Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 15, 2021 Editorial
Kaieteur News – On Wednesday, January 21, in less than a week, Joseph Biden will be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States of America, bringing an end to the tumultuous, violent and at times outright macabre single term of the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump.
It is a sign of exactly how much of a proverbial dumpster fire the Trump Presidency was that, here in the final days of it, scandals like the Russian hacking targeted against his 2016 presidential rival Hilary Clinton, or the furor caused by the discovery of his affair with porn star Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels have long been forgotten. A dazzling cast of bizarre characters from his press secretaries (remember Sean Spicer) have entered and exited the ruinous stage that has been the Trump administration, with the President himself ending a term he began by promising his supporters so much “winning that your head will spin”, not only losing an incumbent but by setting the ignominious record of being the only President of America to be impeached twice.
The departure of Donald Trump from the highest seat of American power marks the end of an era of shame, and the beginning of what will be a difficult process of reformation and reconstruction unprecedented in American history with its only antecedents being the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. The storming of the most sacred site of American Democracy by a mob goaded on by a sitting President in an effort to overturn the election, which he lost represents, the worst flare up of the sickness of divisiveness that has been festering in American society of a long time, but which became most acute in reaction to the election of Barack Obama to the American Presidency.
From his tone throughout the campaign, Biden, almost 80, has sought to be more avuncular than aggressive, a marked contrast to Trump, and a strategy that saw him winning the election by a margin of 8 million votes. What is clear however is that that margin was not enough to convince thousands of persons to adhere to the role of law in the very centre of American lawmaking, which means that the new President cannot appear to be merely affable when it comes to the actual application of rule of law. If he does not have the temperament for it, then he should delegate policy direction for it to the person who is more than capable of overseeing reforms, his VP, Kamala Harris.
To be sure, a Kamala Harris Vice Presidency will be markedly different from Mike Pence’ tenure in office. Whereas Pence was, until last week, simply Trump’s factotum, Harris as a former political rival of Biden for the Democratic nomination and formerly a senior senator and state attorney-general in her own right, will play a critical role in cooperating with Biden’s project attorney-general Merrick Garland in using the legal system to push back against the internal insurrection – fueled by both White nationalism and a more diverse but equally rabid Republican deconstructionism – that threatens to destabilize America. Whatever Biden’s rhetoric about peace and harmony going forward, the fact that 21,000 National Guard troops are stationed in Washington, DC should say something about the reality of law and order in America at present.
It is easy, and perhaps not entirely unwarranted, to indulge in a little state-sized schadenfreude in the wake of what appears to be fall of American democracy, considering the direct role America has played in destabilizing small states and entire regions in the furtherance of the establishment of its economic hegemony – however, reform of law and order in America, or the failure thereof, has repercussions for at the very least, this hemisphere. Any bell that tolls for the rule of law in America would be a bell that eventually tolls for us here in Guyana as well.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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