Republican soul searching and preparation for 2022

Following the 2020 Presidential election, the United States feels more divided and polarised than ever before. But, the American public need to be politically mature if they want to restore their democracy, writes Donald Forbes. 

When congress ratifies Joe Biden as president-elect on January 6, the 2020 election will be over. But some Trump hold-outs including General Michael Flynn are alarming even Republicans by speculating about military intervention to try to reverse the result. It's far-fetched, except that nothing can be discounted as crazy in a crazy year.

Depending on the outcome of the two outstanding senate races in Georgia, Biden will have nominal control of both houses of congress or the Republicans will retain a senate majority that is narrow but enough to slow the Democrats' agenda.

Biden will either have the power to do much as he likes or he will be constrained by the need to do deals with the senate Republicans in order to pass legislation or get his government and judicial nominees confirmed.

This is the outcome of an election distorted by the unforeseeable Covid pandemic and strong suspicions that the result was rigged to ensure Donald Trump's loss to a puppet who will govern through unaccountable handlers.

Had all things been as equal as they were last January, Trump would probably have won comfortable re-election. But the law of flux in human affairs means things never remain equal. The pandemic and the economic and social upheaval it caused changed everything.

In a country angrily polarised by the destructive behaviour throughout the Trump presidency of the Democrat nomenklatura embedded in governance, millions of Americans feel cheated both by the electoral system and the denial of redress by the courts.

The theoretical conditions exist of a classic Clauswitzean impasse; unless one side backs down, the logical result of a perceived failure of democratic politics is war. The possibility of civil war should be unthinkable in our day but seemingly is not.

The civil war Americans fought in the mid-19th century, when the population was only 31 million, cost 600,000 lives. Its wounds never fully healed. The southern ex-Confederacy remains to this day under the watchfully coercive hand of northern Washington.

To contemplate civil war and rip apart the bonds of common citizenship as some are openly doing is to risk bringing it about. History shows that a spark is enough to cause a conflagration. One shot is sometimes all it takes and America is awash with guns and extremists.

The red and blue populations are mixed together across the country and in the military and the police whose impartiality is not a given. Two former army officers said publicly during the campaign that the military should intervene if Trump refused to leave office. They were slapped down but their words sowed doubt about the surety of civilian control.

The scale of the injustice that has enraged Trump's millions is on a par with what is at stake. Biden threatens a return to everything they hated about Barack Obama's arrogant and often divisive government. The anti-democratic message they took from Trump's loss is that everyman America cannot defeat establishment America.

Yet violence is not the answer as the last civil war, in which all Americans lost, showed. Democracy in the sense of a transparent process yielding a result that the losers could accept, suffered a defeat. But there is no better alternative.

The United States is still a democracy, no matter how corrupt, and the future of us all in the West is to some extent dependent on it surmounting this crisis peacefully. Like Maradona's hand of God, there are events in human affairs, both trivial and earthshaking, which are immutable. Biden winning this election in the way he did is one of them and all the Navarro reports in the world will not change that reality.

It's speculation on my part but I suspect the Republican leadership and Trump himself are not unhappy that he lost. The first because he embarrassed them for all his success and because they gained as much as there was to be gained from his White House. Trump for many of the same reasons and because a second term is always harder. A re-elected president is a lame duck within two years.

As it is, he leaves office refusing to concede because he claims he won and also because while some of his achievements can be unravelled by Biden, others like his historic Middle East triumph will flourish under his name.

In that sense, we've all been tricked to some extent during the election dispute by the ulterior motives of politicians' self-serving calculations.

The real question is not Trump's future but the political maturity of ordinary American people and the energy they are willing to commit to restore health to the democracy which their elites have so cynically abused.

Will they let the Democrats and the Left esconced in the media, the universities and corporate America pursue their campaign to turn the country into a fascistic oligarchy? Or will they see that in the priceless possession of one man, one vote they already have the weapon they need to fight back?

There's another rendezvous with this question in two years time. That's not so long if the will is there.