America, the Confused, Conflicted, and Dangerous
The most pivotal election in America, to elect members to both Houses of the Federal Government, to the Congress and the Senate, and to perhaps end the anomaly of the first near-authoritarian government in its modern history, is upon us. The ‘Mid-Term’ elections this time around will determine whether Donald Trump’s reign of terror (by democratic standards not Stalin’s) will continue, if the Republicans maintain control of the Houses, or if Democrats take majority and bring the Republican and Trump’s complete lock on all three branches of the government to an end.
It all should be pretty straight-forward and simple. Americans vote, and the outcome decides the government. But in America, these days, nothing is quite so simple anymore, because in the White House is a President, Donald Trump, who has shown a predilection towards flaunting the rules by which democracies work. He is quite aggressively telling the American people that if he feels that the Republicans don’t win, he will call it a rigged and dishonest election, and deny it, as he has done before in spite of all proof to the contrary.
This is the confused America. The America which, in spite of insisting it is the world’s leading democracy, 250 years after its formation can’t decide how much of a democracy it really is.
Almost 40% of Americans, today, the Republicans, believe in the authoritarianism no-rules based-style of Donald Trump. And, they are willing to subvert the rules of fair and free elections to ‘win at all costs’.
America is also a distorted country, with a populace that is imbued with morally twisted values that preach all manner of noble human aspirations to the world, while themselves practicing practically none of them, which then makes America conflicted and dangerous.
For instance, take their assertions over the past decades that they are a democratic country. Upon a closer examination hardly, because in no other democracy, is democracy (one person - one vote, majority wins), more undermined than in America.
Its Constitution has a democracy-busting system of ‘Electoral College’ which allows certain number of votes from certain States to override the majority popular votes. On top of that, one of the only two main political parties in America, the Republican Party, is fond of excising voters that may not vote for them, by redrawing district boundaries to shut out minority-communities’ votes and particularly Black communities’ votes by gerrymandering, to give then an advantage in the overall voting results.
In Texas, even now, the ruling incumbents, the Republicans are reportedly ‘purging’ millions of voters off the lists under one excuse or the other, while the Republican President in Washington is either trying to outright bribe voters with offers of cash, or is encouraging ‘any manner of cheating’, to win.
America, as a leading democratic country, is about as accurate a title as it being known as a champion of fairness, equality and justice. America has loudly and persistently proclaimed itself to be the bastion of ‘equality and justice for all’, for decades. In reality, there has never been an equal and just America.
In the very beginning of its formation, the European settlers never, ever, considered the indigenous people, already there for thousands of years before them, as equals. And, they certainly did not treat them with any semblance of justice. America’s history is rife with endless examples of unequal and unjust treatment of those with lesser status and lesser means. That reality certainly persists till today.
Additionally, America has been historically a very racist country that had to fight a civil-war to end slavery. That civil-war ended slavery, officially at least, but rampant racism and persecution still persists to this day, particularly for its Black/African Americans, and its Latin American communities. And, under Trump all manner of immigrants, minorities, refugees and visitors have been targeted and detained. And notions of ‘White Supremacy’ once again reign supreme amongst a significant part of its ‘White’ population. Officially appointed masked thugs under the banner of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) have terrorized anyone they suspect of being even remotely undesirable in the guise of ‘deporting illegal aliens’ from the streets of America; most of who are of a skin colour other than white.
Even white protestors who were born Americans, have been shot dead on the street, in objecting to ICE’s heavy-handed tactics. The real human diversity amongst its multi-racial citizenry is deeply resented by the current Trump administration, which is keen to reflect the wishes and deeply hostile sentiments of its voting base which is primarily White, racist, generally poorly-informed, and very entitled. At his election rallies, most recently, Trump has mused out loud why America cannot have immigration from beautiful Nordic-White countries, rather than having people from ‘shit-hole’ (third-world) countries.
These overtly racist attacks on non-White Americans, by their President, have further divided and fractured an already fracturing America, making it politically toxic and nationally weaker. On top of all this internal angst, Trump has, at the behest of Israel and Netanyahu, gone to war, and ignited the entire Middle East. In spite of decades of proof of loving and living off of war, to feed its military-industrial- complex, there is America’s outrageous claim to be a peace-loving nation.
Literally, nothing can be further from the truth, as its past 400+ years of uninterrupted war-waging history shows. Even if one was to pick up its history from the end of the Second World War, to bring it in to the modern times, no country has waged more war, undertaken more clandestine military operations, and precipitated in more foreign regime changes, than America. So the image that America projects to the world, and the image that most Americans have of their country, is in stark contrast to the reality of the country, and its citizen’s daily lives.
These contradictions, that the American people live daily, seem to be so ingrained in them that they seem genuinely unaware of them. And when the contradictions are pointed out to them, Americans generally react very defensively, and dismissively.
