One thing is clear: America remains bitterly divided

An extraordinary election, still too close to call or to concede, has left America and the world in a state of political uncertainty.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden owe it to their supporters to allow the postal vote counting process to continue in those battleground states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – that will determine the electoral college vote.

The President, with typical boorishness, has suggested that Democrats are trying to steal the election. But, like Biden, he owes it to his nation to avoid taking steps that will undercut the presidential election’s eventual legitimacy.

It’s likely to be days before the final result is determined. However, one thing is clear: America, no matter who wins, is bitterly divided and uncertain as to how it should proceed.

So toxic is the polarisation that one would need to go back to the late 1960s – race riots, counterculture, Vietnam War protests – to find any meaningful analogy in recent history.

It is extraordinary Trump has performed as well as he has in this election race. Consider all the factors that weighed heavily against his re-election bid: a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans, a virus-induced economic downturn, a racial crisis sparked by the killing of George Floyd in May, and, in the first presidential debate, a depressing performance that horrified the world.

Hyper-partisanship has worsened during the past four years, but Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of America’s political crisis.

Add to this the fact that Trump’s approval rating never exceeded 47 per cent throughout his presidency, and it is no wonder the sharemarkets had priced in a comfortable Joe Biden victory.

And yet Trump has confounded the pollsters and so-called experts (including this writer), who predicted a clean Democratic victory.

Moreover, even if he loses, the conditions that gave rise to his populist surge four years ago have not dissipated. As a result, it would be naïve to think that normal programming of civil discourse will resume in Washington.

Sharp divisions

The US is in a crisis caused by forces that may have been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, but preceded it. Wage stagnation, rising inequality, socioeconomic dislocation caused by technological change and exacerbated by the 2008-09 financial crisis – all this had sharpened divisions between ordinary Americans and economic elites well before Trump arrived on the political scene in 2015.

So did the toxic polarisation that grips Washington. In 2013, Robert Gates, former defence secretary to presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, warned that the greatest national security threat to the US was “the two square miles that encompass the Capitol Building and the White House”.

That hyper-partisanship has worsened during the past four years, but Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of America’s political crisis.

Conventional wisdom slams the America First agenda. From imposing import tariffs to pulling the US out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump is held responsible for unravelling the rules-based liberal international order.

However, the rot set in well before the former reality television star championed his nationalist populism.

With the end of the Cold War three decades ago, both Republicans and Democrats believed that the US should adopt a foreign policy of global leadership. The results were disastrous.

After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the US spent blood and treasure on fighting misbegotten wars in the Middle East where it had no vital interests. Under Bill Clinton, Bush and Obama, Washington led efforts to expand the NATO alliance eastwards, which just upset Russia’s strategic sensibilities and helped create a new cold war with Moscow.

Meanwhile, America’s belief that democracy is an export commodity is no longer credible, if it ever was.

All these conditions and decisions existed before Trump. And they helped him in 2015-16 to tap into widespread anxieties among a war-weary American people. It is nonsense to suggest that, should Trump lose power, bipartisan comity – or a new era of US-led global leadership – will return.

Whoever becomes president will, in one sense, have a qualified mandate. Almost exactly half the country will have said no to what the other half embraced. That makes it all the more important for both sides to pay even more deference than usual to the process. The coming days of postal vote counts are crucial.

But the bigger, more disturbing issue remains: How will it be possible for Trump or Biden to govern the US when it is more divided along ideological and partisan lines than it has been since the Civil War?