seeking to
“sow chaos” — those who make the case for a more liberal
political system within the Sinic world, for example in Hong Kong or
Taiwan. Beleaguered liberals in Russia or China need a
well-functioning US democracy as a support and an inspiration.
Instead, they see a system that produces Mr Trump, a man whose
political style owes more to President Putin than to President Obama.
In Beijing recently,
I was told that many Chinese officials quite like the idea of Mr
Trump as US president “because he makes America look so bad”. By
contrast, US allies around the world would be dismayed to see the
Oval Office occupied by an erratic “America First” narcissist
like Mr Trump.
Of course US
politics has thrown up villains and melodrama before. The first great
US political scandal that I followed as a child was Watergate —
which also featured a “bad guy” making scandalous remarks on a
secret recording. The Watergate tapes introduced the American public
to the phrase “expletive deleted”. Many Americans were
scandalised by the profanity and cynicism of Richard Nixon, their
president. But the way that the US system — the courts, the press
and the Congress working together — dealt with Nixon was ultimately
very impressive. And for all his flaws, no one doubted that Nixon had
the experience and the intelligence to be president.
By contrast, Mr
Trump is manifestly unqualified and has thrown the US system into
confusion, leaving the press and the Republican party floundering.
The fact that more than 40 per cent of Americans, and a majority of
whites, are probably going to vote for him suggests that the US is in
deep trouble. We can, by now, all list the ingredients that have
helped create this sickness — economic stagnation, inequality,
illegal immigration, the rise of social media — but the outcome
threatens the prestige of democracy worldwide.
If Mrs Clinton makes
it to the White House there will be relief across the west and a
certain disappointment in Moscow and, perhaps, Beijing. But it will
be very hard to erase the memory of this campaign. It has presented
an image of a troubled, divided and deluded US to the rest of the
world. As a result, it has already dealt a serious blow to the
prestige and power of the west.
gideon.rachman@ft.com
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