US Elections 2016: The Greatest Show On Earth

A political storm is capturing the imagination of millions in and around the United States of America. The airwaves of every media outlet in America have been hijacked. The air is rife with the din of hot rhetoric, impassioned pleas to the voters and the twang of accusations shot at each other by the candidates hoping to occupy the highest seat of power in the world.

The US Presidential Elections of 2016 is simply the greatest show on earth right now. The primaries have ended and the stage is set for an epic general election contest between two of the most reviled politicians in recent American history.

Republicans Vs Democrats

The Democrats – Clinton and Sanders – have conducted largely dignified campaigns while the Republicans, particularly Trump and Cruz with Kasich watching from the sidelines, have indulged in a dishonourable slugfest.

Sanders and Clinton, who sparred over the differences over their way of doing things, ultimately agreed on a whole host of issues ranging from raising the minimum wage to women’s reproductive rights. In fact, it took a number of debates and the tightening of the race for the differences between them to crop up in full force.

The Republican primaries, on the other hand, started out with 17 major candidates and at times featured scarcely believable moments before the orange billionaire hijacked the nomination from a host of highly qualified governors and senators.

‘The Donald’ Trump has played fast and loose with xenophobic demagoguery and downright racism, accusing all Mexican immigrants of being rapists and murderers while calling out an Indiana born judge of Mexican heritage, who is overseeing a lawsuit filed against Trump University for fraud, a Mexican who would not be able to adjudicate the matter impartially. He has called for a ban on all Muslims travelling to America and has argued that Hilary Clinton is playing the ‘woman card’, without which she wouldn’t get 2 percent of the vote.

But the appeal is clear to see.

Year of Outsiders

First and foremost, and this is the most important factor in a year of outsiders, Trump is not a career politician. He has weaved a series of half truths and outright lies to make the case that he is the man to get America back to its ‘winning’ ways, because the wealthiest nation in history just doesn’t seem to be ‘winning’ anymore.

His main argument and the point he makes every time regardless of the question posed to him, is that the current leaders are stupid people who have made disastrous trade deals with other countries which in turn has led to the American people suffering economically.

While the overwhelming hubris and a complete lack of humility would put any candidate’s campaign in the dumpster, Trump is not just any candidate. At a time in America when a substantial populace is still reeling from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, there is enormous anger.

This anger has also supercharged the campaign of Bernie Sanders. Trump’s supporters see in him an authenticity that the career politicians woefully lack. His legendary levels of self promotion on media of all variety might indicate unhealthy level of obsession with one’s own self but his fans lap it up with glee. The moral turpitude he displays in blasting his opponents might set off alarm bells regarding his character but his base merely sees it as an appropriate response toward the establishment that is out to get him.

It’s the economy, stupid! Obviously there is more at work here than simply Trump’s mad marketing skills. Years of globalisation and trade pacts like NAFTA have contributed to a shrinking middle class all across the western nations. The neo liberal policies that championed such globalised trade, hinged primarily on two planks – austerity in the times of economic downturn and increasing deregulation of the financial markets.

So, even when the macro outlook looked rosy, the wealth creation was merely benefitting the top 1 percent. The constant refrain of the ruling elite since the 90s has been that globalisation is the greatest thing to have happened since Elvis burst onto the scene. That removing all manner of regulations to make way for unfettered trade is the panacea to all our problems.

Greatest Spectacle on Television

To a significant portion of the populace in the west, globalisation seems like an elitist system designed by and for the said elitists. The 2008 financial crisis exacerbated this feeling in a spectacular manner. In times such as these, when restrained and mature leadership is seen as weak and feckless, when each action taken by the politicos is seen as self serving and callous, a strongman promising to upend the whole system and fix the rigged economy carries with him an enormous amount of appeal. Increasingly, it looks like a globalised economy that works only for the top 1 percent, rather than anything else, is the prime factor behind it.

GoT? Nah. We live in the golden age of television. More than that, we live in the age where a show like Game of Thrones exists. But on enquiry by a friend if I’d caught the latest season, I said no – I was busy watching another spectacle unfold.

Now, I must say I am not a political junkie. Yet in a summer where Trump has steadily gone from eliciting responses such as ‘No, he didn’t’ to ‘Of course he did’ and where a self described socialist rattled one of the greatest political machines of our age to its core and where racial tensions and needless violence have threatened to drown out almost any other substantive dialogue, the US elections of 2016 are proving to be an able match for anything else taking place on TV, or anywhere else.