Irish Examiner view: The wake-up call that America can’t ignore

Will voters see compromise as a step towards consensus, as a foil to unsustainable extremism and division? Or might they cling ever more fervently to partisan positions? 

Supporters of US president Donald Trump outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol on Wednesday. Picture: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Astonishment, anger, distress, sorrow, fear, doubt, some degree of shame, and more than a little bewilderment shape reactions to Wednesday’s appalling events in Washington.

Those genuine, heartfelt responses, and many, many more, are justified as America’s, Europe’s, and the rest of the West’s opponents burble in a very different set of emotions. They may not gloat openly — just yet — but they are surely purring as they consider a version of that old Irish maxim: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.”

A clearly unhinged, anti-democratic, and narcissistic president sent his Freikorps, just as another tyrant before him had, to subvert his country’s parliament and established democratic processes to try to cling to power despite a clear and verified election result. 

That so many Americans, even if only a tiny proportion of that country’s 330m or so souls, were so animated by Trump’s stop-the-steal dishonesty to storm Congress is as amazing as it is sad. The comfort in those figures is, unfortunately, diluted by an early YouGov Direct poll of 1,397 registered voters that found 45% of Republicans supported those who stormed the Capitol, although almost as many — 43% — expressed opposition.

However, it is even more amazing that the Trumpistas imagined that they might achieve their objective of a second term for their tinpot duce. Yet that is not the greater, more pressing question. That must be how did the Make America Great Again — that plan went well, didn’t it? — rabble get into what is ordinarily one of the most secure, most protected spaces in our world? Whether by incompetence or, dread thought, one-eye-closed collusion is immaterial, especially in the very setting that was so very recently secured in the most intimidating way ahead of Black Lives Matter protests. That question must be answered convincingly even if Joe Biden’s incoming administration must answer it. It simply cannot go unanswered and fester at the wellspring of democracy.

Biden’s response, when he filled the fermenting vacuum left by the incumbent, was one chink of light in this tragedy. In a televised response, he called for “the renewal of a politics that’s about solving problems, looking out for one another, not stoking the flames of hate and chaos”. 

Those noble hopes were echoed, albeit in a minor key, in an unexpected quarter. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, that bitter opponent of anything Democratic, suggested Trump’s most unyielding enablers might recognise the damage he’s done and, even at this 11th hour, recant. “Self-government, my colleagues, requires a shared commitment to the truth,” he said as he promised to vote to certify the election, a vote he called the most significant of his career.

Those corrupt enablers are essential in this attack on American, and by extension, world democracy. 

In the coming months, when one after the other of those odious people launches a ghostwritten memoir of their White House days, they should be ignored and all of the usual conduits to publicity, and sales, denied them. 

That so many of these enablers are, to one degree or another, part of the Irish diaspora is shaming for this country, one that fought so hard to establish and protect its own democracy. 

Wednesday’s events have brought matters to a head and the key question is how will America react. Will voters see compromise as a step towards consensus, as a foil to unsustainable extremism and division? Or might they, if the darker angels prevail, cling ever more fervently to partisan positions? 

This, just as was the case before America joined both world wars, is a question of fundamental significance in a world fighting an accelerating pandemic and growing autocracy.

We cannot afford to contemplate a world where America is so divided that it is dysfunctional. Biden and Kamala Harris face a challenge far greater than they can ever have imagined. So, by extension, do we.