As someone who studies failed states, it has been exhausting living next to the American carnival. The incessant braying of the lion-maned, tiger-hued barker; the marquee lights distracting from tawdry set stages; the never-ending parade of hucksters and kewpie dolls; the ever-to-be-disappointed promises of a country returned to greatness. The carnival’s midway has afforded the thrills of rollercoaster rides, a gawdy carousel of distractions, vertiginous zipper rides, and dizzying tilt-a-whirls. The carnival has been a sideshow diverting attention from unpleasant reality, a fun house that over time revealed itself as a haunted house of tilted morality. The carnival also afforded license to a grotesquery of sham artists, fakes, and frauds, as well as a host of carnie cheats, swindlers, pickpockets, and others prepared to prostitute themselves for fame, cash, or advancement. During the Trump administration, the American carnival became a veritable house of mirrors, distorting and magnifying the country’s grim and grimy reality while reflecting little of its inherent goodness.
Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, loudly and persistently claiming voter fraud without any credible evidence, led to a number of attempts to overturn the election tally or to otherwise subvert the course of American democracy. Such efforts culminated in Trump’s inciting a crowd of his unruly supporters to storm the Capitol, the consequences of which played out through an unprecedented second impeachment process and criminal charges against some of those involved in what has popularly been presented as a near death blow to American democracy.
As a political scientist, the hyperbole attached to recent political events in the United States provokes a welter of confused thought. There is a sense of recognition, certainly, in that too often we’ve seen states descend into chaos, usually due to internal factors, but commonly through the involvement of outside actors (including the United States). There is the heightened awareness that statehood and governance are at best tenuous, and that no state – no matter how great or powerful it might be – is immune from the stresses and strains that can expose, exacerbate, or ignite existing fragilities. That the veneer of democracy is often thin should come as no surprise. Nor is the understanding that governance, or at least adequate governance, requires norms of forbearance, mutual respect, tolerance, restraint and civic trust – qualities that seem particularly lacking in the United States in 2021.
The past several months saw the American government veer dangerously close to what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt refer to in their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, as “the guardrails of democracy.” Still, as the Biden administration now strives to return the American ship of state towards a more normal, sane course, one can’t help but note the “calling the kettle black” irony in the US government’s response to Myanmar’s most recent military coup d’etat: “The United States opposes any attempt to alter the outcome of recent elections or impede Myanmar’s democratic transition, and will take action against those responsible if these steps are not reversed.”
With his Make America Great Again myopia, Trump derisively dismissed inferior “shithole countries,” all the while cultivating and indeed luxuriating in political exclusion and division at home, while also at least flirting with narratives of white supremacy. His administration gave lie to America as a “beacon to the world.” America’s better angels, indeed, have been tarnished.
In his inauguration address Joe Biden detailed the scope of Trump’s American carnage: “Anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, and hopelessness.” This catalogue of almost existential challenges is shared with a host of countries we blithely categorize as “failed states.” Many of these bottom-of-the-barrel, “shithole countries,” however, have no history of stable government and lack strong institutions, their fragility thus incalculably magnified. If the United States approached the guardrails of democracy, what hope is there for countries without democratic traditions and facing even greater challenges to their very existence?
The Hill We Climb, National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s poem for President Biden’s inauguration was highly performative. Her rebuke of Donald Trump was absolute: “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation/Rather than share it/Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.” While Gorman’s widely acclaimed (and now, not incidentally, immensely lucrative) recitation was no doubt intended to offer hope or a sense of redemption to America’s badly shattered notion of its vaunted democratic ideals. It remains to be seen, however, if Gorman’s lofty vision, and the Biden administration’s best efforts, will be able to “challenge the actual in the name of the possible.”
This same challenge is faced by other fragile (and not so fragile) states around the world.
Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash
