Vandita Mishra writes: A sobering moment in America

It will have to pause and take a deep breath and reflect on its steep slide from its founding imagination of itself as a “shining city on a hill”. As former president Ronald Reagan, who built on the phrase to convey the idea of American exceptionalism, described it: “… a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept… teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace… And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here”. Over the years, Democratic presidents have deployed similarly expansive imagery.

A city set on a hill cannot hide from itself, or from others. The world will watch, therefore, as America asks itself searching questions in Saturday’s aftermath: About what unbridled political polarisation and which unchecked lurch to extremism combined with an entrenched and ubiquitous gun culture and powerful new technologies of radicalisation in the social media age to produce this sobering moment.

Former US President Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa. (AP)

Of course, America has a long history of violence — it took birth in a violent revolution, and acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, which has seen political assassinations and acts of terror. But the divisiveness and contentiousness that now permeates its political discourse, and shapes darkening spectres of violence in it, calls for a special and urgent conversation.

Dots will also need to be connected, perhaps, to the January 6 insurrection, when pro-Trump mobs stormed the US Capitol and proclaimed that America, or at least a significant section of it, is angry, and that it does not trust anymore in elections and does not commit to the rules of the game to resolve problems and reconcile differences. Studies show that this is a time of heightened political support for violence in the US. There is growing distrust in the establishment and a more hospitable terrain for misinformation and conspiracy theories.

But the world’s other democracies can ill afford to only sit back and watch the mighty America squirm.

The sharpening political polarisation and the recasting of politics as a bloodsport, the view of the electoral contest as a do or die battle in which the winner takes all after a fight to the finish, is hurting democracy at large, and it is taking a mounting toll in other democratic systems as well. The middle ground is shrinking and civility and respect for the political opponent is thinning perilously — not just in America.

In India, the verdict in the just-concluded general election has come as a potentially wise and welcome break from the all-or-nothing scenarios of the past — it carries a nudge to both sides to create and maintain new conversations. The people withheld a majority from the ruling BJP even as they gave the Opposition a leg-up but not a full mandate it could call its own.

It’s early days yet, and it is still unclear whether India’s leaders are willing or able to rise to the occasion. But the dangers of politics becoming a war of impermeable and self-enclosed narratives, and of these political hostilities setting the stage for breakdown and violence, are writ large. You only need to look at America.

Till next week,

Vandita