By José Ernesto Nováez Guerrero on November 7, 2020
Berkeley California, Photo: Oscar Ruiz
Finally, today, an official winner has been declared in the U.S. elections. After four days of tense expectation, with vote counts that were incredibly slow, the electoral balance has tipped over to the Democratic candidate.
This long political charade has been followed with great expectations all over the world, for various reasons. Donald Trump’s hostile and irreverent policies have encouraged and stimulated similar currents in countries as diverse as Brazil and Great Britain. Even though a strong wave of right-wing hardliners in the Western Hemisphere has had some recent setbacks, including the elections in Bolivia, the overwhelming triumph of the Approval in Chile, which was in practice a great vote of disapproval not only against the Pinochet Constitution but against the economic and social model that this constitution was intended to support and the deflation and discrediting of the opposition in Venezuela, with the Guaidó puppet becoming more and more isolated, it nevertheless retains several positions of strength, such as the OAS or the Inter-American Development Bank, without counting the member countries of the Lima group and their respective governments. All these ultra-right-wing projects may not find in Biden the support they need to continue operating with the logic that has worked with up until now.
On the other hand, among the left, many are now looking with preference at a candidate who seems to have a less hostile approach to the region and the various alternative projects there. This is in spite of the fact that Biden, while in Florida, embraced the hard-line Latin American exile reactionaries, which in the case of this southern state means promising that everything possible will be done to put an end to the terrible dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela.
Biden, as vice president of the first black president in the history of the US, benefited from the magnificent public relations image that Obama’s smart power was able to sow both inside and outside the United States. Although the “good-natured” Obama-Biden administration, if looked at closely, was more of the same of U.S. policy, it was able give the executive a facelift and present itself as a government that greatly benefited the most vulnerable, particularly ethnic groups such as Blacks and Latinos.
This Biden, a gray man of a lifetime in the Democratic Party establishment, famous for being an exceptionally boring and measured politician, now promises to take charge of the complex process of a country that seems on the verge of recession and crisis, with an infinite number of major internal problems, ranging from the coronavirus, where the record of those infected is broken day in and day out, the growing deficit of the economy, which makes the United States the most indebted country in the world, to the deep social polarization, stimulated by a president who governed with the prejudices of a certain sector of the electorate. A nation where more than 70 million people voted for Donald Trump, in spite of his crude sexism, racism and xenophobia, which Biden promises to unite together with the more than 75 million who voted for him.
The charade, which has been the talk of the media in recent days, promises to continue, while the current tenant of the White House exhausts all means, advertising, political and legal to ensure that the decision of the elections ends up in the hands of a Supreme Court that is supposed to be aligned with the conservative interests he has defended.
The whole spectacle has come to reaffirm something that many have already been pointing out for years: the insufficient character of the US electoral model and the need to reform it. But on a deeper level, it also shows the deep crisis in which the model of bourgeois democracy, which has one of its pillars and paradigms in the US, is immersed.
Everywhere in the developed and underdeveloped world, a confused working class votes for choices that are presented to them, in some way, as anti-system. From Trump to Bolsonaro, it is evident that there is an attempt to deny the traditional political class and its programs of economic management which, since the 1980s, have done nothing but weaken the bourgeois middle classes and thus undermine the social sustenance of the capitalist model in force on a planetary scale.
The rise of the current rightwings that many societies are experiencing are the result of the structural crisis of a system that, moreover, has steadily demonized the political option of the left, from the most moderate to the most subversive. Thus, populations fed up with how things work, but educated in a fervent anti-communist environment and, by extension, anti-left, see in a corrupt and vulgar ex-military or in a magnate sustained under the myth of the “self-made”, logical options to change a system of which both are non-antagonistic unwanted by products.
The other great truth that we can never lose sight of in American elections is that, no matter who wins, the true interests that pull the strings of power in that nation remain unchanged. They do not submit to any democratic control, they see the logic of war and imperialism as big business and are the ones who support and maintain the present economic system where more than a hundred countries and their populations bear the environmental and social costs of development, while less than twenty live as havens of development and order.
Having made this clear, we can now sit back and enjoy this electoral charade and view it as an intriguing television spectacle of US society complete with violence, intrigue, adult language and with miniseries possibilities.
Source: El Necio, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau