It was not just weaponry that flew off the shelves; so did the nation’s supply of plywood sheets. The luxury department store chain, Nordstrom, ordered half its stores to be boarded up. Fancy stores on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles also covered their plate-glass windows. Tiffany & Co., Saks Fifth Avenue, and other marquee retailers hired more security guards. As if Covid-19’s ballistic strike on American commerce were not enough, streetscapes from Beverly Hills to inner city Philadelphia braced for a brawl.
Fears have not borne out so far. In fact, the election went more smoothly and more peaceably than many feared. There was little violence. People turned out in droves and mailed in ballots in unprecedented numbers. By all accounts – pace the president – the ritual may have been the cleanest in American history. Indeed, the election was so clean and so massive that it put into stark relief just how splintered the country is. On election day, I was standing on the sidewalk in my town in central New Jersey and watched as a pick-up truck with a large trailer drove down the main street bedecked with massive TRUMP and American flags. In the preceding months, this kind of display was becoming more common, a kind of "take that" for genteel onlookers. Weaponized versions were on display among vigilantes during the summer’s street protests. As the truck went by, a woman standing beside me turned to speak through the gauze of her mask: "I feel like it is no longer my flag." She had lost her credo.
Trump did not kill it. It has been ailing for years, especially since the debacle in Iraq and the shameless bailouts of Wall Street that seems to reward the haves at the expense of the have-nots. The spectacle of policemen choking Black civilians while looking blankly into a camera, tax breaks for the rich, soaring student debt, poisoned drinking water in Michigan, concentration camps along the border, and the unabashed drive to suppress voters, have taken their toll on the credo. This does not include the everyday ways in which the humble facemask divided families and led to fist-fights in stores.
As long as America is so cleaved, it will be so consumed with its internal drama (and force the rest of the world to watch as bystanders) that it will be hard to summon the capacities to be an effective partner with neighbors and allies. Trump may be consigned to the basement, Tweeting like a crazy uncle to his followers. But Trumpism is here for a while.
Reckoning
In the soul-searching that has already begun, two events went unnoticed. Election day was a sad one because Covid-19 infected an additional 92,660 people while citizens flocked to the polls. Another 1,130 people died in the quarantined solitude. The next day, the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty became official.
Trump may recede, noisily. But Trumpism lives on and will take new forms. New voices will emerge from the shadow of the man’s girth. The outcome of the 2020 elections will not change the fact that Washington is the capital of a fractured nation.
Copyright : CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP
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