The lessons from Trump's rise and the flaws of modern Democracy
- By Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 19, 2016
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump |
I have refrained from and avoided commenting on the U.S. presidential election that has been hogging news cycles for the last six months. Primarily because there are other things to write about, which are more important, and secondly, there are better people to comment. However, it has reached the stage where it is justified to draw a few conclusions from the most unique election cycle that I have covered in my lifetime.
You might ask, how is this important and why now? It is because the rise of Donald Trump has echoed the dark days of the 1930s. A man, with a juvenile knowledge of economics, who wants to spark a global trade war with China and Japan, and who wants to openly commit crimes against humanity in the Middle East is no longer someone to be avoided. More importantly, it is imperative to understand the conditions that led to his rise, so that those conditions can be avoided in other great powers.
To start off with a caveat, Donald Trump can be, for all practical purposes, a man who is carefully conning the unsatisfied percentage of American people. He could also be an actual fascist, but that remains to be seen. What is startling is the amount and number of people who support him. In the 1930s, during the early days of the rise of Nazism in Germany, there was a common disbelief among the Jewish population. Surely, the blonde, German and Christian church-going family, who had been a neighbor for over ten years, wouldn't give in to the toxic rhetoric of a demagogue about Jewish people being the reason for Germany's loss in the first World War. They were also surprised to find out how wrong they were. The disbelief was first in the form of denial, and then reached destruction.
To understand the rise of Trump, one needs to carefully analyze how democracy has changed in the last twenty years. Western liberal democracy, as we know it, started from the concept of direct democracy practiced in the Greek city states. Eventually, after thousands of years of evolution, it turned into a representative parliamentary or presidential democracy as we know it. The reason being, the modern world we live in is far too complex for everyone to understand and opine on.
For example, would we expect a small town farmer from deep North India to know about the benefits of using Thorium as a nuclear fuel, much less have an opinion about it? In an ideal world with proper education, perhaps yes. But in a real world, unfortunately, we cannot. That's why we have elected representatives, even who themselves don't know much, but relies on the knowledge of the officers and assistants and bureaucrats who are there to form policy.
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