Why the world is counting on a Biden victory

by Krishantha Prasad Cooray

Next week’s presidential election in the United States of America has become a remarkable event on the world stage. It has exposed the dark underbelly of the American political system and left us all wondering whether America, the world’s oldest modern democracy, is indeed still a democracy at all?

Four years ago, America fell to a strongman. Donald Trump took the national stage with masterful control of the media, hijacking a democratic system, bypassing the traditional scrutiny of presidential candidates by hiding his tax returns, silencing people with non-disclosure agreements and controlling the narrative about his political opponent.

By the measure of an election in any normal democracy, he failed, garnering 2,868,686 fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, a margin of 2.23%. To put that margin in a context that Sri Lankans would understand, Ranil Wickremasinghe lost the 2005 presidential election in Sri Lanka by a narrower margin of only 1.86%. However, under the American system, it is the combination of states you win in the Electoral College that counts, not the number of votes, and Donald Trump became president as a result.

For decades, the battle for the right to vote has been a feature of American politics. Politicians and judges they have appointed frequently succeed in preventing minority groups, young voters or others from voting, and have found ways to have their ballots excluded from the final tally. On more than one occasion, the politicized American Supreme Court has sided with these efforts, further divorcing the American political system from what we in Sri Lanka understand as democracy.

Indeed, we can take pride in our own system. For all the political turmoil that our country has suffered in 72 years as an independent democracy, no one barring the LTTE has ever tried to deny the franchise to any Sri Lankan constituency or to prevent them from voting. More importantly, it would be unthinkable for Sri Lankan courts to even entertain a case seeking to deny the vote to any group of Sri Lankans.

But what is still unthinkable in little Sri Lanka is now the stated path to victory for Donald Trump’s re-election in America. A president who came to power on a technicality is now seeking to unleash a torrent of technicalities to cling on to power. His acolytes are sabotaging the postal service to scuttle the postal vote, rushing to courts across the country to seek rulings preventing votes from being counted, shutting down polling places in urban areas to make it more difficult for poor people to vote, and adopting a flurry of similar strategies not to increase their own vote count, but to reduce the number of votes counted for their opponent.

To those of us who treasure democracy and the institutions that defend it, there is solace to be found in the fact that Donald Trump is the first incumbent American President running for reelection who has not been endorsed by living former Presidents in his own party. Lifelong institutionalists in his Republican party, from former Speaker Paul Ryan to the late Senator John McCain, disavowed him. McCain went so far as to request that Trump not be allowed to attend his funeral.

Hundreds of retired senior military, intelligence and law enforcement officials in America have spoken out not just to oppose Donald Trump but to warn that his re-election would pose a grave threat to the national security and integrity of the United States of America.

What America has seen in the last four years is that when strongmen bluster their way into high office on a façade of glitzy propaganda and magical promises, the reality is that they will spend their time in office making excuses as to why they could not get anything done, and insisting that the only way they can deliver what they promised is if they are allowed more time in office. Meanwhile, they chafe at the democratic and institutional safeguards designed to ensure that our rulers are accountable to their people and serve at their mercy.

With Trump’s failure to deliver on his promises, and his catastrophic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is reason to hope that his defeat will make way for healing America and making its institutions stronger than they were before Trump began his assault. There is a lot of healing to be done.

Ever since World War II, America has marketed itself as the poster-child for democracy on the world stage, even though the fairness of its electoral system has lagged objectively behind those of several other established democracies like Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Switzerland and the Scandinavian states.

Despite America’s wide inequalities, it is the country’s evolution that is most romantic. Before being elected President, as an opponent of slavery, Abraham Lincoln explained that America’s Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that all men are equal, was not a statement of fact but an aspiration to strive for. The concept of equality, Lincoln said, is one that must be “constantly looked to, constantly laboured for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colours, everywhere.”

Indeed, the American tradition has been to own up to its country’s dark history and aspire to do better. Whether slavery, the treatment of native Americans or other ethnic and religious minorities, the country has openly and gradually strived to evolve into a less racist and xenophobic, and more inclusive and equal nation, all under the glaring eye of one of the most searing and merciless news media environments in the world.

America’s claim to moral authority around the world has come from reconciling its roots in inequality, slavery and other heinous crimes, owning up to them, accepting its present shortcomings, and actively striving to grow with its founding values, while espousing those same values abroad. Democracies that have shared those values or even overtaken America in their implementation have found in the USA a strong and staunch ally who will stand up to autocratic bullying.

