America in “democratic transition”
Dr. Neven Cvetićanin, President of the Forum for Strategic Studies (FORST)
We live in a rare moment in history when the history itself gets an unusual acceleration and when what was thought impossible hundreds of years ago is actually underway, like the intrusion of demonstrators into the American Congress. However, only those who are uninformed and lack specific set of skills in their knowledge of history are surprised by this, since this is neither the first nor the most violent way of invading the American Congress, which experienced its “baptism of fire” in 1814 when it was under construction and was set on fire by the Britons as part of the so-called “War of 1812” (1812-1815). Since then, the Capitol has been spared with such drastic events, but it has always been far from being a peaceful politics theatre with sleepy and blazed visitors. It has always been exactly the opposite – lively and combative. In the previous two centuries, delegates arriving in Congress were not always calm and wise, but there were hot and fearless heads who were better off with a rifle than a book, such as Davey Crockett, a famous hunter and wildlife explorer who did not hesitate to risk his own life where others did not dare to do the same, remaining remembered to this day as an unadulterated hero of the nation.
For all those who are surprised by what is currently happening in America it is safe to say that they do not really know American history, since the country of Davy Crockett and Wyatt Earp very often came to their political “dismissals” with shootings and gunfire. It is actually a “methodology” of solving political problems that is as cruel as it is effective, since in America problems are not pushed under the carpet, but are performed in the sunlight, which results in the cruel struggle of different interests and social groups that are their bearers. This was also the case when the first American immigrants fought against the British Crown for independence, as well as when various social groups within a freshly independent nation fought for their interests. This is also the case today when the “two Americas” brought up the question of the essence of American identity, which, due to demographic and economic trends, has evolved, and obviously needs to be redefined. This time, as in all previous times, America will redefine itself in a dynamic process of clash of different social groups, and ahead of us is the process of redefining the nation, through which it has successfully passed many times in the past, and not the process of its apocalyptic collapse, as many people believe. After all, with so much capital, weapons, resources and their current and future ambitious servants, it is not possible for them to fail so easily.
So, in the USA, the so-called procedural, deliberative democracy is currently in crisis, but the latest events are actually a return to the original “factory settings”, since the latest cruel events with the incursion into Congress are a reflection of a specific and crude democratic spirit in which each individual interest is allowed to be expressed. Finally, the protesters were not prevented from entering the Congress by tanks, so they easily penetrated inside the Capitol, among other things because each of the two conflicting parties saw their interest in that operation. Trump in “flexing muscles”, Democrats in getting Trump to “flex his muscles” and then dragging him through a series of accusations for crashing the constitution, which is what is happening right now. But behind it all is a struggle of different interests, which are allowed, in one way or another, to express themselves, because in a more rigid system, protesters would be taken off the trains in Tennessee, not allowing them to arrive in Washington at all. Behind the latest developments in America that seem apocalyptic at first glance, there is actually a sophisticated game of different interests, and everyone has a role to play in that game. Finally, the extent to which every interest in the United States is allowed to be expressed in the end is evidenced by the fact that anti-establishment Donald Trump could have been president for 4 years, which again shows the aforementioned harsh but effective methodology, which allows different interests to fight. The loser may bear drastic consequences, but at least he had his chance. Quite the opposite of those “empires” that push problems under the rug, and then when unresolved problems accumulate, they collapse completely in a great revolution, as happened during and after the First World War for some traditional European “empires”. Unlike such pompous empires that live pompously and perish pompously, the revolution in America is permanent, and always a little accompanied by shooting and tracing, so that always after a series of these small revolutions, a real balance of power between different interests is established.
In essence, after all the fierce struggles, a group comes out as the strongest one will likely to be able to absorb various interests. It is very likely that the leader of that group will not be Biden or Trump who will be worn out in that fight, and who, given their age, are not even “projected” to be a long-term solution for America, but a kind of transitional solutions to the new leadership. Hundreds of congressmen, senators, businessmen, military and security officials and other elite members who are in their best age are in the process to be drawn as part of a future leadership, but before that they need to show their skills in this war of different interests, to which it will not be strange, as in any war, neither changing sides, nor distancing oneself from former allies, nor seeking new ones, which is already happening within the Republican Party. There are such struggles within the factions of the Chinese Communist Party, but in accordance with Chinese culture, which take place quietly and behind the scenes, while in America they take place also behind the scenes, but much more often frontally, with shootings and tracks, and it has been so since the founding of the federation and all the struggles it has gone through in the previous two and a half centuries. All of this will change both the Republican and Democratic parties, and it has already changed them because Democrats already have a more conservative president than Obama (Biden came from a centrist, conservative, so-called “right wing” of Democrats), while Republicans have yet to redefine party identity from opposition benches, as they are currently divided into a strongly pro-Trump (Senator Ted Cruz and the like), anti-Trump (Senator Mitt Romney and the like) and central pragmatic wing, maneuvering from situation to situation (Vice President Mike Pence and until recently Republican Majority Leader in the Senate Mitch McConnell and the like).
