For Biden, work starts with fixing home first

The US is a deeply divided country. It is divided more than it was during the Civil War in the 1860s. Its domestic and international relations alternate between two contradictions which often play out during elections.

This is whether to be the land of inspiration on ideals of freedom and virtue or to be the very symbol of manifest evil in the form of slavery and racial atrocities. Its struggle to represent virtue often flounders on the reality of systemic and structural atrocities. The latest is the Donald Trump and Joe Biden (pictured) confrontation that ended up as a referendum on inherent American racism.

Americas acrimonious disunity goes back to the ratification of US Constitution in 1788, with the federalist and anti-federalist debates on the Bill of Rights. It was there in the attempt to steal the 1800 presidency from Thomas Jefferson and in the 1824 contest which gave rise to Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party.

The internal split allowed Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party to sneak into the presidency in 1860, culminating in the Civil War. Greed for power led to the 1876 compromise in which the Republicans sacrificed anti-slavery ideals. And there was bitter contest in 2000 as George W Bush whipped Al Gore in the US Supreme Court. In 2020, Trump wants the court to make similar rulings and ensure his continuity as president. The odds are against him.

Violated norms

Trump was overconfident in his usual ways of ignoring and violating norms of political civility because he hardly had any. He has ability to arouse emotions and innate racism that manifested in the police killings of black people.

Subsequent demonstrations, the ‘Black Lives Matter Movement’, simply played into Trump’s strategy of appearing to represent ‘law and order’ which was euphemism for fixing blacks. This appealed to rural white America that wanted to put blacks in their supposed place and keep the White House white.

In doing so, Trump appeared to have borrowed from Kenya’s 2007 chaotic election playbook on how to manufacture electoral crisis and escape blame. He excelled in shifting and blaming others for his failures. Ignoring danger to American institutions and values, he started casting doubt on the electoral process, claimimg that there is intentional electoral fraud, and that he would not accept official results if they did not favour him.

He accused Iran and China of attempts to turn American voters against their good president. What was worse than before, and unusual in American electoral competition, people started arming themselves, emptied gun shops, and engaged in militia drills. 

The campaign, on both sides, became an emotional matter of do or die. On his part, Biden initially seemingly lacked ‘fire’ and was probably misled into gentlemanly laxity by pollsters who repeatedly predicted his big victory margin. This was partly because Trump appeared to do almost everything wrong. Being obnoxious was a strategy that Trump had effectively used against Hilary Clinton in targeted places. He thought he could repeat it in 2020 but the times were different, and so were the end results.

Two halves

First, Barack Obama seriously got into the fray and emotionalised the campaign. In the process, Obama brought out the worst in Trump while energising Biden’s campaign. This changed the impression of Biden being complacent and lacking fire. He then sounded tough and when, during debate, he told an erratic Trump to ‘shut up man’.

He went out of his way to sound reasonable, to rely on facts and scientific evidence, and to project himself as an empathetic leader that the Americans need, especially during the coronavirus crisis.

The times and environment are different. Biden’s win, in electoral and popular votes, is narrower than expected. The turnout was unprecedentedly high as over 140 million voters, split virtually in two halves, cast ballots.

Although pollsters had predicted a big clear Biden advantage, it took days of disputed counting in which states changed sides for either Trump or Biden.

The US remains a deeply divided country. It has seemingly lost credibility both internally and globally. A major challenge to Biden, therefore, is to restore American credibility, starting within the United States itself.

Prof Munene teaches history and international relations at USIU