A year ago, on January 6, 2021, members of the US Congress met as scheduled to certify the results of the Presidential elections held in November 2020 and officially declare Joe Biden the new President. The loser, Donald Trump, had been railing ever since the votes had been counted that there had been massive electoral fraud and that the election had been stolen from him. On January 6, Trump gave an incendiary speech at a rally close to the Capitol complex, which houses the US Senate and the House of Representatives, asking his supporters to “walk down to the Capitol”, to “show strength” and “take back our country”.
The day has since been described as “one of the darkest days in US history”.
Soon after Trump’s speech, a violent mob of hundreds attacked and vandalised the Capitol, stormed the floor of both chambers—the Senate and the House, climbed on the dais, sat in the chamber chairs, stole podiums and trashed the offices of the American people’s elected representatives.
The Capitol riots were something the average American may never have expected. They seemed to desecrate every democratic principle that the nation had supposedly been built on.
Yet, a year later, opinions of the American people remain sharply divided. And an examination of the situation also may help us a bit to understand the polarised India that we live in today.
According to a CBS News-YouGov poll conducted in the last week of December, 17% of Americans approve the actions of those who forced their way into the Capitol. And 40% of Republican Party supporters believe that most of the attackers were actually leftists pretending to be Trump supporters. A quarter of Americans feel that what happened was “patriotism” or “defending freedom”.
Trump, though banned for life from Facebook and Twitter, is still highly visible, still insisting that the election was rigged and hinting that he will run again in 2024. As many as 26% of Americans think he should do that. And another 12% want Trump to fight to retake the Presidency right now, before the next election. And a third of the people within that 12% (which translates to only 4% of Americans, but that’s several millions of them) say he should use force if necessary. In essence, 38% of Americans want Trump back, by Constitutional means or otherwise.
The Capitol riots also seem to have set some sort of a precedent; 62% of Americans expect violence from the loser’s side after the next Presidential election in 2024, though very few favour it. And 25% think violence might be justified, depending on the situation, on matters like abortion policies, civil rights, labour issues and even vaccine and coronavirus.
But the numbers are the effect. What could be the causes?
Trump came into the 2016 Presidential race as a rank outsider and won because he was an outsider. During his campaign, he tore into the political establishment, both Democratic and Republican, and tapped into widespread but non-articulated disaffection and disappointment. He said blunt things about immigration and trade and American soldiers dying in distant lands that career politicians would not speak publicly about. His slogan “Make America Great Again” mined both patriotic feelings and a sense in the American heartland that the country’s elite had betrayed the masses.
In spite of his super-boorish behaviour, delusional statements, megalomaniacal tweets in his four years as President, it is almost certain that he would have been re-elected in 2020 had Covid not struck. The US economy was doing exceptionally well on every count, and the gains percolated right down to the bottom of the pyramid. He had taken a tough stance on China, which gave hope to industrial workers, and American soldiers were no longer dying in wars that the average American had no interest in.
But Covid did strike, and finally Biden won quite simply because he was not Trump. The victory margin was wafer-thin. Just 44,000 votes in the three states of Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College.
But Trump the President was also an exceptionally polarising figure. In a way, his election too was rejected by left-liberals, just as Trumpians rejected the 2020 verdict. The day after he took oath as US President, an estimated four million people clogged the broadest avenues of American cities demanding human rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights and so on, but fundamentally saying that they would not accept him as their President.
American media, too, was hardly neutral. In the four years of the Trump Presidency, media like The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN presented everything that Trump said as a lie, while others like Fox News presented every one of Trump’s lies as an absolute and imperative truth. Of course, both sides claimed that they were right.
It should then not come as a surprise that a survey done by the Reuters Institute in 2021 found that Americans trust media the least—only 29% of them—among the 46 countries covered (India was ranked 27th, at 38%.). The distrust is extremely high among right-wing Americans—75% thought that the coverage of their views was unfair.
The inevitable result has been that citizens have gravitated to social media to get their news and form their views. And here, “confirmation bias”, which the algorithms use to the hilt, comes into play—you trust only the facts that validate your opinions and you connect only with people who share your ideas and prejudices. An echo chamber is born, and everyone inside it shares your worries and also leads you to other chambers where similarly-opinionated people hang out. The cluster of chambers, whatever its leanings, grows to be an ecosystem with airtight boundaries. All criticism is rejected and beliefs grow more monolithic.
It seems almost certain that after the mid-term elections later this year, the Republicans will have a majority in both the Senate and the House. But Biden and the Democratic Party will have only themselves to blame for this. While leaning more left than many Americans are comfortable with, Biden has failed spectacularly on most fronts, from the economy to Covid. If the Republicans control Congress, his Presidency may be terminally hobbled.
But the Republicans, too, will then have to solve a dilemma. Will the party back Trump if he stands for election again in 2024, which, as of now, he clearly intends to? This is as much a moral issue as it is political.
In the various state-level elections since Biden became President, the Democratic Party’s campaign platform seems to have been that every vote for the Republicans is a vote for Trump and surely the voter doesn’t want Trump back? This appeal has not worked as well as the Democrats expected, but no one has been able to truly fathom the reasons—whether the voter wants Trump back, or makes a clear distinction between the Republican Party and Trump, or whether she feels let down by the Biden administration.
In his address to the nation on the first anniversary of the 6 January riots, Biden ripped into Trump, saying that his ego was more important to him than any principles. He may be correct, but right now, given Biden’s underperformance, no one knows which way the American voter will move. And Trump’s shadow continues to darken the political landscape.
Also read: Joe Biden urges America to see the truth of January 6 and understand its place in history
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