Politics of fear and loathing

As the day approaches for Americans to pick their next president, the question that comes up more and more is what is it that makes folk choose one person above another.
To a large extent the answer in the case of the US is simple. Diehard Republicans will vote for their party’s candidate, no matter who he is, and so will committed Democrats in favour of their party’s candidate. That is what the pundits say.
I once asked a professor at the London School of Economics which party he voted for. A brilliant man with a delightful sense of humour who happened to hold the Karl Marx chair, he answered abruptly: Labour, of course.
Why? I asked.
Because my father voted Labour, he said with a burst of laughter.
That is the way of party politics in most democratic countries, by which I mean proper democracies, like the US.
But look at how some such votes went in other democracies. The most chilling example remains the Germans’ choice of Adolf Hitler, an unhinged individual who wormed his way into their hearts by convincing them that the Jews were largely to blame for their troubles. Furthermore, after losing World War I and the admittedly iniquitous Versailles Treaty that was designed to punish and humiliate Germany, he was going to make their country great again. That was his mission, and see what it brought his followers.
What a potent recipe this keeps on proving to be. Convince voters that they are getting the short end of the stick, convince them that it is the system’s fault, convince them that it is above all the work of dark forces that are ganging up against them, and soon you have the masses pumping the air with their fists and chanting vitriol.
Take a quick look around the globe and instances of this tendency jump up all over.
Russia cannot rightly be called a democracy given the hardships inflicted on the opposition, but Vladimir Putin has hit upon a profitable formula by persuading his compatriots that his country is on the way back to greatness and by using its military to underscore his point in eastern Europe and the Middle East.
A particularly grotesque example of this brand of politicking is that of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte who, in the name of confronting the drug menace, is winning favour by having his henchmen clamp down and kill suspects indiscriminately and telling the US and President Barack Obama to go to hell for objecting.
Africa is no paragon of democratic rule, but Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe stands out as a particularly tragic example of this misshapen style of rule. He and his cronies years ago brought the country to its knees with their mugging of the economy, but there he still is at the helm. Sure, election-rigging is partly to blame, but still a surprising section of the populace keeps voting him in. Why? Because he tells them their troubles are all the work of evil foreign forces.
The United Kingdom’s Brexit vote is a more subtle and certainly more genteel expression of this type of foreign-fear politics, but it is no less consequential. The fact that many who voted against continued membership of the European Union have since had second thoughts says much about the danger of such gut reactions. Voting is one thing, the consequences can turn out quite another.
And so back to the US where Donald Trump, whatever his tax and other mishaps, has made denunciations of Muslims, Mexicans and even Nato, and slurs of women, war veterans and who else the hallmark of his campaign. Is this what is ultimately going to make voters catapult him into the Oval Office? Heavens forbid.