The real question is not why Trump, it is why democracy?

My son and my hairdresser on the US elections

Dear Global Jigsaw,

I returned home last night after a Zumba class at the gym to find my 16-year-old son atizzy. U.S. election analysis of some kind as background hum emanating from his phone, he peppered me with questions about my predictions for the outcome. My policy on punditry is always to be honest, which translates into the answer most hated by my boys: “I don’t know.”

My adolescent was having none of it, so I was forced to articulate my rather inarticulate feelings on the matter: I think it will be Trump, although I hope it is Harris, although I am not impressed by her or the Democratic Party in general, but Trump is just awful, and it’s best not to speculate.

My boy dismissed my word salad with a pithy, “It’s going to be Trump,” a conclusion that seemed to amuse, more than horrify him. He stayed up late into the night listening to the seats as they were called one by one, taking pleasure in the sport of it. This I find understandable. In India, the excitement of watching election results as they unfold has a hoary history. The kind that other countries I’ve lived in, like Spain and Japan, reserve for football and sumo.

Donald Trump attends a campaign rally ion Oct. 30. Pic Credit: Chip Somodevilla

But I am bemused by how invested the child is in the United States, a country that he has no “real” connection to. Half Indian and half Spanish, my son has studied in British schools in Indonesia, Japan and Spain. His closest friends are Dutch, Chinese and Spanish. But it is the United States that has emerged as his imaginary homeland. It is US politics that he invests in emotionally. He’s all about LeBron and Kendrick and says things like “I’m good,” when I ask him if he’d like a second helping of rajma.

Back in the dark ages when I was a schoolgirl, I remember thinking that kids who went to international schools, regardless of their parental culture, came out as Americans. Decades later, even given the current decadence of the American polity, this still seems to be the case. For all the multipolarism of geo-strategy, American soft power is still unipolar-strong.

My son listens to American music, watches American TV series and listens to American youtubers. And because his news is sourced from the latter, while I read the main stream media, this morning has made it abundantly clear that it is his ear that is closer to the ground.

For weeks, my friends have been assuring me that Harris was going to turn the election around in favour of “democracy.” But my boy who seems to consider Trump more like an amusing idiot than a danger to all good people in the world, knew not just how many people actively support Trump, but also how many actively do not support the Democrats. And the preferences of people is the foundation of democracy.

Yesterday, was also the first time I talked politics with my hairdresser, Mika,  a gay Ukranian man. It is only Trump who will end the war in Ukraine, he told me, while snipping at my locks. We need to stop young men dying, and if that means making a deal with Russia, that’s fine.

But what about democracy, I spluttered.  Mika humphed. What demeocracy? I cannot go home to visit my family today, because if I do they won’t let me leave again. You call that democratic?

There is a nationwide ban prohibiting men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine and conscription squads have been sending those who don’t want to fight into hiding .

I had not known this, until the hairdresser told me, adding to the feeling that I know very little in general.

So, this morning as it looks like the orange, misogynistic, narcissistic, felon, aka Trump is set to become the President of the United States, I have decided to take a page out Indian commentator Yogendra Yadav’s advice on how to “Watch the US elections like an outsider. ” With philosophical detachment.

He writes: “US elections are like a wedding in the big landlord’s family in our village. It makes for a spectacle, designed to keep the entire village busy for some time. As affairs of powerful families do, it has some fallouts for everyone, including us.But as village elders know, we must not forget that this is not a wedding in our family. A vicarious partisanship — pro-Trump or pro-Harris — is not just misplaced, it is undignified….

The US is not even our neighbour. Our sense of proximity to them is largely imagined. So is our exaggerated anxiety about what a Donald Trump or Harris administration can mean for us. That Kamala Harris shares her first name with my mother cannot make me forget that what matters most to this Kamala in relating to my country is the cold logic of geopolitics and GDP.”

Instead of getting our knickers in a twist about the fact that a person like the orange one can become - correction, be elected - as President of the world’s most powerful country, what we should really be getting philosophical about, is the idea of democracy itself.

Yadav leaves a set of questions that need to be examined rather than just taken as dogma:

What made us believe that the system of representative governance is going to give us good governance? Why do we think that popular rule would be free of popular prejudices and pettiness? How can we assume  that a system of political equality is compatible with a system of economic and social inequality?

Let me know your thoughts on any of this rather disjointed ramble.

And please do become a paid subscriber, if possible. Especially today. I need tons of coffee, and its only the price of a cuppa per month.

Until soon,

Pallavi