This currently contradiction-filled, defensive America, is dangerous, as it lives out its fantasy as the world’s ‘good guy’ on the global stage, while doing all the bad things - like disrupting and damaging global trade, breaking post WWII world-order, abusing and harassing allies, praising and assisting dictatorships, invading other countries, killing innocent civilians without remorse, backing countries like Israel unconditionally, which is demonstrably guilty of perpetrating and continuing the genocide of the Palestinian people, all the while berating its allies for not indulging in its misadventures.
The global list of sins that America indulges in, while propagandizing ‘it’s all for the good of others’ is quite impressive – like ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’; like liberating Afghanistan from global terrorism; like holding the scourge of Communism back in Korea, and Vietnam; like liberating the people of Venezuela, and Iran, from their evil dictatorial regimes, all the while salivating over their oil riches; and the list goes on - like wanting to annex Canada, Greenland and Panama, while backstabbing Ukraine and consistently damaging NATO.
What was scary though was that not only American people believed their own delusions, but America had convinced the rest of the world of its beliefs, even though reality and proof had said otherwise.
For decades after the Second World War, most countries of the world were content and happy to let America take the role of global leadership of ‘liberal democracies’, as the great former colonial powers declined in economic and geo-political influence and power, and tried to recover from the devastation of mass destruction of the Second World War.
In that capacity as the global leader, America set up the post-World War II world-order. That order is now abandoned by America and is being actively undermined by it.
All of which makes these impending Mid-Term elections all the more significant.
If the Democrats sweep the Congress and Senate, which at this point in time seems possible, then America’s current geo-political trajectory may not change fully, as Donald Trump will still be President, but it will be curtailed significantly as Democrat controlled Congress and Senate will curb and even perhaps curtail President Trump’s more damaging impulses.
But if anything less than full control of the two Houses is achieved by the Democrats, then the breakneck agenda towards full authoritarianism may be slowed but will not be entirely stopped, or reversed at this time, and the destruction of the older version of a flawed but quasi-democratic America will continue, as will the destruction of the post-World War II global-order as America retreats behind walls of tariffs and Christian-Fundamentalist Nationalism.
But this election also opens up the possibility of a new darker chapter in America’s history.
It seems very likely, the President and the Republicans, together, will do their utmost to block the Democrats from taking power if they win this election. Apart from denying the results on the basis of the elections being ‘rigged’, fraudulent, or in some other way tampered with, without any proof, as has been with their claims over the past years of Trump’s political career, they could refuse to seat the newly elected Democrat Congressmen and Senators, as apparently the duty of accepting and seating new members to the Houses lies with the incumbent officials, which of course are Republicans. And/or place other bureaucratic hurdles in the way to delay the installation of the new governing bodies so that the entire government of the country becomes dysfunctional for an extended period of time.
Donald Trump and his sycophantic Republican lawmakers and officials are not above the damaging of the operations of the country to thwart the Democrats from taking power and making Trump a ‘lame-duck President’.
There is also the possibility of a quasi-civil-war in America if the voters who voted the Trump/Republican rule to end, feel they are being denied their right and vote to select the government of the country. If that happens, these anti-Trump/Republican voters may decide not to take it lying down, but to bring their active protests onto the streets. The odds of violence rise significantly if one side has been convinced that the other won because of cheating, because Trump convinced his followers of that quite falsely, and the other side feels equally strongly that they are being denied their perfectly legitimately-cast vote for a change. An actual civil-war is unlikely, but considering America’s love of violence to settle disputes, or to settle anything for that matter, it is not at all an impossibility.
A fractured, quarreling, dysfunctional, ungoverned America is dangerous for the world.
For one thing a desperate Trump, always with an eye to the ever-closing-in possibilities of accountability from the incoming Democrats, for all his crimes and misdemeanors in Office, and the possibility of the infamous Epstein Files being fully released, is quite capable of doing desperate things to distract from the smooth transition of power, as he did with the January 6th attack on the Capitol, when he legitimately lost the election to Democrat Joe Biden for the Presidency.
Donald Trump, under normal times is a dangerous President, as his two years in Office have already shown, a desperate Trump is capable of almost anything which would be unthinkable to others in his place, but he and his handlers are not above doing the unthinkable, regardless of how damaging. Trump could dangerously escalate the Iran war, there have been reports of consideration of using ‘tactical nuclear weapons’ by Israel and the USA to finally destroy Iran, which could further unleash the global dogs-of-war, crash the global economies, and bring about the horror of the dreaded World War III. He will most likely deny the elections as being legitimate and create chaos in America for an indefinite period of time. His easily roused-to-violence base could again cause an insurrection and the prelude to a civil-war, and all this chaos could push the fragile global trade and financial markets to collapse. Making Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, was akin to giving a spoilt, entitled, not a particularly bright or sensible child, the world’s most powerful gun, fully loaded.
In the next few days we will find out if everything is going to be ok, or, we all collectively need to duck under our desks as during the Cold-War exercises in schools in preparation for nuclear strikes. Hopefully, our fears turn out to be over-blown, and Trump TACOs (Trump always chickens out). Hopefully…
America the Confused Conflicted and Dangerous - Oct 31, 2026
Comments