First, Fareed argues that the Trump presidency, and the 2020 election, have led America to the precipice of something he first wrote about 23 years ago: illiberal democracy. The 2020 election saw Trump use “his platform and power to delegitimize the election, the free press, the idea of a loyal opposition, and the country’s integrity,” Fareed says. And Republican allies went along with him. For decades, elected leaders in weak democracies have been using their power to undermine democratic institutions, and President Trump has done the same.
Trump’s “term in office should be a reminder to Americans and everyone around the world,” Fareed says. “Democracy is fragile and needs to be protected. It can be eroded and undermined not just in Belarus and Venezuela but in the birthplace of constitutional government, the United States of America.”
How is the world reacting to Joe Biden’s win? And what does it mean for the global populist movement, whose standard Trump carried? Fareed asks three former top political leaders from abroad: former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, former Israeli Foreign Minister and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, and former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Next, why is America so divided, and what’s next for the country? Fareed talks with Vox’s Ezra Klein, author of “Why We’re Polarized,” and David French of Time and The Dispatch and the author of “Divided We Fall.”
Finally, if you thought Covid-19 (and America’s handling of it) cost Trump the election, Fareed explains why that’s not exactly the case. Biden Wins—and the Work Begins The New York Times’ editorial board, which endorsed Joe Biden for president, concludes that “it is worth taking this moment to raise a glass and breathe a sigh of relief.” The country has survived what will likely be viewed “as an extended stress test for the American experiment,” the paper writes. “The president did his best to undermine the nation’s democratic foundations. They were shaken, but they did not break. Mr. Trump exposed their vulnerabilities but also their strength.”
Biden now faces the unenviable task of governing in “a nation more beleaguered than it has been since 1945,” the Financial Times writes in another editorial. The US economy is in shambles, and even if a Covid-19 vaccine arrives, producing and distributing it will be a massive challenge. Biden’s win is “historic” and deals “a significant setback to modern populism,” the paper writes. “It is what faces him ahead that will make his achievement so far seem like the easy part.” As Joe Biden enters the White House with America divided, Anand Giridharadas writes for The New York Times that his presidency may not resemble that of FDR, who enacted a sweeping agenda and created America’s modern social safety net. Rather, Giridharadas writes, “[t]he example of Lyndon Johnson … provides a possible historical analogue.” Serving as president in tense times, LBJ was renowned for buttonholing and cajoling senators into agreement with his own Great Society program. Giridharadas suggests “Mr. Biden could turn out to be an improbably deft salesman for progressive priorities, using his disarming, folksy, median-voter-friendly patois, that ‘C’mon, man’ Americana vibe, to make major changes seem like common sense.”
There may be unexpected opportunities. “[T]hanks to the heterodoxy of Trumpism,” Giridharadas writes, the GOP might go along with some bold changes. “A wealth tax polls surprisingly well among Republican voters. Using the Department of Justice to crack down on monopolies and threats from China has some bipartisan support. As does actual infrastructure investment and, to a limited extent, raising the minimum wage.” If the size of the news was in question, headlines from around the world are marking Joe Biden’s victory as a big deal. Le Monde announces he’s set to become a “peacemaker in chief.” Nikkei Asia declares Biden’s win has “ma[de] Trump’s Asia policy one-term.”
Other countries will likely wonder about the possibility of the US lurching back into Trumpism, four or eight years hence. European allies will breathe a sigh of relief, Mathieu von Rohr writes for Der Spiegel, and they’ll hope Biden can “patch up society and deliver peace to the country.” But they’ll also recognize that it would “almost take a miracle for that to happen. Trump, after all, wasn’t the cause of the deep divide running through the country, but a symptom of it.” For that reason, Lionel Laurent wrote this week at Bloomberg, Europe will still need to chart its own course, relying less on US protection and support. At the same time, a Biden administration figures to return the US to its active, vocal role in supporting democratic rights around the world, Nikita Gryazin and Daniel Shapiro write for the European Leadership Network; we should expect it to take new interest in the post-election mess in Belarus, for instance.
The view from China appears sanguine. The sometimes-bombastic, Chinese Communist Party-affiliated Global Times notes predictions of soothed US–China tensions, time bought to improve relations, and a reduction of US tariffs on Chinese goods. A Lesson of 2020: 2016 Wasn’t a Fluke Despite Joe Biden’s win, critics of President Trump are still grappling with how many people voted for him. Given the close margin, Democrats can stop writing off Trump’s initial rise as a fluke, Nina Khrushcheva wrote this week for Project Syndicate: Just as the “Soviet Union used to attribute its obvious decline on its citizens’ corrupt desire for American jeans and jazz … Democrats chose to place all the blame for Hillary Clinton’s loss on Putin and Russian election interference. But the US did not destroy the Soviet Union; the Soviet system destroyed itself. And the Kremlin did not elect Trump; American voters did.”
If this election was a contest for America’s “soul,” as Biden repeatedly posed it, Andre M. Perry writes for Brookings that substantial support for both candidates shows that “America isn’t Trump, but Trump still represents a good part of America’s soul. Confronting that part means confronting the nation’s racism, xenophobia, and classism. If, someday, we prove successful in battling those demons, then Trump was the mirror America needed.” This presidential race was a very close one—or was it? Joe Biden appears to have taken back the upper Midwest states Hillary Clinton lost, and he leads in Arizona and Georgia—two states once unthinkable for Democrats to win over. “[P]ut aside your anxieties of the past few days … Suppose, instead, that you’d been on one of those weekslong rafting trips in the Grand Canyon … and woke up to this map,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver writes. “It’s not a landslide, by any means, but this is a map that almost any Democrat would have been thrilled about if you’d shown it to them a year ago.”
Trump has won the second-most votes ever cast for a presidential candidate (second only to Biden), but The Economist offers a different historical perspective: Trump “is only the fourth president in a century to have failed to win re-election. He is also the first president since Benjamin Harrison, in 1892, to have lost the popular vote twice. … Mr Biden will have won around 5m votes more than Mr Trump. The Republicans are only in the running nationally because of the bias towards their many rural voters in the electoral college and Senate.” American Populism: Bigger Than Trump? Now that President Trump has lost, what will become of his brand of populism? (As for the president’s immediate political future, he may or may not accept the election results, but The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote Friday that his legal strategy amounts to “one more Trumpist fantasy.” In The Economist’s view, America is most likely “hearing the last bark of the Trumpian carnival. … No one should underestimate how good it is that Mr Trump will soon be gone.”)
The Economist also reckons the appeal of Trumpism will fade. “For those who worry about the endurance of Mr Trump’s strain of populism, it should also be noted that it is not altogether clear what it is,” the magazine writes. “A mixture of isolationism, cronyism, nativist rhetoric, somewhat performative authoritarianism, corporate tax cuts and personality cult, Trumpism is what the president says it is. No one finds this more frustrating than the small minority of Republicans … who have attempted to turn the party into an actual vehicle for the working-class concerns Mr Trump raised.”
Still, a divided government would perpetuate the “deadlock and disaffection” that enabled Trump’s rise, the magazine writes. And at Foreign Affairs, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu posits that American populism is bigger than the president. Inequality fuels the resentment that makes it possible, he argues; unless the US can address that problem and rebuild trust in institutions and experts, Trump won’t be the last American populist to succeed. |
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