Asian Angle | Trump vs Clinton: the spectacle of America’s one-party election

“How many political parties do you think America has?” droned the college senior one autumn afternoon at a campus canteen in Calcutta. A week into college, a speech on class struggle is the last thing you want to hear in your downtime. But somehow, that question has remained lodged in my memory ever since, probably because it was the only time I mustered a response, if only to give my stubbly senior’s monologue the appearance of a conversation as a mark of respect. Or probably because it keeps coming back, every time I introspect the idea of democracy.

“Well, two main ones, of course.”

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“Wrong. Tell me how the Republicans are different from the Democrats,” the Communist Party talent scout delivered the clincher with a flourish, perfected after years of practising leftist mumbo jumbo on unsuspecting college freshmen.

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Wherever the shaggy communist tormentor from my misspent youth is today, I am sure he is watching the US presidential elections with unreserved glee. Now he doesn’t even have to belabour his theory of fundamentally indistinguishable political opposites keeping up the appearance of choice in democracies. Increasingly, it seems, there is just one party running in this election. With the other one too busy distancing itself from its embarrassing candidate, this contest is essentially between the Democratic Party and Donald Trump. If you found the recent vote-rigging scandal in one-party China ironic, what would you call this one-party election in the bastion of democracy?

What began as a trickle over the course of a noxious election season turned into a stampede for the exits for Republican leaders after their nominee managed to make “pussy” an acceptable headline word by the time of the second presidential debate. As The Donald’s skeletons came tumbling out of the locker room, he drew the condemnation of nearly half of all 331 incumbent Republican senators, Congress members and governors, Reuters found in a review of official statements and local news coverage. For die-hard Republicans torn between loyalty to the party and revulsion for its leader, the mood is best summarised in a recent Foreign Policy piece titled “What the hell happened to my Republican Party?”

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To ease their pain, Trump has done what he does best – fire. Turning the tables on the party establishment trying to lose him, he fired the party, instead. “It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” he tweeted a day after the second debate, finally dropping all pretence of representing a party. First the man hijacks a party, then gives it the boot, and now he has trashed the notion of democracy itself by refusing to concede if he loses the election. Because it’s all rigged, he says. Just the point my communist tormentor was trying to make.