After the Storm

By Neeliya De Silva

What the 2016 American presidential election illustrated – more than anything else – is that we are all able to choose our own reality. The election of Donald Trump to the highest office of power signified an unprecedented, dream-like event in world history. 2016 was a year when seismic shifts in politics happened in the blink of an eye, leaving us reeling, and now the world moves towards something unknown with a gentle inevitability as we sit watching, waiting for further unforeseeable events to unfold. 

How did we get to this point in time? When adrift in an obfuscating fog of falsehoods, a sea of ‘alternative facts’, the very notion of truth itself has become contested in contemporary political discourse  – a verifiable version of reality floating into the air to be lost in the ether, spinning amidst a myriad alternative choices, to pick and choose at will. The role of the news media in the American election highlights how uncompromising and partisan information has become, a miasma of despair emanating from the intractable interpretations of pundits and party politics. Harkening back to British philosopher George Berkeley’s notion of esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived), one’s immediate perceptions - and volitions -  become the only measure of reality. And yet, when verifiable facts and our commonly shared idea of reality become a subscription-only option, there begins stasis and disruption.

We become blind to all else but that which we perceive intuitively – or viscerally – as Trump was effectively able to appeal to the base fears of his fan-base, not so much interested on outlining a cohesive policy plan than in depicting a fictitiously dystopian sense of dread and despair underlying the world-leading democratic nation, which ‘[he], alone [could] fix’. The statistics spoke for themselves – crime and unemployment rates were at their lowest in years.  And yet, with a comprehensive, obdurate disregard for truth – in speeches riddled with inconsistencies, often veering into sheer unintelligibility – Trump tapped into that omnipresent sense of paranoia and discontent amongst the disaffected – he was able to make people feel as if they were in danger. And in the end, this sense of uncertainty which he was able to exploit, this fundamental lack, more intangibly premised than empirically based, was all that mattered. A change was to come, but it was a keening cry for change, something which could not be coherently articulated, a revolution not seen but felt. 

Trump’s election was thus a synecdoche for the absurdity of politics in the modern age: a glitteringly golden spectacle of swallowable soundbites, a freewheeling horror-show of secrets and lies. The archetypal strongman demagogue who represented individualistic willpower, the Freudian id of the American dream, carried with him the deafening roar of populism, bringing representation for the mythical concept of ‘the people’, who stood in binary opposition to the negatively portrayed establishment and liberal elites of coastal towns. What exactly did America see when they gazed at this blustering, brazen billionaire who lives high up in the sky, untrammelled by hardship his entire life, against a highly qualified establishment candidate who, although capable, represented the unknowable, inscrutable machinations of the security state, which citizens had never been privy to? If Hilary was shadowy, Trump was transparent. For all his coarseness and vulgarity, for all the scandals which constituted his infamy, for his followers, he simply ‘[told] it like it is’. And now an unqualified outsider representing the extremes of discourse, previously unheard of anywhere, has become legitimated by being given the highest position of power in the world. 

So far, in the uncertain interregnum period that followed the election with FBI investigations into Russian interception, to the chaotic conduct of the White House communications staff and cabinet appointments, including the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn for illegal communications concerning sanctions with Russia, there is veritable proof that the new administration is anything but the ‘finely tuned machine’ that Trump has bloviated it is. And yet, we have seen here a man who wants to be adulated indiscriminately, no matter his indefensible and incorrigible conduct or its requisite consequences. His presidential bid was premised on repudiating the liberal establishment elites based first on a certain personal ressentiment, a feeling of not being accepted into an elite society he so desired to be a part of, which then crystallised into something more concrete and sinister when he gave voice to that same sense of inferiority and detachment from liberal values that was silently brewing, unnoticed and overlooked, in the rust belts and red states of America. We will ‘take our country back’, he cried out, and that cry resounded amidst the crowd, the deafening cry of fighting an enemy they were collectively unable to pinpoint, and thus spread to all forms of antagonists, including Mexicans, Muslims, refugees, women, liberal elites, lobbyists and the establishment. It was a cry of war, of us vs them, ad infinitum. 

Already, implications of his election have resulted in a flurry of controversial executive orders that will make what has been fearfully apprehended into a grim new reality: the blanket Muslim ban  from seven countries which was chaotically implemented and rescinded in judicial court for being unconstitutional (but will be redrawn in the coming weeks, he promises), controversial environmental and global healthcare orders, actions to repeal and replace Obamacare, amongst many others. Meanwhile, the histrionic show rolls on, in extraordinarily hostile press conferences and rallies designed to bolster his core supporters and further alienate the sceptically minded, and with his alarmingly authoritarian attempts to discredit and demean the intelligence agencies, judicial courts and liberal media at large, declaring the latter ‘the enemy of the American people’ on his Twitter account. At the same time, senior advisors and Republican dominated Congress work surreptitiously behind the scenes to undo what positive progress has been made in the eight years under the Obama administration. Concurrently, whilst an ineffective opposition Democratic party flounders, resistance in the form of protests and activism galvanises across America, as an embittered, divided nation refuses to remain stagnant and helpless in the face of flagrant injustices to its liberty and values.

 If America is turning away from the world, the world cannot turn away from America. What we are witnessing across the ocean is an unsettling and fascinating spectacle – certainly not isolated to America but part of a wider global disruption at play. With the splintering shock of Brexit and the prospect of another controversial populist victory for Marine Le Pen in the upcoming French presidential election, is this the end of the global liberal establishment order as we know it? And if so, is there a viably robust alternative system to challenge and uphold a positive, internationalist outlook of the world – or is this retreat into insular nationalism in major democratic nations something that will resonate and replicate itself throughout the world?