Must-Read: Philip Stephens: America Can Survive Trump. Not so the West: "History can veer off course... in 1914... the first age of globalisation was consumed in the flames of the Great War... [in] the 1930s when economic hardship, protectionism and nationalism nurtured the rise of fascism...
...Donald Trump’s election victory heralds another of these dangerous dislocations. It may well be that America is resilient and self-sufficient enough to survive.... The founding fathers of the republic foresaw the dangers of populist passions. James Madison set the first objective of the constitution as to “break and control the violence of faction”.... The constitution’s intricate checks and balances are there to block the path to such tyranny.... Madison had Mr Trump in mind when he wrote about the need to safeguard the union from domestic insurrection. The president-elect has said he wants to muzzle the media, torture prisoners, lock out Muslims, expel millions of migrants, build a wall against Mexico and cosy up to to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Lauded by white supremacists, Mr Trump won the prize by disinterring the demons of race....
But America’s tragedy--and how else can one describe the passage to the White House of someone whose politics are so boastfully rooted in prejudice and hate--is also the west’s tragedy. The liberal international order has rested not simply on economic vitality and military strength. It has been anchored by a set of values whose appeal is universal. Freedom, the rule of law, human dignity, tolerance, pluralist institutions: these are all now scorned by the president-elect of the world’s most powerful nation. Liberal democracy itself is thus delegitimised. Whatever the course of US politics, the damage inflicted on the alliance of nations that has shaped the world since 1945 is irreparable. Few of the Madisonian checks and balances apply to the conduct of diplomacy and foreign policy....
The US-designed global system has been unravelling for some time. It will not survive the withdrawal of American leadership.... “America First” promotes belligerent isolationism.... Mr Trump is content to preside over the dissolution the US alliance system, leaving Europe vulnerable to Mr Putin’s revanchism and East Asia to the ambitions of an assertive China. Japan and South Korea, he has suggested, may want to build their own nuclear weapons. We can be sure that, if he keeps a promise to abrogate the international nuclear deal with Iran, then Tehran will soon enough build its own bomb....
Mr Trump goes further by repudiating the basic, organising idea of the west: the notion that the world’s richest democracies can oversee a fair and inclusive rules-based system to underwrite global peace and security. Co-operative internationalism is to be replaced by competitive nationalism. So the dangers will now come thick and fast....
America will spurn eventually the lethal concoction of nativism and protectionism that won Mr Trump this election. But the West has lost its guardian, and democracy its champion.
Sarah Churchwell: It Will Take Time to Mend America’s Broken Promise: "In 1920, America had put its faith in an isolationist, businessman president called Warren Harding, whose slogan was 'America First'...
...This meant then what it means now: anti-immigrant nativism and isolationism. It mirrored the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.... The so-called economic boom of the 1920s did not extend its benefits much beyond the urban middle class. Harding’s successors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, were also businessmen. Their administrations created the conditions for the 1929 crash and the depression; very dark days ensued. But America survived....
There will be much to say in the coming weeks about accountability. I agree with those who insist that the media is gravely culpable for treating Mr Trump as if he were legitimate, and Hillary Clinton as if she were illegitimate. That was the Republican strategy, and it worked: Mrs Clinton must be guilty of something, even if they could never make up their mind what it was. Emails would do in a pinch. What was illegitimate, to them, was the idea of a woman--this woman--taking power. The roles that the FBI and Putin’s Russia appeared to have played in this election will also need to be addressed. But too many Americans decided that the Republican party represented their interests; too many fell again for the cult of business that has led us astray before.
Many are saying that the great democratic experiment of America--even of the west--has come crashing to an end. It certainly feels that way. It feels like the death knell for justice, inclusion, tolerance and peace. It will certainly work to undermine these values. And so we must all put our shoulders to their foundations, and help shore them up; they are bigger than we are, but they won’t stand without us. History tells us we have seen such challenges before....
So first we must grow up.... America must teach itself... that tolerance, progress, compassion, equality, security, even the common bloody decency that has been trampled in the gutter during this filthy election campaign, are not trophies we win.... A greater good... is a constant process, and it comes only from a willingness of the heart. It seems we are doomed to keep learning that the hard way.
