Almost half a year to go

In a sane universe, the all too evident shortcomings of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, let alone Joe Biden, would make it impossible for one of them to become what their compatriots plausibly say is the “most powerful” person on earth but in the one we are stuck with it would appear that, for the foreseeable future, humanity’s fate will be left in the hands of whoever happens to be thrown up by the US political process.   

Just what it will produce is impossible to say. Things are happening fast. A month ago, the big news was that Biden, the “leader of the free world” was an elderly gent prone to babble nonsense; although his mental and physical state had been obvious for years, his handlers and their friends in the truth-telling media had managed to make people overlook the distressing facts. A couple of weeks later, a gunman came within millimetres of killing Trump - a “convicted felon”, as his foes delight in reminding us -, the man who had preceded Biden in the planet’s top job and seemed likely to get it back.  While “the Donald” is still very much in the running, he could be thwarted by Kamala: if experts in these matters are to be taken seriously, the millennials of Generation Z like her so much that social media have been inundated by allusions to the coconut trees, brats and chartreuse-tinted green backgrounds she is somehow associated with.

Though many Democrats fear that the current vice-president could prove to be as unelectable as she looked in 2020 when she failed to win a single vote in the party primaries, they are evidently reluctant to run the risk of seeing their convention, to be staged next month in Chicago, turn into a repeat of the one they held there in 1968 when frenzied mobs battled it out on the streets of that still extraordinarily violent city. Despite her dismal showing in the primaries, Kamala got to where she is as what disgruntled critics call “a diversity hire”; like Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University who had to step down when it became clear that she was not just a mediocre academic but also a serial plagiarist, the lady benefitted from her sex, the colour of her skin and Biden’s keen awareness that it would be in his interest to be accompanied by a political featherweight who would find it hard to plot against him.

To judge by what is going on, the quality of leadership in democratic countries has gone downhill almost everywhere in recent years, a phenomenon that can be attributed to the tendency of politicians to behave like members of an exclusive club and defend its corporatist interests.  In Argentina, the understandable feeling that the “political caste” had long since stopped caring about what happened to the rest of the population was behind the sudden rise of Javier Milei. In the United States, Trump continues to profit from similar sentiments, as do other rebels against what until recently was the middle-of-the-road consensus in much of Europe.  As for the United Kingdom, a scandalously warped electoral system which lets a party win two-thirds of the seats in parliament with about one third of the votes cast has enabled her to maintain a semblance of political stability. Just how long this will last is anyone’s guess.

It could be argued that, given the current state of Western civilization, it is entirely appropriate to have someone like Biden, Trump or Kamala at the helm. Symptoms of decline are ubiquitous. In North America and Europe, large numbers of young people, who take it for granted that they are the best and the brightest, have been taught to despise everything done by previous generations and as a result go on iconoclastic rampages. Such collective self-denigration is not unprecedented, though in the Byzantine Empire and Mediaeval Europe iconoclastic outbreaks were inspired by religious fanaticism and not by an apparent desire to tear down almost everything, from statues to ways of thinking, that could be associated with the past.

One very worrisome symptom of decline is the steep fall in the birth rate which in much of the Western Hemisphere, including Argentina, Europe, most of Asia and North Africa is now well below the level needed for societies to reproduce themselves. While there are some people who say this is a good thing because they believe that if there are fewer humans about, wild life will have it better, others recognise that living standards will be hit very hard when there are more pensioners than the workers who will be expected to provide for them. Will robots, guided by Artificial Intelligence, replace the unborn?  For a time, the Japanese assumed they could, but they, along with the South Koreans, are beginning to feel that something should be done to prevent their country from continuing its slide towards oblivion.

The collapse of the birth rate is contributing to geopolitical unrest. It is surely not a coincidence that China, Russia and Iran, the three autocracies whose behaviour gives Western leaders the jitters, have all seen their birth rates drop well below replacement levels. They are impatient because they know that unless they take full advantage of their present strength, and the lack of self-confidence characterising the Western nations, they will have no chance of reaching any of their objectives.   

Biden insists he will cling to his job until the term allotted to him by an electorate unfamiliar with his already unfortunate mental condition comes to an end on January 20. This means that for six months the US presidency, and with it the leadership of the Western world, could be held by a man who is in no shape to be mayor of a small town.

If Old Joe is forced to call it quits before then, Kamala would take over. She herself summed up her grasp of foreign policy when she told journalists that Ukraine is a small country in Europe and Russia a much larger one. For enemies of the West, who already feel encouraged by the disastrous NATO pull-out from Afghanistan and Biden’s shilly-shallying over what arms Ukrainians should be given and what they should be allowed to do with them, the temptation to take advantage of the absence of a proper government in Washington or, at least, to put the resolve of whoever is in charge to the test, could well prove irresistible, so it would not be at all surprising if something extremely unpleasant, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, happened in the next few months.   

--TIMES