Whoever wins the US Presidential election, civil strife is sure to follow

We must expect the worst, for Donald Trump is a man who knows nothing of what the Founding Fathers stood for

In a few days’ time we will know who is to be the next president of the United States. Or maybe not. The plausible outcomes supposedly include a Donald Trump landslide, a Kamala Harris win in the popular vote but with an electoral college majority for Trump, and an outright dead heat. But none of the possible results are expected to produce contentment and conciliation amongst the population. Indeed, there are serious suggestions that something like civil war could follow the announcement of what any irreconcilable army of supporters sees as an unacceptable ending.
It is notable that the Trump campaign is ramping up its confident predictions that he will win by a landslide presumably in order to lay the ground for an immediate accusation of foul play if he loses. If he is beaten by Kamala Harris narrowly or even (as seems unlikely) decisively, you can bet that there will be orchestrated civic unrest that will put the 6th of January siege of the Capitol into the shade, as well as a deluge of litigious disputes on every possible point of contention.
In short, it is almost impossible now to imagine any result that could bring general confidence in a just settlement to the American democratic process. But even if Trump wins convincingly both the popular vote and an electoral college majority, I can confidently predict that he will not instantly become a benign, conciliatory figure determined to heal the terrible divisions within the nation’s political life.
On the contrary, he will do what he has explicitly promised to do: seek out his enemies and tormentors and wreak terrible vengeance. He will effectively weaponise the presidency for personal revenge. His return to the White House might avoid the immediate catastrophe of armed insurrection but it will prolong the bitterness of America’s internal battle indefinitely. So whether he wins or loses, he will continue to subvert the social contract on which American democracy was constructed.
This is not just a tragedy for the country that was the incarnation of one of the greatest dreams that human reason has devised – a nation created from nothing that could offer freedom and justice to diverse peoples in return for their acceptance of its rules. Much more, it is a catastrophe for that large portion of the world which had placed a bet on the chances of government of the people, by the people and for the people winning out over the ancient forces of totalitarianism.
It is easy for blase Europeans to miss the point of all this: what I have just described – the idea of America as a moral mission offering a vision of what human social organisation could be at its most enlightened – can seem naively optimistic or absurdly vainglorious to peoples whose conception of politics has endured generations of corruption and betrayal, where the idea of nationhood itself has led directly to dictatorship and catastrophic war.
Even the rituals of American civic life – pledging allegiance to the flag and referring in reverential tones to the Constitution – appear ridiculous, or sinister, to populations which have solemnly vowed that they would never again worship nationhood and its symbols. Indeed, one of the driving motivations of the European Union was precisely to subsume those dangerously divisive loyalties into a supra-national body which would, by design, not be elected: benign oligarchy was much safer than relying on the judgment of people who had once elected Adolf Hitler.
If much of the Old World has repudiated the ideas of nationhood as sacred and patriotism as a virtue, how can they possibly appreciate just how bizarre and unnatural the Trump phenomenon is in America’s own terms? Of course, Trump himself seems to be playing precisely those cards – national pride and love of country. But he seems to know nothing – quite literally nothing – about what those principles meant to the Founders who drafted the sacred documents which state so clearly its existential purpose. The United States was created as a conscious act to prove that it was possible for men (sorry, but in the eighteenth century it had to be “men”) of differing origins and beliefs to live together in harmony and tolerance, and to choose their leaders by orderly election and legal agreement.
This was unique in world history because it was a deliberate invention. Unlike other eighteenth century revolutionary republics, such as France, the United States did not emerge from an existing historic culture. It was a brand new experimental thing. The peoples who came to settle in it were leaving their roots – with all their familiar comforts and limitations – behind them, to sign up for something completely untested. The only thing that bound them together was the idea of America and what it represented: equality, opportunity and the hope of a shared humanity. That is why Americans are taught to see their political institutions as sacred and the documents which designed them as holy texts.
So how on earth is it possible for a man like Trump, who demeans these ideals in every absurd performance and travesties the values to which this new land was dedicated, to be seen as a saviour of the nation’s pride?
I often hear British commentators imposing their characteristic ironic detachment on this situation: Trump is a clown at best, a malignant narcissist at worst but what of it? Politics is just a game and occasionally the Joker wins.
No, you don’t understand – in America it is not a game. Democracy is a sanctified rite. Politicians themselves may be ridiculed but the process of electing your government is an act of devotion not to be mocked, because it delivered you – or your forebears – from persecution or tyranny in return for an acceptance of this common purpose. That is what made the storming of the Capitol on January 6th and Trump’s attempted coup so devastatingly shocking: an event from which no American politician should ever have recovered.
And yet he did. He has come roaring back, still crying out for vengeance. And nothing – not even shamelessly hateful remarks by his supporters, or Elon Musk turning the election into a game show – seems to matter.