Democratic elections can always be reduced to a simple equation: One man equals one vote.
If enough people choose one candidate over another, that candidate will get the privilege of ruling over and charting the destiny of all the rest, by mutual agreement. As soon as the next elections take place, they will have the chance to make the same choices yet again.
Donald John Trump was smart enough to tap into a huge vein of resentment with politics as usual and to parlay that into victory in the US presidential elections. Enough angry American voters bought into his nativist vision and repudiated the status quo, represented by Trump’s polar ideological, gender and almost-everything-else opposite, Hillary Clinton.
American voters chose to ignore all the serious allegations made against Trump, including charges of racism, misogyny, protectionism and mendacity. Now they—and the other Americans who did not vote for Trump—will have to live with that decision.
It’s worth noting that, unlike in these parts, Trump’s victory has not been called “the death of democracy.” Quite the contrary.
The jokes about the dumbing down of the American electorate aside, voters in the US are mature enough to accept the decision of the majority. There are no calls to take to the streets to protest or to impose the will of the minority losers on the bigger portion of the population, simply because the losers believe they know what’s best for the country.
Expectedly, the elites in government, business, media and other key sectors of American society who pushed for Clinton’s victory wailed and tore at their hair, predicting dire consequences for the country now that voters have cast their lot with Trump. The pundit David Remnick, writing in The New Yorker, was one of them, calling Trump’s election “nothing less than a tragedy,” adding that “[i]t is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.”
But instead of calling for revolution and destroying the democracy that brought Trump to the presidency, Remnick argues that “despair is no answer.” “To call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do,” he wrote.
You can’t have a democracy only when the majority thinks and votes the way you do. The American voters chose Trump, in the same way that their British counterparts chose Brexit and just like Filipinos chose Rodrigo Duterte.
People in a democracy who can’t accept the way the majority has decided are free to criticize that decision. Or to leave, as enough Americans were supposed to have opted for, crashing the Canadian immigration website after it became clear that Trump had won.
But you’re not free to undermine the same democracy that allows you the freedoms you enjoy under it. If you do, you become an agent working for the death of democracy, instead of an adherent of the supposed “icons” who reinstated it.
* * *
But what does a Trump presidency augur for the Philippines? That really depends on how much policy and decision-making leeway that the US Congress and the bureaucracy will allow the new, supposedly radical president.
Trump has already declared that he wants stricter controls on immigration and to bring back jobs that have been leaving the US. While he has not directly discussed the Philippines at length, what he will do with regard to these issues bears watching for their possible impact on Filipinos.
Tougher immigration rules will be bad news for Filipinos staying illegally in the US, who will be forced to return to the Philippines. And while Trump cannot directly order American companies with a substantial presence here like those involved in business process outsourcing to return, the US government can impose rules that will make it harder for BPO firms to hire people overseas.
(On the issue of China, Trump and Clinton are in rare agreement, bashing the Asian giant for stealing US jobs, engaging in unfair competition and undervaluing the yuan to boost exports. Trump and Clinton also back a stronger military-backed stance against China—but these views have very little traction outside of America, the intended audience of all the get-tough anti-Chinese campaign talk.)
Right now, with the expected uncertainty that greeted the election of Trump, the US dollar and its markets are already in retreat. In the short term, Trump will have to act quickly and decisively to dispel the belief that he is an unreliable policy shape-shifter who can cause potentially disastrous upheavals in both international trade and global politics.
The US Congress and the bureaucracy, however, can be relied upon to push back against any major policy initiative by Trump that diverges radically from the status quo. While Trump is seen as an ego-driven, seat-of-the-pants decision-maker, he will certainly be reined in by a Congress (never mind if Republicans now control both Houses) and a bureaucracy that only allow glacial change; institutional memory is a very big deal for the US government, after all, as even avowed reformist presidents like Barack Obama have quickly discovered.
The Philippines, like it or not, has never been top-of-mind to US policy-makers and hasn’t been for decades, anyway. I don’t think that’s going to change under Trump, either.