This is why Trump’s rejection, deriding and snubbing of democratically elected leaders, and his embracing and enabling of dictators and autocrats, and his encouragement of human rights abuses in his own country and overseas have struck such a serious blow to fragile democracies everywhere. The ideologies of countries like Russia and China depend on people losing faith in the idea of democracy and a free press. They could have no greater champion than an American president who insists American elections are rigged and boasts that he helped a foreign prince get away with murdering and disemboweling a journalist.

So when Mike Pompeo came to Sri Lanka, winked that democracies should stick together, and warned that the Chinese Communist Party is preying on Sri Lanka, his words would ring less hollow if his own party were not so feverishly dismantling and delegitimizing the concept of franchise in his own country. Indeed, he would sound more sincere if President Trump had not just months ago been impeached for “preying” on the democratically elected leaders of Ukraine.

Sri Lanka cannot be credibly lectured on human rights and democracy by a country whose government has for the last four years institutionalized the oppression of minorities, forcibly separated refugees from their children, and laboured to engineer the arrest of journalists and jailing of political opponents. When Trump speaks of autocrats like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, he betrays a frustrated envy of these strongmen and how simply they can silence and dispatch their political opponents.

These weaknesses in Trump and his lack of character are the primary reason he is on track to garner far fewer votes than his opponent, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. Unlike Trump, whose manicured public image propelled him to fame on a campaign of fear, hate and race-baiting, Joe Biden is someone who has long been known to Americans and the world.

As a leader on the world stage, Biden has championed support for independent institutions in emerging democracies, especially in making judiciaries independent and distancing law enforcement activities from political pressures. All the while, he has made no secret of the fact that he believes his own country has a long way to go in making its own established institutions more inclusive, fair and just.

There is little doubt that Biden will garner more votes this Tuesday, but his opponent has made no secret of his plan to win through an assault on the franchise more akin to those adopted by leaders of failed states than the President of the world’s largest democracy. He has even tarred the independence of the courts, making no secret of his motives when stacking the Supreme Court with judges he believes will deliver him the presidency a second time.

Dictators, strongmen and autocrats around the world are also watching. In a world where such people cling to power not through overt fascism but by putting on the thinnest guise of democracy, it is mana from heaven for them to see an American President boast of rigging the US Supreme Court to stay in power. If Trump succeeds, they will only be inspired and emboldened to employ similar strategies to stifle the democratic will of their own people. If they see one candidate win millions more votes in America, only to have their victory overturned by a politically stacked court, they will see a blueprint for how they too can cling to power until the end of their days.

When George W. Bush was declared president in 2000 by the Supreme Court stopping the counting of votes in Florida, three key lawyers on his legal team were John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. All three are now Justices on the US Supreme Court, who may soon be asked to choose whether the next President of their country will be their “party man” or the man who won the most votes.

Those Republicans in America who seek to use a politicized Supreme Court to prioritize keeping Trump in power over the founding principles of their nation would do well to examine the events that led to the founding and rise of their own political party. The Republican party in America came together after 1854 by bringing together a growing number of American politicians whose opposition to slavery left them without a party that reflected their political ideology.

As the party and its philosophy garnered traction and it became clearer that a clear majority of Americans were opposed to slavery, it was the opportunistic president James Buchanan and politically motivated Chief Justice Roger Taney who colluded to deliver a 7-2 judgment of the Supreme Court that declared that those of African descent were sub-human and thus must be treated as property all across the United States.

The barbarism of this move and its aftermath played no small role in the election of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860. The question of freedom and who deserved to be free so charged American politics that his opponents tried to kill him before he took office, and soon drove the United States into a civil war. That war was won by those who stood on the principle that freedom and equality were the inalienable rights of all human beings. The world in the 1860s was not remotely as interconnected as it is today. The telephone had not yet been invented, and news traveled across the world no faster than a ship could sail the sea.

Today, the eyes of the world are on the American voters and American institutions. Dictators, strongmen and autocrats around the world have had an easy time of the last four years, finding their actions more legitimized by the United States than chastised, while journalists, rights advocates and those who stand for the rule of law have often found themselves isolated in every corner of the world.

If a Biden electoral victory is suppressed by discounting votes and overruling the will of the American people, the path will be cleared for every ruler who seeks to govern without the consent of those they govern to follow America’s example, and craft policies and institutions that cement their power. Such counties will then join America as politically apartheid states, democracies only in name.