a bonobo humanity?

A Palestinian protest held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on the day of Trump’s election

It’s November 5 in Australia, 1.32 am in the USA and their election is determined. Not already determined, but determined nonetheless – just as Trump and Harris are determined, by their respective genetic inheritances and their vastly different backgrounds. I don’t know vast amounts about those backgrounds, but enough to know that they were raised in very different circumstances by very different people.

Trump’s influences were mostly male, capitalistic and grasping, to the effect that he had a million dollars to play with, sort of, by age 8. As an adult he has bankrupted himself six times. He has of course, been a chronic tax avoider, and it’s clear that this and other traits, such as his everyday racism, his attitude to women, his big-noting of himself, and his various get-richer schemes, were laid down early in life. Trump’s father Fred was a real estate developer and businessman who lived well into his 90s, and clearly he was the principal influence in Donald’s life. His mother Mary is described as a socialite and philanthropist, presumably on the basis of her husband’s wealth.

Kamala Harris is the USA’s current Vice-President, which means, according to the USA’s rank-obsessed political system, she has already become the USA’s highest ranked female. Her father is a Jamaican-American professor of economics, and her late mother, born in Madras (now Chennai) in India, was a researcher in women’s health, notably breast cancer. They divorced when Kamala was a child of 6 or 7. Clearly these academic interests impacted on Kamala just as Fred Trump’s pecuniary interests heavily influenced Donald, but the fact that Kamala was brought up for much of her childhood by a single mother would have heavily shaped her view on women’s issues.

I’ve collected this scanty information from the public record, which of course provides very little in the way of granular detail, but enough to indicate vastly different life trajectories in a land of great contrast socially and culturally, together with the developed world’s most massive rich-poor divide.

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So twenty-four hours later, Trump has won the presidency of the USA, this time including the popular vote, which, in my view, is the only vote that should count in a one-on-one election for near-dictatorial powers (though of course no such political system should exist in a democracy and, as far as I’m aware, no other democratic system provides such dictatorial power to a single individual).

In my view, the most serious disadvantage Harris faced in this election was the fact that she is a woman. We don’t know as yet how the election, for the first time, of a convicted felon to this dictatorial position will pan out, but even if it ends in disaster, it’s my view that no woman will be given the top job – held by men in that country for over 230 years –  for decades to come. And I suspect that the presidential role will only cease to be overly empowered to the ridiculous and catastrophic degree that it is today when a woman is elected to that position. Not any woman, it must be said. Not a woman like Margaret Thatcher or Sheikh Hasina, but a woman indeed like Kamala Harris or Jacinda Ardern.

I’m reluctant to think about the internal future of the USA over the next few years – I thankfully live far away from that storm – but of course I worry for the Palestinian and Ukrainian people, and for Xi’s now-boosted ambitions regarding Taiwan. The world is terribly interconnected, and we should have interconnected and humane concerns, but there’s not much use telling that to one of the most self-centred human beings on the planet, an individual who now has control of the world’s largest military-industrial complex, and who worships dictators.

My first instinct is to avert my eyes from the USA. And yet, I have that curiosity that allegedly killed the cat. I shall try to direct this curiosity to related matters. Having just read Peter Apps’ comprehensive biography of NATO, I know that this development will create something of a crisis for other NATO nations. They will have to step up their support of Ukraine, and do all that they can to avert the serious possibility that Trump and his minions will actually provide support to the dictator. As to the people of Gaza – what is there to say? Trump has no fellow-feeling whatsoever. Absolutely none. This has nothing to do with politics. Trump is not a politician, or anything like a normal human being. The term malignant narcissist has never been more apt for an individual, and it’s obvious to any reasonably informed observer, that’s why the fault of his becoming any nation’s leader doesn’t lie with him but with that nation’s massively ineffective guardrails. And the whole world is going to suffer, we don’t yet know how much, for that nation’s massive failure.

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump#:~:text=Frederick%20Christ%20Trump%20Sr.%20(October,president%20of%20the%20United%20States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_J._Harris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Anne_MacLeod_Trump#:~:text=Mary%20Anne%20Trump%20(née%20MacLeod,president%20of%20the%20United%20States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shyamala_Gopalan

Peter Apps, Deterring Armageddon: a biography of NATO