November 10, 2020

A Silver Lining in the Election Debacle

By Srdja Trifkovic

4-5 minutes

Image Credit:

[Image from Flickr-Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped and resized]

In the eyes of much of the world the United States is now reduced to the status of a banana republic.

The sordid spectacle of the past week—with the Democratic Party machine, the mainstream media, and social media barons forming a joint criminal enterprise to steal the presidential election—is reminiscent of similar ploys in the post-Communist world, only cruder. Not even Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko's election officials would produce boxes in the middle of the night with 100,000-plusvotes for their boss and exactly zero for the opposition. Unlike several wards in Milwaukee and Detroit, not even the regime in Pyongyang tallies more votes for the Beloved Leader Kim Jong Un than there are North Koreans on the roll.

Biden is now the media-appointed "winner." Trump will not concede but sue. Violence may break out, this time on both sides of the national abyss. Regardless of the final outcome, the legitimacy of the winner will have been fatally eroded, at home and abroad. If Biden prevails, even his power-holding sympathizers in Paris, Berlin, Brussels, and Ottawa will know the score. There will be no knowing smiles and furtive winks in their war rooms or on their media channels, but they will know.

There is a silver lining, though. America's attempt to dominate the world, its hubristic ravings of "We are America, we are the indispensable nation" will be a thing of the past. Similar countless droning about the "benevolent global hegemony" or even "the leader of the international community" will no longer be taken seriously.

The U.S. Empire was born when the Spanish-American War began with the explosion of the Maine in 1898. It finally died in November 2020. The rationale behind the insane quest for global hegemony always rested on lies and self-serving pretenses. Any attempt to reinvent the project after this year's election debacle is doomed to fail. From now on, "America, the Light to the World" will sound as convincing as Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's claim that Wunderwaffen (revolutionary superweapons) would change the course of the war, or Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1957 pledge to overtake the U.S.

Even if this blue coup succeeds, its protagonists will find it hard to continue pretending that U.S. foreign policy is devoted to promoting freedom, democracy, and human rights. It doesn't really confront tyranny and evil, nor does it make the world a better place in the image of the exceptional nation. As European news commentators—themselves familiar with color-coded revolutions—are noting, it is ironic that Americans have less difficulty in installing a president in foreign countries than legitimately electing one in their own.

The U.S. Empire has always been a flawed project, inimical to the American interest, to the spirit of the Old Republic, and to the natural global order based on the balance-of-power system. Nevertheless, it provided the foundation for international discourse.

The phenomenon of Western civilizational weakness—seen in its demographic crisis and ongoing immigrant invasion, which are both geopolitical and cultural threats of the highest order—requires a new global paradigm. Undoubtedly the world needs order. Not an order based on U.S. dominance, but an order based on a multinational balance-of-power system.

It is possible that America's deepening domestic crisis, which is about to culminate, makes the emergence of such order more probable. If so, then at least there is a hint of silver lining on the dark horizon.