Is it Joe Biden who may have seemed too unobtrusive ? Is it because of the age and personality of this man that there was finally such a solidity of the Trump vote instead of the blue wave that the polls were announcing?
Is it, more profoundly, that the rejection of immigration, the showdown with China, the national retrenchment and the dismissal of the legacy of the Sixties weld half of America together in a passionate aspiration for a mythologised past? Or is it still that the Democrats today have no other glue than their desire to prevent their country from a second term of Donald Trump?
Just like the real reasons for the War of 1914, this will be debated for a long time, but if the causes of yesterday’s vote are anything but obvious, its consequences are all too evident.
At the end of the day, whoever the winner is, the difference in votes between the candidates will not have been sufficient for the losing America to concede victory to the winning America. Short or long, there will be a legal battle. Perhaps it will even be up to Congress to make a decision, and during four years, one half of the United States will regard the incumbent President as illegitimate because he was elected by fraud.
This means that, in a world where dictatorships and democracies abound, the wealthiest and most powerful of democracies will no longer be able to plead for the respect of the rule of law, liberties and human rights without Moscow, Manila or Beijing reminding it of the parable of the speck and the log.
We have just entered an era in which democracy will have lost the advantage of military force, the force of the world’s number one army. At the same time, the United States has entered into an institutional crisis that is likely to get worse. Good or bad, it is not a political line that will have prevailed but the entire camp of freedom that has suffered a defeat because…
Let’s imagine for a moment that Donald Trump does not have to give up his seat. His ambition then would not be to reconnect with the European democracies, but to seek, on the contrary, to get along with Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey, with the dictators of the moment whose political culture he shares.
All over the world, a second term of the outgoing president would further damage democracy, but what would happen if Joe Biden became the 46th president of the United States?
He, for his part, would want to close ranks with the European Union, reduce inequality by restoring a minimum of tax fairness and reverse policies of social and environmental deregulation. There is no reason to doubt it because it is his culture and because the State no longer appears today as the problem but as the unavoidable solution, but would Joe Biden have the means to achieve his goals?
He would have had them with an incontestable victory but he would have them much less with half of America incessantly putting obstacles in his way. Condemned to fight at the same time against an America that will not acknowledge him and against a pandemic to which Donald Trump has left an open field, this old senator from the East Coast would have more than a hard time opening a new page to an increasingly breathless United States by restoring the soft power of being a role model in the world.
