As biden bides trumpism lives on

As biden bides trumpism lives on

Joe Biden was six short of the 270 electoral college votes a candidate needs to win the US presidential election, at the time of writing this, and those were well within sight from just one of the five states whose results had not been called by a major news outlet. Wherever the counting has been prolonged, that has been on account of the mail-in or early-voting ballots that are counted, except in some states, only after the election-day votes have been. Since Democrats have been taking Covid precautions seriously, they constitute the preponderant majority of the mailin and early-voting contingent, and the chances of the votes still being counted going to Biden are high. What would a Biden presidency do?

Biden is not Trump and that is saying a lot. However, Trumpism is far from being vanquished. Despite the 2.34 lakh toll of lives resulting from the Trump administration’s mismanagement of Covid, there has been no mass revolt against the Republicans. The Republicans retain control of the Senate. Two freshly elected Republican members of Congress are champions of the QAnon, a movement that believes Trump is up againsta deep State committed to Satan worship and paedophilia. Widespread belief in this conspiracy theory is proof of the complete breakdown of a shared public discourse, which is the basis of democracy. In today’s America, there is no piece of information that everyone could accept as fact; there is only news that is fake, from one partisan perspective or the other. The sway of social media, which had, till recently, abdicated the responsibility of a publisher of news to verify the authenticity of the information that it purveys to millions of viewers, and the division of mainstream media into partisan camps, have, in the US, made the job of finding common democratic ground hard for the newly elected president.

Biden would be less erratic than Trump in rallying allies to hem in an expansionist China and more inclined towards a rules-based world order. This suits India, even as bilateral relations will stay steady.