Even if Harris triumphs, America’s election is a tragedy |
Outside of the United States, one often hears that Donald Trump’s continuing electoral viability — despite his increasing appeal to bigotry and his obvious disdain for the rule of law and norms of democratic fair play — reveals that there’s something uniquely broken in American society.
This a view that is both too jaundiced and too coloured by American exceptionalism. In every major democracy, there is a rump of voters with illiberal or even autocratic political preferences, and often a majority who downplay or excuse the democratic misdeeds of a leader whom they feel is looking out for their interests. In Asia, the electoral successes of Indonesia’s Joko Widodo (and his successor, Prabowo Subianto), the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte and India’s Narendra Modi are all testimony to this dynamic.
It is no doubt sad to see this kind of authoritarian populism entrenched within one of the major parties in the richest and most powerful country in the world, whether Trump wins or loses. The sanguine outlook of many Americans on a politician labelled a fascist by his own former chief of staff is disturbing. But it is not unique when viewed within the global landscape of illiberal politics — and serves as a reminder that the threats to democracy in the West emanate primarily from within, not from Beijing or Moscow.
The United States was distinctively unlucky among rich world democracies to have some features of its political system — a primary system with no runoff provisions, in which a populist outsider can outmanoeuvre a divided pro-establishment majority, and the electoral college system that can generate freak victories for the loser by popular-vote — that suited Trump’s strategies all too well. Analyses of what Trump ‘says about America’ need to take account of how the grievance and polarisation that put Trump on the political map interact with these institutional factors.
This isn’t to downplay the damage that lies in store if Trump wins on 5 November. The case for (relative) calm about Trump has always been that either he didn’t really mean the outlandish promises he made, or that he wouldn’t ever be able to enact them because of his own incompetence and laziness, or the obstructionism of more mainstream conservative technocrats around him.
That line is undermined by the fact that Trump actually did deliver on his core economic promises last time around — a trade war with China, huge regressive tax cuts and efforts to politicise the US regulatory state and judiciary. Embittered by his 2020 loss and the possibility of legal consequences for his efforts to overturn it, and alienated from the conventional Republican national security and economic policy figures who featured in his first term, Trump’s incompetence and criminality are likely to be offered up undiluted in a second.
That’s why Trump’s thought bubbles on the economy, from blanket tariffs to mass deportations to undermining the independence of the Federal Reserve, need to be taken seriously as a potential economic blueprint — one that would worsen inflation, smother growth and do immense damage to the American economy.
All those with the interests of US democracy at heart, and with an interest in keeping the restoration of US internationalism as a realistic prospect, will have their fingers crossed for a victory — and as decisive as possible — for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
But as Peter Drysdale and Liam Gammon write in this week’s lead article, an honest accounting of the stakes involved in the election for Asia in the short to medium term, particularly on economics, will conclude that there is less in this election than meets the eye.
‘Even if the United States manages to avoid the calamity — for its democratic institutions, social cohesion and international standing — of a second Trump term’, they say, it ‘remains the stark reality’ that ‘the 2016 US presidential election fundamentally changed how the economic policy strategists in East Asia and the Pacific must think about the US role in the global trade regime’, in ways that would guide the policy of a Harris administration, too.
The ‘worker-centric’ trade policy now in operation under Joe Biden is simply a progressive rebranding of America First. Once upon a time ‘worker-centric’ international economic diplomacy would have merely meant an emphasis on convergence in labour standards across developed and developing countries within the framework of multilateral trade negotiations, as one did see in the Obama administration’s approach to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
That now all appears like a golden era for US leadership on trade and on economic engagement with the Asia Pacific. The putative centricity of workers in today’s ‘worker-centred’ trade policy doesn’t imply using access to US markets as a bargaining chip for pushing labour-friendly ‘behind-the-border’ reforms overseas within a framework of multilateral liberalisation, a la the Obama years. It means instead the ‘new Washington consensus’ heralded by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan — marked by tariffs, industrial policy and freewheeling use of the national security get-out-of-jail-free card to protect ‘strategic’ sectors.
That already imposes costs on the Asia-Pacific economy in the aggregate, and it will impose high costs on the United States over the longer term, despite the short-term boost to some economies in our region from ‘friend-shoring’ and the boost to US jobs and private sector investment credited to the ‘re-shoring’ of industries being given a leg up by Biden-era industrial policy and trade protection.
The EAF Editorial Board is located in the Crawford School of Public Policy, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University.