By Vishwamithra –

“Every contrivance of man, every tool, every instrument, every utensil, every article designed for use, of each and every kind, evolved from a very simple beginning.” ~Robert Collier

Trump

Victory has many fathers and defeat is often an orphan, they say. The losers in the recently held Presidential Elections in Sri Lanka bring forth many likenesses and dissimilarities between the approaching US elections and the elections that concluded just about a month ago in Sri Lanka. Donald Trump, on the surface, is one of a kind. When he was elected in 2016 as the 45^th President of America, many a pundit and scholar was taken aback. How could such a crude and uninformed businessman be elected to the highest office in the greatest military and economic power in the world and be taken seriously by an electorate that also elected Barak Obama just eight years ago?   

I may have already written about this phenomenon earlier, but it deserves to be told again and again. The American electorate may have wanted to punish itself for electing Obama in the first place. It sounds totally defective, out of whack, so to speak; but taken in the context of modern day politics and the way the American constituency was alerted by Donald Trump’s signal to the misplaced sense of ‘white supremacy’ and its palpable appeal to the white majority certainly had its desired effect.

The Republican Party always had its latent sensitivities to the difference between the traditional Caucasian make up and the obvious difference in color of skin of the large majority of immigrants flowing into America. It’s not a vicarious entreaty to the dwindling numbers of Caucasian people in major cities. Trump has changed the Republican Party, at least in the last decade or so, from an accommodating big tent into an exclusionary enclave of white-dominated political entity that is yearning to be placed amongst those racially sensitive men and women who would prefer to go back in years where the color of skin was the ultimate arbiter of all things, political, cultural and economic life. And that is not the twenty first century.

Nevertheless, this tendency on the part of that 35% that constitutes an active and vociferous segment of the Republican Party is not the majority voice amongst white Americans. A majority of white Americans are, whatever the stance they hold in their policy pronunciation and belief in which direction the country should advance in a fast-changing global economic and scientific environment. It is a very sensible and balanced community of men and women. But given the very divisive and polarizing political atmosphere so created by extreme rhetoric and maddening vocalizing of extra wild sloganeering propelled by the Trump (Republican) Party, one cannot be found fault with for branding the current political atmosphere in America as completely unacceptable for a leading democracy.

Donald Trump’s irrational entreaties to the white-skinned American is somewhat akin to the equally irrational appeals made by the Rajapaksas ably assisted by some of those ‘thugs’ in saffron robes in the mid years preceding the election campaign run by Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Appeals to the fringes of an electorate could have some serious consequences in the short run. When such appeals are made by the clergy of a religion, the consequential flow of events could assume violent and riotous character as was shown during those times. The ’83 riots or ‘pogroms’, as some Tamils would prefer to call it, followed by a continuing recycling mindset of an extreme-minded segment our own people engaging in a bloody war, are all in the past.

Magnetism towards the middle-ground is a constant. Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD) and his disciples proved beyond any shade of doubt in the Presidential Elections. I could not find a single moment or occasion on which AKD mentioned the word ‘Samajawadaya’ (Socialism) either in his public speeches or interviews. He took away all the tools and weapons that the richer classes of the country could use against him. Ranil Wickremasinghe ran out of his inventory of sophisticated or crude political weapons.

Currently, Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance are ceaselessly mentioning the words such as Socialist, Communist and radical leftist in reference to their opponent Kamala Harris. The Madison Square gardens rally was filled with such vitriolic attacks on Latinos. Treating Latinos as a non-American community is not going to help him in States such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona. Trump’s appeal to non-White Americans may have outlived its usefulness.

The Rajapaksas’ playbook bordered on the same racial/ethnic identity-politics. They played a determinant role in persuading the voters to a large extent. But Aragalaya-22 may well have taken care of that element once and for all. The new generation of voters have been successful in persuading its parent and grandparent generations to see outside the narrow confines of ethnicity, caste and religious shades. While both Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa placed so much emphasis on securing a majority of Tamil and Muslim votes, AKD, on the contrary, managed to stay within the controllable factors that shaped and defined the desires, ambitions and aspirations of the larger Sinhalese Buddhist masses on the south side of Vavuniya in Sri Lanka.

Donald Trump in the American electorate is testing its very sensitivity on race-laden politics. His relentless cry for an America that existed prior to the sixties and fifties may be bringing some nostalgic white-American dominance. Apartheid policies which advocated that any skin that is not white is inferior to the white of the Caucasian, whites-only washrooms, busing for school children based on whether they are of black skin or white skin might be arousing hard and utterly insensitive emotional responses not only on the election battlefield, they tend to play even a greater role in classrooms and workplaces in the vast land of the United States.

The parallels between Sri Lankan extremism and American fringes is not in substance; it’s not in the core content of issues and arguments; it is in the style and the respective mechanisms used by both parties. Donald Trump is no Sajith Premadasa, Mahinda Rajapaksa or Ranil Wickremesinghe. Trump is more narcissistic than either Sajith or Ranil; he may be even more greedy than Mahinda Rajapaksa. But the methodology and application of most radical and deplorable ideas and tenacity with which he pursues them is very much akin to those deployed by any of the Sri Lankan leaders, Mahinda, Sajith and Ranil. Nevertheless, both Trump and Sajith are losers.

However, there is one stark and obvious feature common to both Trump and Sajith. As much as Sajith was so sure of winning the Presidential Election, he had already appointed his Cabinet of Ministers, promised top government jobs and even assigned the various embassies and High Commissioner jobs to his friends and disciples long before the election; Trump is busy doing the same. The cocoon that these narcissists have created around themselves is impenetrable. A carnival of mad and crazy routine has been launched and those who follow the leader would be rewarded and those who don’t would be left in the lurch.

That fundamental of politics will not change whatever the country one comes from. A degenerating human condition is feeding on itself and those who avoid such extreme scenarios are few and far in between. Kamala Harris, on the contrary, is showing poise and balance, not only in her political rhetoric but also when she engages with the ordinary folk and being authentic about her childhood history and her family makeup.

One might wonder whether any parallels to be drawn between the political settings between America and Sri Lanka is of any value; whether it’s prudent to draw such wild inferences between a bankrupt nation and the wealthiest country in the world. It might not be, yet to make a cursory comparisons could be pardonable given the time frame within which the elections are being held in both countries.

Instead of identifying the two sources of data and information – USA and Sri Lanka – individually and attempting to weave a common thread which, in fact, does not exists, why not make a try to see if there is any identifiable features amongst issues, leaders and the electorate at large. Given the global context of leadership changes, the varied occurrences that are taking place today in Sri Lanka and the USA are sure to leave lasting effects on their respective polities. Lack of steady and sturdy opposition to AKD in Sri Lanka and to Kamala Harris in the USA are in character very much akin to each other.

As much as these similarities and differences exist, the bubble created by Trump in America and Sajith in Sri Lanka would burst asunder and the same way AKD secured a comfortable victory, Kamala Harris is also poised to gain victory and create history. If elected, she would be the first female president of the USA and the first non-White woman to occupy the highest seat in America. That alone is a remarkable feat for a daughter of a migrant South Indian woman. Kamala’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a biologist who arrived in the United States from India in 1958 to enroll in graduate school in endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley. Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, is an Afro-Jamaican who arrived in the United States in 1961, also enrolling in UC Berkeley and specializing in development economics. The first Black scholar to be granted tenure at Stanford University‘s economics department. Small beginnings but yet scholarly.

Beginnings can be deceptive indeed and most favorable if one is indebted to those humble beginnings. Like Kamala, like AKD!

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com