Opinion
Because they knew precisely what they had been doing
This US election doesn’t appear to have been determined by questions of values, however by sober concern for one’s personal pockets. That could seem loopy to us, however one factor is for certain: Americans had been clear about who they had been voting for once more.
No, 2024 just isn’t like 2016, in spite of everything. When Germany wakened that morning and America went to sleep exhausted, there was hardly any hint of the Big Bang, the elemental shock of Donald Trump’s first election victory. In its place is a uninteresting feeling of Already seen kicked.
We did not get up in a totally new world. We have woken as much as a world that Trump has helped to form for eight years – and which he’ll now most probably form in a really completely different means.
That is a very powerful, essentially the most sober perception of this US election night time, which comes throughout as so unusually anti-cyclical and quiet that it hardly matches in with the noise and the insanity of the Trump years. It nearly appears as if somebody is returning to the White House in an orderly method.
The different findings surrounding this election additionally appear surprisingly rational: Kamala Harris, the candidate who didn’t head the present US authorities, however however embodied it as Vice President (and Biden’s alternative determine who was chosen with out an inside celebration choice), failed. Not even one in three Americans mentioned in post-election surveys that their nation was at the moment growing in a superb route. An incumbent authorities can hardly resist this cry for “change”.
And, additionally surprisingly rational, even humane, though in fact egocentric: many citizens appear to have selected what’s most useful to them. It wasn’t the dispute over immigration, abortion, or “values” that was decisive on this vote, however somewhat considerations about one’s personal pockets.
“It’s the economy, stupid” was as soon as the legendary maxim of Democrat Bill Clinton. The billionaire Donald Trump tailored this for himself. He suspected that those that assume on daily basis about how costly fuel is, how costly groceries are, how a lot it’s a must to pay for a Big Mac, take into consideration little else.
Many US voters really feel: We had been higher off beneath Trump
That the US financial system is definitely booming and that Trump’s proposed tariffs will most likely gas inflation once more? Such arguments obtained little consideration, regardless of how rational they might be. But it is no use accusing America’s voters of being irrational as a result of most of them aren’t (aside from a small variety of fanatical Trump followers).
People already know who they’re getting again into the White House: Trump’s character (and his errors) merely weren’t that necessary to them. What was most likely extra necessary to them was the sensation that they had been doing higher beneath Trump.
Will this now result in a common assault on democracy? Will he let his opponents be persecuted and tear down America’s establishments, which are literally not ready to cope with such a legitimized and on the similar time authoritarian ruler? Will he drop Ukraine inside 24 hours, make a cope with Vladimir Putin, will he depart NATO?
None of this may be mentioned but. It additionally seems as if he’ll be capable to depend on an incomparable quantity of energy sooner or later: a majority within the Senate and the House of Representatives, and within the Supreme Court anyway. What can most likely already be mentioned: The USA might be absent as an ethical and democratic main energy for at the very least 4 years.
People dance at a marketing campaign celebration for Republican Senate candidate D.McCormick in Pittyburgh, Pennsylvania
© Gene J. Puskar/AP/DPA
It was all the time naive to consider that beneath a President Harris there would have been an entire abandonment of “America First” or a transatlantic renaissance. But in fact we Germans would have been nearer to her when it comes to values.
And, with out eager to overuse the comparisons between Washington and Berlin: If voters vote primarily based on their financial pursuits, they may flip away from the German site visitors mild authorities in droves within the subsequent election, as a result of the present financial considerations are far more well-founded in Germany than within the USA.
Now the argument will come up in Berlin that the site visitors lights should stick collectively so as to not trigger additional chaos on the planet. This site visitors mild authorities as a bulwark towards a Trump administration? Even Donald Trump, who does not perceive humor in any respect, must snort heartily at that.
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