Jagdish Rattanani
The world’s most-watched election is today, November 3, with Joe Biden in the lead but pollsters are still unsure if he will make it to the White House. The prospects of Donald Trump’s victory are bleak but not many are ruling out a repeat of the kind we saw four years back, when Hillary Clinton, the then favourite according to most pollsters, lost the Electoral College even though she got more votes overall than Trump.
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Latest reports have it that in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state and the place he was raised; Biden had a teeny five-point lead. Pennsylvania voted Trump in the last election by a difference of 0.72%, the narrowest seen in 172 years! A small set of people, therefore, will eventually decide who becomes President. Twists and turns such as these bring to mind the words of historian Will Durant, who wrote, “History is largely the battle of a few minorities, the winner of which is then lauded as the victor by the majority.”
In sum, this is not an election where the outcome is as clear as it is in the minds of many we might think of as “right-thinking individuals” who worry that Trump is unfit for any office, let alone the office known by the acronym of POTUS.
That is only a partisan endorsement of a candidate based on local priorities but one cannot deny that there is a lot else that’s cuckoo about America today. The entire election drama is fascinating in that it provides some insight into the working (or the unravelling) of democracy in a nation that is acknowledged as the only super power of the globe today. Wild ideas have gained currency, fringe has gone mainstream, decency is at a discount and reasonableness is discarded as unreasonable.
Consider the conspiracy theory that goes by the name QAnon, which has found surprising support and gone from being a fringe movement to some force in the election. Trump has refused to condemn the far right movement, responding to a question by almost playing along, “If I can help save the world from problems, I’m willing to do that.” One report said at least 19 House Republican candidates who have supported QAnon are on the ballot. The QAnon “theory” holds that America is run by a parallel State that works with cannibalistic elites and Satan-worshipping paedophiles, and President Trump is the only one who can stop them. In the conspiracy are linked of course Biden, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, liberal Hollywood stars, and business magnets – almost everyone who questions Trump and supports the Democrats. The story line carries juicy and wild details that can trap the uninformed but the wilder it gets, the faster it appears to spread.
This is the price to be paid when almost an entire generation of citizens has grown on a diet of modern-day entertainment-laced debate that ignores the substance and over emphasises the form. What is one to expect when presidential outcomes can be decided based on the sound bite and the headline, or the appearance of a candidate, or based on debates that are like an elaborate attention-grabbing drama? As candidates speak in a much-hyped event called The Presidential debates, television keeps up the charade with ridiculous minute-by-minute tracking of moods, swings and the so-called pulse of the “undecided”.
In the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, the author Neil Postman writes: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk…” The warning is apt, for America, and equally for India.
The writer is a journalist and a faculty member at SPJIMR. The Billion Press.
