US and the yawn factor

Despite Newt Gingrich upsetting Mitt Romney’s apple cart in the South Carolina Republican primary, the US presidential election race has lost the magic of the old days for the world. This cannot be ascribed merely to the relative decline of a country which is still the most powerful and likely to remain so for many years. A number of other factors are responsible for outsiders falling out of love with a system they had treated with reverence not so long ago.
To begin with, more and more democrats in the rest of the world are convinced that America does not offer the best model for democracy, with its penchant for money power playing an even greater role with each election. Besides, extreme groups of religious variety or of the Tea Party kind distort public debate to an unacceptable degree. Democracy by definition is untidy but the cacophony of irrational noises that has become the staple of the American election campaign is particularly off-putting.
True, US President Barack Obama’s great victory the last time around — the first black President in American history where blacks were slaves — seemed to vindicate the world’s faith in America. But the euphoria of that victory was short-lived as Mr Obama’s inability to beat the system in foreign as well as domestic policy became evident. Put simply, he could not match his words with deeds. The most glaring example, of course, was his soaring rhetoric in his Cairo address to the Muslim world and his craven surrender to the power of the American Jewish lobby by betraying Palestinians.
One factor for the near unanimous euphoria that prevailed in the world over a famous American victory was that the new President was not George W. Bush. Even the august Nobel Committee was swept off its feet by the prevailing excitement to award him the Peace Prize on the promise of what he would do in future, rather than anything he had accomplished to date. But as Mr Obama sank lower in world esteem with each promise he went back on at home and abroad — remember closing Guantanamo in a year and giving notice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt settlement building on occupied Palestinian land? — he was merely telling the world about the tyranny of the American system.
Politics by its nature is a game of compromise, but the democratic system is built on the premise that a leader sets up some markers that he refuses to compromise on. Even as Mr Obama reflects on the possibility that he might end up as a one-term President, he would be ruefully counting the costs of his compromises, which have shorn his rhetoric of credibility and nurtured a sense of disillusionment among the public.
There are extenuating circumstances. It has been a difficult economic period for the US as it has been for the rest of the developed world, although there appears to be some shoots of hope lately. The US, as Europe, seems to have moved right. Traditionally, the country is hospitable to the rise of extreme groups tied to policies or faith (remember the McCarthy era?). Most Americans believe in the romantic myth stemming from the early days of colonising the country that government is evil and the less government there is, the better for the people. The European model of the welfare state is derided in public rhetoric.
State welfare, therefore, can be introduced only almost surreptitiously or in times of acute stress — witness Franklin Roosevelt’s policies or President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society — but the American norm remains hostile to any policy that makes the state responsible for people’s welfare. The Tea Party movement is a predictable response to hard economic times when the country has a unique black President. The strength of the evangelicals is another response.
In Republican primaries, of course, these tendencies come into full play. As Mr Gingrich demonstrated in South Carolina, his pitch was to decry “European welfare” and uphold the glories of unalloyed American style capitalism. It is, of course, par for course that were he to end up as the Republican challenger of Mr Obama, still unlikely, he would move more to the American centre.
What South Carolina has accomplished is to make the Republican race longer and more expensive — much to the delight of television channels, who win billions in commercials, thanks to the new, more lax funding law — even as the rest of the world yawns. There is an element of repetitious rhetoric in these primaries transformed in the television age into extravagant shows, rather than reasoned debates. Apparently, Mr Gingrich performed well because he was feisty in responding to his former second wife’s accusations that she had rejected his proposal that he remain married to her while he consorted with his new love interest and his present wife.
It is not all doom and gloom with American democracy because it has displayed the ability to renew itself after wallowing in the depths of intolerance and illiberal tendencies. But that prospect seems to be a long way away. The cycle of Republican primaries will see more extravagant over-the-top rhetoric on the evils of the welfare state equating social democracy with poisonous communism, more calls for evangelical gospels and the Israeli God-given right to all of the Palestinian land, in addition to the occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank.
For his part, Mr Obama has gathered impressive funds to fight the battles ahead. Although non-American television channels and media try to replicate the aura of excitement each stage of the pre-election contest evokes at home, there is less and less interest around the world in the minutiae of US electoral politics. The bottom line is: Who will be the new President and what will be the nature of the policies he will adopt were Mr Obama to lose? That will not be known for some time. The choice would seem to be restricted between an ineffective, if well-meaning, head in the incumbent and a Republican with Right-wing tendencies with a more expansive world agenda.

The writer can be contacted at snihalsingh@gmail.com