The Divided States of America

YOMI MAKANJUOLA, PhD

Yomi Makanjuola earned a doctorate in Materials Engineering and Design and worked primarily as an Associate Partner at Accenture in Nigeria. Currently, he is an author and freelance consultant in the UK. He is the author of the book, “Nigeria Like A Rolling Stone”. “His most recent book titled “iProverbs: Wisdom Rebooted” is available on the Amazon platform at https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D31W2P2W. He can be reached at 9yoma9@gmail.com

Two years shy of the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, the US will hold a general election this November whose outcome is on a knife-edge. But why should it matter to non-Americans? For starters, because whoever wins will be recognised as the leader of the so-called free world. Also, the new president becomes the commander-in-chief of a multimodal military superpower. 

Although the American population is barely 4% of the global headcount, its economy remains the most consequential and innovative. However, in terms of longevity, America is the new kid on the block relative to two geopolitical rivals, Russia and China. Put delicately, the former still has a lot to learn over the long arc of history. But regardless of ideological foes’ sabre-rattling, the US has been the world’s indispensable sheriff since the end of WWII, and continues to undergird the rules-based global order.

Oddly enough, despite its vaunted meritocratic credentials, the US has never elected a woman to its highest office. Subliminally, it could be inferred that America is still a patriarchal society contending with radical progressive forces. Incidentally, Barack Obama, the 44th president, became in 2008 the first non-white US leader. But is there more to this narrative than meets the eye?

A bird’s eye view marked Hillary Clinton as the first American female to capture the presidential nomination of a major political party. Although she won the popular vote, she lost the election to Donald Trump through the quirk of the US Electoral College system. Without rehashing the 2016 race, apparently it emerged that segments of the electorate – both male and female, and mostly in non-urban areas – could not bring themselves to vote for a woman.

Psychologically, whisper it, is it possible that some US voters still cannot visualise a woman’s finger hovering over America’s nuclear button? Today, that sounds preposterous, misogynistic, and politically-incorrect. Indeed, nuclear-armed democracies as culturally diverse as Israel, India and Great Britain have in the past elected female leaders like Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher, respectively. Therefore, ascribing America’s intransigence to machismo or national security misgivings may be missing the point.

This backdrop ennobles the tough decision of age-impaired President Joe Biden to vacate the 2024 Democratic Party ticket in favour of his vice president, Kamala Harris. In the event, no sooner had the US digested the impact of Obama’s two-term presidency and Hillary Clinton’s debacle, than the country faces a choice between a German-Scottish-American septuagenarian (original family name: Drumpf) and yet another woman, who happens to be a centre-left Jamaican-Indian-American. Comical that Kamala cannot ‘Duck’ the pun that her father, Donald Jasper Harris, has the same first name and initials as former President Donald John Drumpf! Disparagingly, his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance, called women such as Harris “childless cat ladies,” in the slipstream of xenophobic, sexist, and quacking duck-whistle insults.

Objectively, Harris faces an uphill battle whatever the polls may indicate. To outsiders, the mystery is how someone as crass and divisive as Trump could be the Republican Party nominee. Here is a profane Vietnam-era draft dodger who disdains war veterans and is openly contemptuous of democratic norms. Obliquely, he has signalled to his hard-core supporters that they may not need to vote again after the next election. Remarkably, moderate Republican leaders, browbeaten but hungry for power, have refused to condemn Trump’s volatility and putrid rhetoric.

Long renowned as a nation of immigrants, the land of the free, and a beacon for the rule of law, it would appear that such values endured as long as white Americans felt comfortable in their own skin. With or without mass immigration, demographic trends foreshadow the US becoming a minority white republic within decades. Obviously unhinged, when Trump barked that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,” channelling the insidious ‘great replacement theory,’ he was mobilising his conspiracy-theorist and nativist base.

To top it all, a craven US Supreme Court recently expanded executive powers in its presidential immunity decision. This partisan and febrile atmosphere has emboldened Trump’s right-wing enablers to unveil a reactionary blueprint for his “second term” (captioned Project 2025), aimed at reversing the ‘economic carnage’ and socially-permissive hellscape attributed to the Democrats. Characteristically if disingenuously, Trump disavowed the 900-page document, in order to deflect public criticism.

Analysts despair that the US is facing an existential threat from within — predicated on vicious culture wars and intense polarisation — as distinct from climate change hazard or the peril of nuclear Armageddon. As racial absolutists tie themselves up in knots in a melting pot, carving out a schizophrenic apartheid system would seem geographically and politically infeasible, since large coastal states like California and New York will certainly baulk at the disintegration or balkanisation of their country.

Seriously, are extremists truly prepared to sacrifice America’s representative democracy on the altar of winning political power at all costs? In immature democracies, suspension of constitutional rule is usually followed by bare-knuckle or undisguised tyranny. But who can fathom the jeopardy of illiberal overhang if the US can no longer hold free and fair elections? If Trump’s scorched-earth strategy succeeds, then all bets are off. Were he to lose and not concede for the second time, could that tip American democracy over the edge? Literally, this portrays a rattled and divided nation flailing between the mighty Rockies and two gigantic oceans.

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