The violence at the US Capitol by Trump’s supporters is a stunning rebuke of American exceptionalism
Electoral and political violence before and after elections is not a surprise in India and many other parts of the world. But the incidents that took place at the US Capitol in Washington DC — where the US Houses of Congress sit and meet, and were sitting to certify the results of the presidential election that took place in the US in November — are shameful since America has for the past two centuries been seen as a promoter and, more recently, a protector of democracy across the world. Egged on by the sitting US President, Donald Trump, the loser of the election, his supporters gave a shameful display of themselves and the US to the rest of the world. Not just Trump, many of those who owe their political careers to him encouraged the supporters and, while they expressed their shock and dismay at the end result, this was nothing short of an attempted coup. Part of the fault lies in the convoluted American election system where different States are given the Electoral College votes based on the weightages decided decades ago. Trump, who won the election in 2016 on this very basis despite losing the popular vote, claims that in several States his votes were “lost” or “extra votes” were found by his Democratic opponents, and the US State of Georgia has been in his crosshairs because he lost the election there by a narrow margin. Trump, who has made a career out of being a “winner”, is bitter with his loss in Georgia and some other States, particularly in Arizona and Pennsylvania, and his claims of fraud have stoked his core supporters, who are almost always racist white vigilante organisations who believe in the conspiracy theories that formed the core of the militias that marched into Washington.
The US needs to move to a simpler and easier presidential election system where the person, a man or woman, who wins the plurality of the votes wins. Trump lost to Biden by over seven million votes, that is 4.4 per cent of the ballots cast. While not a landslide, it is a comprehensive victory margin in any book. Trump does not like losing, but he also lost the plurality of votes in 2016. The rest of the democratic world, which largely follows the first-past-the-post system that has its own flaws, cannot understand how a voter in the sparsely populated agrarian state of Wyoming has his or her vote count as almost double that of a voter in the most populated State of California. The US electoral system is broken and it needs to be fixed urgently, particularly as the country faces off against a rival across the Pacific Ocean once again. A rival that exports autocracy; a rival that exports tyranny. If the world is to trust the US to stand up to China, if India is to trust the US to stand up to China, we need the US to fix its electoral flaws. Fixing the deep divisions in American society, however, is something that might take much longer. The US is clearly a deeply divided nation, much like many other democracies, including ours. Fixing these problems will require exceptional leadership and a multi-partisan approach. As Joseph Robinette Biden Junior becomes the 46th President of the US on January 20, he has an incredibly difficult task in the shape of uniting his country, in front of him.
