After November 8, we would be left without the popular pastime of predicting US Presidential elections. Hillary Clinton seems to be leading in polls. One can agree or disagree with her on a range of issues, but I fail to understand what her opponent is advocating in practicable policy terms in the first place. I don’t fear a Trump victory either as I would expect that after a period of potentially dangerous confusion the Republicans would bring in their policy wonks.
I disagree with many over Hillary’s allegedly poor charisma and saddened to watch the television charades where she engaged in endless parodies just to look more adorable and fun. I personally cared more that she blundered to call the YPG terrorist outfit as “friends”. In the policy void that President Obama left in Western Asia, the US had this ridiculous idea of fighting a terrorist group with the help of another. She should be able to correct such foreign policy misconceptions.
At any rate, the 2016 election, irrespective of who wins, is already a memorable milestone in the US political history. This is not because of the controversies that the two nominees cannot seem to cleanse themselves from. True, there has been enough material to make even the most outlandish political conspiracy dramas appear as simple plots.
The unusual intensity of this one aside, viscerally negative campaigns and character assassinations are not new to democratic process neither in the US nor the rest of the world. It’s a milestone also not because we are living through a watershed period in world affairs. Indeed, we are living through a transformative era and strategic, political and economic policy choices by the US and other major stakeholders in the regional and global theaters will have ramifications for the future of international and human peace and prosperity.
All aside, the elections may well be historic because in a world where 19th-20th century ideologies no longer capture mass imagination and following, we now have a name for a strain of political behaviour, if not thought, which accounts for the erratic perceptions and votes of a large section of societies, particularly in the democratic world.
Trumpism, or should I call Trumpianism to avoid a debate on the previous uses of this term, is not populism, nor anti-globalisation but something above and beyond. It is the one that accounts for European democracy facing the direst challenge of its post-WWII history in the form of rising xenophobic, Islamophobic, all-phobic parties or suicidal anti-EU movements. Or, the nihilistic discourses that step beyond rational policy debates into mere fear-mongering. Or, the global apathy to the Syrian humanitarian disaster in the hands of its leader and his supporters. It is the big confusion that ends up awarding an excellent songwriter a Nobel literature prize in an intellectual panic.
Ultimately, Trumpism vindicates the UN’s and, under Turkish chairmanship, G20’s emphasis on inclusive growth. What Hillary irreverently discounted as the “basket of deplorables” may or may not have deplorable worldviews, but there are far too many people that our day and age has left behind either in educational or intellectual or moral or economic or political terms.
This is the very broad and otherwise irreconcilably diverse body of people everywhere that do not feel to be benefiting from the current ‘mainstream’. Trumpism is to watch a superlatively rich man entertain you in a stand-up show by stoking your fears and woes, attacking all that smacks of the dystopian present, and promising you an unreachable utopian future. Whoever wins, I hope he/she understands the need to establish a legacy that addresses such desperation.
Follow him on Twitter @akcapar
Burak Akcapar, Turkey's ambassador to India, is a professor and author