The election of Donald Trump as the next United States president on Nov 8 may come to be viewed as an historic paradigm shift.
Many, both within the country and abroad, may only gradually come to the realisation what a history-changing event it is. It represents, in my opinion, a momentous loss of American political innocence on a scale that even the defeat in the Vietnam War may pale in comparison.
It is almost akin to the US joining the rest of the world, with all the mundane problems every other country faces. All the uncomplimentary attributions citizens of lesser countries regularly heap upon their own countries in moments of grave distress and frustration, Americans now apply to their own country: from being a global laughing stock to shameful and even worse.
It has to be quite a climbdown for a nation that till now views itself as truly exceptional and a bright “beacon-on-a-hill” built on high ideals that all others naturally aspire towards. The next time an American leader or representative sounds such soaring rhetoric on a global stage, it is bound to ring somewhat hollow.
America’s problems and challenges today seem so very ordinary to most of us: post-election riots and violence, dark foreboding about racial tensions, deep political polarisation that split the country right down the middle and a troubling sense of economic hopelessness pervading much of rural America and cities in its so-called “rust-belt” states.
The problems and challenges appear so intractable that American voters are willing to close one eye and hope for the best by electing a president they know is deeply flawed. They are just plainly sick and tired of politicians promising change, but delivering more of the same once elected.
A presidential candidate who presented himself as the anti-politician and offering simplistic ideas and resonant sound bites may not sound promising as a messiah, but enough Americans are desperate to be willing to try the unknown.
It must be rather ironic that a country that prides itself as one where anyone who dreams of becoming president can actually become one would elect its first black president in 2008, and one who seemed to break all the conventional political rules in such outrageous fashion eight years hence.
And, like us all, Americans are now wrestling in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, a thing they always take for granted till now: that democracy as we know it is and always will be an unalloyed good.
Americans now fret if their newly-elected president is up to the gargantuan task of healing a deeply divided nation, let alone taking it forward. They are taking to lashing out at the “mainstream media” for portraying their new leader in a rather negative light instead of focusing on more positive things.
There is every likelihood that Americans, long used to untrammelled freedoms, will have it no other way. Which may be bad news for their new president and all those inside and outside the country who want to wish him well.
Trump must either draw from his innermost well of wiles to come up with a miracle worthy of his astounding triumph or he may at some stage move from merely lashing out to cracking down.
Failing either of these two alternative paths, Trump may be staring right into the danger of drowning in the very political “swamp” he had promised to drain.
Our political challenges today no longer seem so unique or exceptional because even the supposedly greatest nation now looks to be similarly afflicted.
America may no longer be the promised land in both the literal and figurative sense. If Malaysians today — faced as we are with our own problems and challenges — resist the temptation to look overseas for the non-existent key to solving our homegrown troubles, America’s current political predicament may yet offer us hope.
My sense has always been that Malaysia is, contrary to widespread opinion, actually at the global forefront, grappling with a multi-racial polity and confronting the problems it inevitably presents head-on, rather than believing such problems can be wished away simply by pretending they do not or should not exist!
And, we are where we are today by applying Malaysian solutions, including that uniquely Malaysian concoction that is our democracy. Some Malaysians today, like Americans, are desperate enough to believe that changing political masters is the solution.
Unless a credible political alternative presents itself, that belief can only be folly.
John Teo views developments in the nation, region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak