A convicted felon/political persecutee; an avowed misogynist/anti-woke warrior; a liar/anti-mainstream media visionary; a fraudster/victim of deep state conspiracy; a moral and financial bankrupt/brave beacon for truth; and an insurrectionist/courageous patriot is about to become the 47th president of the United States of America.
It doesn’t seem as if there are enough pejoratives to properly describe the sheer scale of Donald Trump’s perfidy or enough adjectives to encompass his awesomeness – depending on your viewpoint. But whether anyone likes it or not, more than half the American public voted to return Trump to the White House, making him the first Republican president in two decades to win the popular vote as well as the US Electoral College.
There have been column centimetres aplenty – and emotions spilling over on air – ever since Tuesday, 5 November as pundits and commentators try to work out why Trump staged the greatest comeback in American history. There will be plenty more opining (and whining) as the days tick down to his inauguration in January.
Perhaps the question everyone should be asking is not why it happened, but how it happened. How did so many people – especially the very high-powered team of experts that Trump’s rival Kamala Harris had – not see this coming and act accordingly?
The great Norman Adami, of South African Breweries fame, had a wonderful mantra: “Make reality your friend.”
It’s easy to say, but it’s incredibly tough to do. Far too many of us who claim to be making reality our friend are just making our own reality our friend. What we should be doing is making the unthinkable reality our friend, because how else can we make sense of the world if we are locked in so hard to our own thinking?
Things are changing so rapidly and so profoundly, yet so many of us are trying to keep believing in what was by denying what is, clinging on for dear life to what we once held true. Instead, we have to unlearn and relearn what the world is actually like.
This is a process that is awkward, uncomfortable and downright painful. It is horrible, because it shatters our senses, but in the process it also allows us to realise that what is happening now is not new. There has always been a cyclical polarity in society, transitioning – lurching sometimes – between democracy and autocracy.
Higher stakes
This time the stakes seem higher. They are. We are more afraid than we have been, we are under massive pressure on all fronts, from the rise of populism to the existential threat to the planet through global warming and extreme climate change.
In the process, we are becoming like the proverbial rats in lab traps, on the verge of turning on each other, exponentially clinging tighter to our identities and beliefs the more scared and isolated we feel.
But what if we could go beyond that fear? We would become unstoppable.
It is easy to demonise those who we don’t agree with or those whose prejudices do not mirror ours, but the scope and scale of Trump’s election victory is too large to ascribe it to the tropes that some liberal commentators have tried. Every group, right or left, God-fearing or atheist, has its share of deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s infamous phrase – but not everyone is deplorable.
We can see similar patterns in our own polity in this country. People do not necessarily vote out of ethnicity. Trump’s victory proves that, as does Jacob Zuma’s unprecedented success with his MK party. Instead of othering them or wishing them away, or – even worse – sticking our heads in the sand and pretending they don’t exist, we need to understand why they do espouse the views that they do.
It is only then that we can make an informed decision to either work with them and get them to work with us to achieve our mutual objectives as a country and as a planet, or to discover how best to work against them democratically to neutralise them without precipitating a civil war – or a world war – in the process.
The situation both here and in the US is that great parts of our society have become a zero-sum game with no room in the middle; you are either on one side or the other. That is increasingly unsustainable, and dangerously so, in a world in which all of us are literally intimately interconnected, such that a cough in China could lead to a public health contagion across the world.
The support for leaders like Trump and the rise of populist leaders across Europe and Asia in particular shows that the people on the ground are looking not just for answers to their problems, but to hear people articulate their needs.
The fact that the world seems locked into interminable and increasingly brutal wars in multiple different theatres from Africa to the Middle East and Europe, is all the proof we need that the institutions we once believed could bring about peace and maintain it are failing.
We see the same being said about Western financial institutions that visit incredible hardships upon sovereign nations and their impoverished people, ostensibly to help them, but in reality to balance their own books.
Read more: US election analysis and live updates
The same can be said of a raft of other international bodies ostensibly working for a greater good. The reality is that even if they have not actually failed, a growing number of people believe they have – and because of that they no longer trust them to act impartially, even if they could.
As we find ourselves increasingly adrift from these moorings, we head into the uncharted waters of a world of multipolarity, with the rise of new blocs to threaten the hegemony of the US.
These inherent tensions have to be addressed, because without global forums and properly mandated and resourced regulatory bodies there will be no guardrail, and life, to paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, will become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Hell, said Hobbes, was truth seen too late.
In the Second Coming, written by WB Yeats after the end of World War 1 and the Spanish Influenza, the allusion of anarchy is the falconer no longer able to control the falcon as its spins further and further from its gyre. Meanwhile, Yeats’s infamous rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.
Just more than a century later the poem seems eerily prescient, whether it’s the tragedy playing out in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine or the underreported genocide in Sudan. The question is whether Trump is the beast, the falcon or the falconer?
The answer depends on whose reality you have made your friend. The solution lies in how you choose to respond. DM