The question of all questions is Trump’s immediate fate after Biden takes office. It is obvious that Trump has a desire to run again in the presidential elections in 2024, as is the desire of the Democrats to prevent him from doing so, which is why at the moment Democrats are about to start the process of Trump’s impeachment in Congress, just nine days before his term expires. The goal of this process, if it will be initiated at all, is not to really remove Trump from the position of president a few days before the end of his term, which is very difficult to do in legal procedure due to the short deadline, but the goal of the process is to prevent him from running again for president, as one of the conclusions of this unusual post-festum “impeachment” may be denying for him the right to run for public office again. The big unknown is also the possibility that Trump will make a decision in the last days of his mandate to be immune hisself to all future criminal prosecutions (self-pardon act), about which the opinions of American lawyers are divided. But whatever are the lawyers’ opinions on this, Trump’s fate will not be decided in the field of law, but in the field of politics, and we should wait for the epilogue of factional struggles within the Republican Party. Trump will be less accessible in the future to any lawsuits if he remains the leader of the Republicans or if, in the event of losing that position, he forms his own party that would take a significant number of officials and voters from the Republicans and continue to successfully address parts of America who are dissatisfied with the traditional political establishment.
After all, Trump’s personal destiny is not so important, because he is not the cause, but the consequence of events in world and American politics in the past decade – a decade after the great global financial crisis, that obviously shook the outlines of the world and America as we knew it. The causes of the crisis in the United States, no matter how much they are currently manifesting as a par excellence political crisis, are actually economic and demographic. Economically, because jobs and basic industry have gone elsewhere, and the economic package is noticeably smaller compared to the 20th-century golden Welfare State Era, when America’s share of the world’s gross domestic product was significant higher (a few decades ago, US GDP was significantly over a 1/3 of the world’s, and today it barely reaches a 1/5). Demographically, because demographic trends are changing the structure of the population and projections are such that if the current trends continue at this pace, “whites” will become a minority in the United States in 2042, which again raises the question of the identity of a nation composed of different ethnic groups and origins and often different cultural patterns.
But no matter how much the “whites” were the dominant demographic group in America until now, United States never really rested on the homogeneous principle of any demographic group, not even those most numerous, because from its very beginnings it was more diverse than classic (European) ethnic nations with same origin.
We still don’t know who will definitely and in the long run win in this latest confrontation between the “two Americas”, although the progressives currently won the presidental election over the conservatives, but the process will continue after the inauguration of new President Joe Biden on January the 20th. America has always relied on the strength of its capital and the ability of that capital to grow and organize itself into sections of an efficient social system. Regardless of the fact that capital has started to flow from America to countries with cheaper labour, it is still the fuel of this federation and there is no doubt that it will, after the previously described process of cruel and efficient selection, as always before, find its optimal political leadership and some (completely new) people capable of uniting and pacifying the currently divided nation. Until then, all the existing actors of the current crisis in the United States will be “held on a leash”, and four years of the Biden administration’s mandate will pass in that “leash-holding”.
In this internal positioning, as has often been the case in American history, some distant country could be directly targeted, playing the role of the “ideal enemy”, causing the “rally around the flag” syndrome. Since there is no question that it could be Russia or China, because a superpower never attacks a superpower without a reason of extreme necessity, that is difficult to assume that will occur soon (as a result, these strategic competitors will probably, despite the official rhetoric of the Biden administration, go to some sort of unofficial “global agreement”, rather than confrontation), the target will be found in some smaller and weaker country, but strong enough to be an attractive target for flexing muscles and should be regarded as a “worthy” opponent. The first candidate for such a thing during the Biden administration is North Korea, which is simply the “ideal candidate” for such a thing for several reasons: it is on the “battlefield” that the United States is most interested in, since it is closest to its main strategic competitor – China, the nuclear deal with Iran is a legacy of the Obama administration that Biden will continue to try to renew, and finally, North Korea, with its nuclear program, causes as well suspicious among other superpowers that are not ready jet to allow the “little ones” to swing nuclear weapons, which remains the privilege of the great.
Finally, whether it will “burst” in North Korea or elsewhere, the four years of Biden’s administration in the foreign policy can be described as a return to the concept of business as usual. What will highlight this period are certainly the events on the domestic level in the USA, where all sorts of happenings are possible in the cruel and efficient fight of different interests, which we have described in this article.
(published in the Serbian weekly newspapers NIN, January 2021)