The pantomime of politics

Donald Trump is on his way to head the Republican Party in the upcoming American presidential elections in November, 2016. He is being called the ‘presumptive’ nominee till the July convention of the party ratifies him as the candidate.

Hardly political, and hardly Republican, Trump somehow anchored his candidature as an outsider on a Republican ticket. His entry into the presidential race was initially greeted as the Don Quixotic moment of the gruelling primary season where a little colour, a little nonsense could help lighten things a bit. Only that it kept getting serious.

Somewhere along the way 33 percent Republicans began supporting his outrageous candidature. He is brash, loud and offensive – and bereft of policy. He speaks the language of the typical working class, farming white and continues to retain some critical support. The remaining 60-some percent of the Republican base was divided between the 16 other candidates, mostly around anti-Trump sentiment. Except that these 16 have all fallen by the wayside under the juggernaut of a Trump campaign that is an absolute new for its tenor and tone and outrageous brashness; and let me repeat, bereft of policy.

It is safe to say that Trump knows no policy. His pronouncements are simple. He will build a wall on the Mexico border to keep the Mexican immigrants out. His expression of hate for the Mexicans and any other immigrant, Muslims for example, is not what he might genuinely believe in but will still proclaim since it resonates well with the Republican middle class.

This has become the ongoing refrain of the Republican establishment even as it grapples with an outsider who has not only broken through the ranks, but has looted the Republican silverware and is threatening to take over the house. Unable to determine how it all happened – the process has already begun to understand how someone like Trump could get through the system without as much as a warning – the establishment is currently seized with finding virtue in the political ‘vice’ of a Trump candidature that is now a fait accompli. The spin is in the nature of adding a little intellect to what Trump brays about routinely.

And despite the ‘show’, something serious is happening below the surface in political terms. American society is ‘reacting’ to how the politics has evolved. The American political tradition has been built round the momentum of rather centrist Clinton terms between 1992 and 2000 and the more idealist Obama terms of 2008 onwards. The politics of the US had established itself under an obvious shift to the Left under these two impressive Democratic tenures; more so under Obama. Trump’s rise challenges such institution of the new status quo in society.

Of the Republican presidents of the recent times, Reagan made the most impact on the domestic political scene and reenergised the Republican base. The media and those jaded with Trump’s rise tend to compare the significant departure in Republican political thinking between what Reagan propounded and what Trump ordains. A political ad shows Reagan saying: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall” in reference to the Berlin Wall which when removed signified the reintegration of Germany and Europe and the end of the cold war.

The contrast could not be starker with Donald Trump instead seeking to ‘build a wall’ that he will call the ‘great’ Great Wall. Going by his penchant for the bold and the beautiful, he might actually make one and write Trump all over it. Such is likely the ruination of the political mantle in the US unless ‘the art of the deal’ can rein him in a bit.

Hop across the Atlantic and there is another kind of counterrevolution in play: Sadiq Khan, a Pakistani-origin British attorney from the Labour Party, in a very Conservative Britain – particularly London – has won the mayorship of the city. Europe in the last decade or two had moved significantly Right with the ultra-right at the helm at places. The recent spate of terror across Europe seemed to be the last nail in the liberalist coffin of Europe.

That is what makes Sadiq Khan’s rise so special, even though it is a small tremor in the vast conservatism of European Right. The rise of Jeremy Corbyn somewhat cements that tectonic shift given how far right Britain and Europe had moved.

The US has a comparable figure in Bernie Sanders, a socialist unique in his own class, far to the Left of Hillary championing the cause of the democratic base. Democrats are flocking around him as he gives voice to the deprived and the 99 percent others. This is yet another phenomenon in American politics which makes the upcoming elections the most important in American society’s political make-up for the future.

Will the extremes overtake centrism? Bernie Sanders will likely be nudged over by the Democratic establishment, leaving the election a contest between the fuzzy centrism of Hillary Clinton and the populist extremism of the Right pinned on Trump’s exaggerated postulations. Between the two Hillary holds a slight edge giving hope to the centrists but that will only keep the two fringes alive, polarising the opposing sentiments as a more abiding reality of American political future.

As conventions are challenged and extremes come into play, is there a lesson for Pakistan in there? Ideological extremes rupture a society while our kind is both venomous and fractious. To preclude its relevance the centrists will have to hold. Both NS and IK are warped in their own missteps and fighting a battle where none will come on top. If it is any comfort, both Trump and Sanders have refused to release their tax returns for varying reasons giving rise to doubts. But all that is downed in the populist din.

So much for the moral equivalence. In an era of political jesters and suspected felons the space for such extremes simply opens up. Not all extremes though are as dangerous. Do we recognise this in Pakistan? How politics is responding to the Panama leaks challenge, far from it.

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com