By Michael Donen
Every political system has its own special way of failing. In our case, we have elections every five years, the same party gets elected every time, and then we spend five years wondering what to do about corruption.
In Venezuela’s case, the people vote, the CIA dislikes the result, a puppet is put in, he holds elections, and the people vote as before.
For superpowers it is different. The failures are almost identical.
In 1982, the Soviet Union replaced Brezhnev, who died on the job, with the geriatric Andropov, who died in office 14 months later.
He, in turn, was replaced by Chernenko, described by the historian Gaddis as “an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not”. Chernenko died months later.
The Soviet system was not a democracy – the decision of who became leader occurred through opaque corrupt machines, with the private loyalties of many of those making the decision being of the utmost importance.
In every respect, America echoes the dying days of the USSR.
And if polls are to be believed, a senile, racist, corrupt, cynical man will, in all likelihood, beat Donald Trump and become the US’s next president. His name is Joe Biden.
From voting against “bussing” (the process by which schools were desegregated in the US) to working with Bill Clinton to push through the 1994 Justice Bill that incarcerated millions of black Americans with mandatory minimum sentences, to any amount of tax cuts for the rich, to pushing through the legislation that bailed out banks and left Americans poorer than ever in 2008, every anti egalitarian, bad piece of legislation in decades seems to have the fingerprints of the senator from Delaware (America’s tax haven) somewhere upon it.
Polls suggest Biden does not excite voters (though he clears the low bar of being preferred to Trump). Voters have never liked Biden, and in any normal democratic system, he would not be a serious presidential candidate. Indeed, he has run for president four times, barely making a splash in the first three.
He is only a candidate now thanks to a backroom intervention by former president Barack Obama, who put his thumb on the scales by encouraging all other Democratic candidates to drop out in order to ensure that Biden would beat the socialist Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary.
Most major media have also circled the wagons around Biden, labelling many open questions about corrupt dealings in Ukraine – frequently involving his son – “disinformation” and refusing to cover them altogether.
The argument has even been explicitly advanced on the MSNBC station that even if the allegations are true, they are still disinformation, a Stalinist proposition if ever there was one.
The only outlier in this pact of silence, the far-right Fox News, also deserves no credit. It simply hates the Democrats. Fox not only lacks any journalistic interest in the truth, but would struggle to recognise truth were their paths to cross.
In the unlikely event that Biden does not win, it will not be because the voters reject him, but because of corruption within the American system.
The most likely way for Trump to win is through the corrupt courts. Trump has illegitimately gained a majority on the Supreme Court.
In the event of disputes about ballots – which are inevitable in a Covid19 election characterised by mass postal voting, performed through a defunded postal system – the Supreme Court will decide what ballots will be counted, and which will not.
Another possible, but very unlikely, way Trump might win would be for Biden to get millions more votes than him, but for them to be located in the wrong places, and for America’s counter-democratic electoral college to thus award Trump victory, as occurred in his victory over Hilary Clinton.
If this all sounds depressing, opaque, and labyrinthine, it is.
This is what superpowers look like when they fail.
* Donen SC is a legal practitioner and listed counsel of the International Criminal Court