Quora Answer: What Do Singaporeans Think of the Current Political Situation in the United States?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “What do Singaporeans think of the current political situation in the United States?” 

I look at it with a sense of schadenfreude.  The United States has peddled a sense of exceptionalism ever since the end of World War II, that their system of governance was superior.  The United States is a country built on hypocrisy.  They claim to support democracy, but only when it has suited their foreign policy agenda, toppling democratically elected governments from South America to Africa to Asia.  They claim to be a champion of human rights, but they cannot even guarantee justice for their own minorities.  They claim to be corrupt, but their politicians are for sale in a process they call “lobbying”. 

When a system is so corrupt, when a nation is so divided along class and ethnic lines, when politics is about divide and conquer while the wealthy get obscenely rich; it was inevitable that a person like Donald John Trump would come to power.  The electorate has been kept intentionally ignorant by a deliberate underinvestment in education.  The defence policy sucks up under-educated, disenfranchised youth, and sends them overseas to fight, and sometimes die, in foreign wars to advance empire.  These people come back with little prospects, angry, betrayed, and looking for a villain.  The Christian Right has twisted Christianity to such an extent that if Jesus (a.s.) were around now, he would be branded a socialist libtard.  Donald John Trump is not the problem.  He is the consequence of the problem, a broken system. 

That it took this long for the unwashed masses to be directed by an elected criminal, supported by a morally bankrupt party, against another branch of the government, rub by another version of the same party, is amazing.  Despite the partisan bias, at a deeper level, the centrist Democrats are not very much different from the Republicans.  The United States is run by a Right and a Right of Centre political party. 

Considering the extreme militarisation of police forces in the US, we are not likely to see an immediate full-blown civil war.  Unlike what the Parler crowd claims, we are not going to see a replay of 1861.  What we will likely see is an upsurge of domestic terrorism, driven by white supremacist libertarians.  Many of them have law enforcement and military backgrounds, their beloved veterans.  If the states and the federal government is not seen to clamp down as hard as they have the BLM, we will likely see radicalisation on the Left as well. 

What we are witnessing is a generational shift.  The US is not in danger of falling apart, but it has lost ground in soft power and international clout.  Her allies will wean themselves of her, and forge their own foreign policy, such as the EU deal with China.  American-lead institutions such as the IMF will be weakened, and regional alternatives pushed by groupings such as the SCO will fill in some of those gaps.  We are seeing the first tangible evidence that an empire is in inexorable decline.