Chronic. The stake was spiritual, it seems. It was an election to save or to restore “The soul of America ”, we assured. On November 3 in the United States, voters were to say which of the two presidential candidates most closely embodies the national DNA. It was not a question of program but a matter of identity which had to be decided at the bottom of the ballot box. This is what was said on both sides, among supporters of the winner, Democrat Joe Biden, as well as of the loser, Republican Donald Trump.
If that was the stake, then no one won. At present, the polls of Tuesday, November 3 reveal only one thing about the “soul” of the country: it is tormented. Barack Obama, Joe Biden’s predecessor, soberly observes: “The election results show that the country remains deeply and bitterly divided. “ Basically, the United States is hardly more “Democrats” than “Republicans”.
“Looks like a cold civil war”
Opinion is more polarized than ever: Trump, as a good demolisher of the practices of American democracy, has done so successfully. Months before November 3, the outgoing president had decreed that he would only lose in the event of massive fraud. Trump offers himself one last satisfaction: 70% of Republican voters believe the ballot was “Neither honest nor free”. They doubt President Biden’s legitimacy – and too bad if the judges end up proving them wrong.
The United States has long been a divided nation. Booksellers pile up scholarly works on the polarization of opinion. Two Americas face each other, ideologically incompatible. One swears that the republican creed is most faithful to the founding ideals. The other ensures that the democratic reform ambition sticks to one of the key elements of the national DNA: openness to change. Over the years, what were only programmatic differences has become an existential, identity dispute – very largely due to republican sectarianism. “It looks like a cold civil war, a war of religion”, writes historian Simon Schama. Two visions of what the country should be are opposed, totally contradictory.
Even worse, Schama continues in the Financial Times (from October 31), “Each camp is convinced that the victory of the other means the end of the Republic”. For Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, prince of darkness of Republican fundamentalism turned Trumpist intellectual, politics is a zero-sum game: “Trump’s America, on the one hand, and post-American coalition society anti-Trump, on the other hand, he asserts, cannot coexist. There is no room for compromise ” (The Observer, October 8).
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