If Donald Trump Wins, It’ll Be a New Age of Darkness — Jonathan Freedland, the Guardian
It’s not Americans who are worried about Donald Trump winning the presidential election. There are many in the UK who fear the worst, as well. They remember what happened when George W. Bush persuaded former PM Tony Blair to join in the Iraq war.
Many, especially in the US, will have a ready response: what’s it got to do with you? To which the answer is: plenty. The experience of the last photo-finish election – Bush v Gore in 2000 – taught many non-Americans a lesson we could not forget. Americans decide, but their decision affects the entire world. The supreme court’s installation of George W Bush as president had a profound and global impact. Just over a year later, Bush was agitating to invade Iraq, a choice whose consequences we live with still. (In Britain the focus is always on Tony Blair, as it was again this week when John Chilcot faced MPs. But that war would never have happened without Bush.)
So a President Trump will change lives far beyond the US. An American leader who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, who believes terror suspects should be tortured and their family members killed, who believes that Saudi Arabia should have nuclear weapons, who is fascinated by nukes’ power of “devastation” and who has asked repeatedly why the US doesn’t use them; a man who says, “I love war”; a man who drools in admiration for Vladimir Putin and whose disregard for Nato, and refusal to promise to defend a member state if attacked, would all but invite Moscow to invade one of the Baltic states – such a man would plunge all of us into a dark future. That we are not living in the US will not protect us.
Trump has enabled the worst elements of American society to surface. His strong man rhetoric, willingness to ignore Constitutional protections of civil rights, and his followers’ fascistic tendencies threaten the structure of American democracy, says The Guardian’s writer/
It sounds extreme, it sounds far-fetched. But that’s because we assume that stability, even the civilised order, are somehow the natural way of things, almost impossible to upend. But that’s not how it is. Civilisation is frail. The balances and restraints that hold us in check are delicate: they took many centuries to construct but would take only moments to smash. They rely on goodwill, trust and co-operation more than we realise. Take those things away, and darkness beckons.
In Britain, we are not smugly distant from this. Our own democratic system rests on respect for the rule of law and the judges who enforce it. Yet, even here a national newspaper can brand three senior judges “enemies of the people”, citing the fact that one of them is “openly gay” as evidence that their legal judgment was rigged and illegitimate.
Let hope, for everyone’s sakes around the world, Trump is soundly defeated on Tuesday.