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| Donald Trump early this morning in his conciliatory victory speech |
History has many examples where countries and peoples have departed from a people's established compact. Sometimes through revolutions that seemed to free a country or its people from shackles that kept them down. Sometimes the disruption is reactionary denouncing a consensus in an attempt of reestablishing privileges in a futile fight against the tides of progress, liberty and égalité.
The populist movements in many western countries and the fundamentalism in some eastern ones is of the latter ilk. No matter how polite a victory speech. A victory based on division, derision lies and an assumption that going back makes anything great again is filled with the poison from which it springs.
A new consensus may emerge but it will be awfully hard to achieve by a movement that frequently says the opposite from what it means and uses covert and overt racism to frighten the masses. Sure, the populist movements in much of the western world are fueled by very real failures. But the analysis for the causes of these failures is faulty. Responsible is not of "a corrupt system in Washington", these are elected representatives after all, but a system that has replaced value for profit alone, in short by capitalism gone wild. There are, indeed, too many groups of people left out and denied to thrive, in America and elsewhere. But those failures can't be fixed by doubling down on the very faults such as tax breaks for the rich. Walls, exclusion and nationalism aren't even what an enlightened capitalism wants. The markets today will show that.
History has many examples where the downtrodden and forgotten have been deceived by forked tongues. The discovery of the fraud usually comes too late. The British have sensed buyers remorse after Brexit and droves of Germans had to flee their country in the years before 1933 because phony nationalism, a Ponzi scheme of economic policies combined with an anti-intellectual cultural backlash made life intolerable before physical threat made it unsafe.
The real promise of freeing the untapped potential of the many that are left out lies in the possibilities of the future not in the restrictions of the past.
It is knowledge and technology that has made the world a global community not bad trade deals. It is progress that has removed the farmers from plowing their fields, miners from the coal shafts, the auto workers from mindless assembly work and steel workers from blast furnaces. Progress that allows to produce more with less blood, less sweat and fewer tears. It is a bad organizational structure that doesn't share those achievements in a sufficient way, not trade.
History is full of reactionary retractions where the path to more liberty, more justice and diversity in the process of global inclusion has frightened those who lose privilege or are adverse to change. Fear is a bad advisor. Only curiosity, discovery and the certainty and conviction that light is not only around the corner but also in every person can really liberate a society.
Much of what has been achieved in this great country is in jeopardy. Most of all a consensus on what it is that makes it great.
The next few weeks and months will show where this uncharted journey will take us. If the path follows what has been laid out in the campaign as the program, losers will far outnumber winners and only a miracle can help us and the world. Short of that the checks and balances that have prevented the US throughout its history from descending into barbarism or fascism are needed more then ever. Great responsibility will rest in the hands of moderate Republicans.
Americas cities will soldier on, even more left to their own devices than before but with the new task of providing safe harbor for those expelled from the large swaths of red America.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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