By : Derwin Pereira
On Saturday, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt during an election rally in Pennsylvania. The former president, who was shot in the right ear, escaped narrowly with his life, but not before pumping his fist in the air. The gunman died, a rally attendee was killed, and two spectators were injured.
Forget the shrill condemnations and pious pontifications that have followed the incident. Look at that word, “spectators”. It draws attention to the word “spectacle”. American political rallies have a strong element of the spectacular in them. As on a theatre stage, there is normally a podium, from which a real or a putative leader addresses a crowd, made up mostly of supporters.
Rhetoric is the main instrument the politician uses to sway the masses; logic, if present at all, is a distant cousin of rhetoric. The leader makes his speech, the mob goes hysterical in its applause, he departs, and the act is over. It does not follow that every member of the ragtag audience will vote for him, but he has done his job. His job is that of an actor. He has played his role in a spectacle.
Politics at its best is theatre. Politics at its worst is theatre with the unwelcome intrusion of reality. The intrusion can take mild forms, such as that of a heckler who stands up suddenly to interrupt and denounce the leader. Or it can take deadly forms, as in the person of 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, the Trump shooter. He interrupted the spectacular nature of American political theatre, one in which Trump himself excels, with a sub-plot of his own. His sub-plot almost destroyed the main plot. It would have been interesting to know why, particularly since he is said to have been a Republican supporter, except that he is dead. The dead get no lines in the theatre of politics.
Of course, I am not supporting what Crooks did. What I am saying is that this episode will pass from the repertoire of American political theatre, as have earlier episodes, without calling into question the country’s insane gun laws or the power of its gun lobby, a power group which festers and breeds particularly well within the reactionary Wild West frontiers of the Republican right wing.
The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981 have passed into the history of American political theatre. The first president was a Democrat and the second one was a Republican, like Trump. Either way, nothing substantial changed in the role of sanctioned violence in American daily life.
What else are guns for but for violence? And if guns are to be allowed for the sake of violent self-defence, who is to say how the self in question will be defined? John Hinckley Jr., who shot and wounded Reagan, apparently believed that the attack would impress the actress Jodie Foster, for whom he had developed an erotic obsession. For the attacker, the actress sustained his sense of self, and that sense demanded that he try to kill the president of his country. Is it impolitic to ask whether that criminal imbecile’s sense of self would have been less dangerous without his access to a gun? It would have been, of course.
But, then, in America, guns define the national self, along with great cities and magnificent highways connecting them.
Dysfunctional America
The Trumpean drama is at least real. (Someone almost got killed.) It is being accompanied by the surreal theatre featuring a serving president so incapable of controlling himself that he makes one gaffe after another, but to no account. Joe Biden’s latest gaffe was to refer to President Zelensky (of Ukraine) as President Putin (of Russia), not a small confusion given that Russia is engaged in an invasion of Ukraine. Yet, this man, who is clearly incapable of leading America and is yet the presidential contender in this year’s election, carries on as if words, gestures and actions do not matter.
Put Trump and Biden together, and you get an idea of why America is dysfunctional at its highest political levels. People who should be in other jobs (or none) are either ensconced in the comfortable job of leading the country or of protesting to show that they can perform better.
As they put on their contending acts, the rest of the world watches and laughs, for the tragedy of American politics is comedy for its rivals. Can you imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping or Russian President Vladimir Putin operating in a wayward system where a lunatic with a gun can try to change the course of Chinese or Russian history? I mention these two countries because they are the two closest contenders for the global position that America occupies at this moment. They are America’s contemporary peers.
Higher standards of security in political engagement prevail in even other countries which are not America’s peers. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia and India manage to ensure that their democracies work free of gun-wielding lunatics who take out their personal insecurities on elected (or electable) officials. That is because they do not possess a Wild West gun culture in which the guy who draws and fires first is the guy who writes history.
In properly democratic societies, political power does not flow out of the barrel of a gun: Political power resides in the collective will of the people exercised through free, fair and periodic elections. Leaders and their parties come and go. What lasts is the sovereign will of the people. It changes, but in its very changes lies its ultimate continuity.
Whom Americans elect this November must depend on them collectively, not on the lone wolf actions of terrorists who believe that their will overrides the choice of voters who exercise their suffrage through the ballot box. Take this fundamental distinction away, and the road ahead will lead to anarchy. Internal anarchy can never provide the basis for international order.
America the Indispensable
This leads me to the last point. For all its faults, America is indispensable. Even as its gun culture catches up with its political culture, America is still the indispensable global leader because it is a democracy in a world where autocratic leaders and their mute nations are trying to write the new rules of the global order. Those nations possess a gun culture, not within themselves, but in their interactions with the rest of the world.
No one can deny that the new status quo in the South China Sea is a direct product of a muscular defence policy which has overridden the moral and political demands of the law of the sea. The borders of Ukraine bear testimony to the brute exercise of force in the settlement of diplomatic issues. Should Chinese or Russian actions become a fait accompli, they will set the “standards” of international behaviour that would be fatal to the interests of smaller and weaker nations. Anarchy would provide the norm in international relations before a new world order emerges in which the powerful take what they can and the weak give what they must. And the powerful would gang up among themselves to rule the rest.
It goes without saying that America, too, behaves like an imperial power (in the Middle East, for example) but even its recourse to force occurs within the parameters of a rules-based liberal international order whose overall purpose is benign: to bring nations both large and small within the ambit of the same rule of law. Replace that principle with the rule of force, and the difference becomes clear immediately.
Since the end of World War II, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, the United States has presided over the liberal international order, which has created unimaginable prosperity around the world (not equitably but genuinely nevertheless) and provided the material basis for the pursuit of international peace as a realistic global goal. Today, the management of the global commons in the existential area of the environment would be impossible without the agreement and contributions of the United States (and other major economies grouped under the rubric of the US-led West). It is useless to pretend otherwise.
It is therefore in our own interests, particularly if we live in smaller and weaker nations, to not see America fail as a civilisation. It is in our own interests that the US should continue to play a balancer’s role in the global balance of power because the alternative would be the arrival of a hegemon bent on wreaking vengeance on the existing world order for the historical wrongs done to it.
There is an Indian saying: “It is better to have a blind uncle than have no uncle.” Uncle Sam is no exception. He is not quite blind, but he is stumbling. But even if blind, he is better than no Uncle Sam.
But Uncle Sam needs to watch out. The gunmen are within.