TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - On the early eve of the 9th of November, with a phone call made by Hillary Clinton, the United States gave the world its most shocking revelation yet; Donald Trump won the election and was mandated by the citizens of the US to be its 45th president-elect. This was a shock to nearly everyone, starting from the voters, the media, the Clinton campaign, and even, as stated in the live coverage of MSNBC, the Trump campaign themselves.
Such shock is as expected; Trump's campaign have violated nearly all norms of democratic decency, he has the highest dislike rating as a candidate (reaching 53 percent) ever in history, he was predicted to lose in nearly all major polls conducted prior to the election, and even on the early minutes of the count he was shown to have a 70 percent to 90 percent chance of being beaten by Hillary by FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times respectively.
Social medias such as facebook and twitter have been ground to the majority of voter shock; ranging from those expressing their disbelief (with hashtags #ImStillWithHer trending world wide), those that celebrated and welcomed the night, and those that calmly assert faith that the American people will heal from its electoral division. News media on the other hand is already playing its role in making preliminary analysis to where their predictions went wrong; the flocking of democrat voters to third-party candidates, the lower turnout of African-American voters, or the last-minute controversial maneuver by the FBI eight days before the election.
But amongst the stuttered, scattered, and divided response, there are several things that we can learn from this election. First and foremost, that we should never underestimate the power of suppressed grievances and anger of voters to override rational calculations and considerations of merit, policies, and judgement. As seen how, despite the fact that Donald Trump's economic plan is projected to raise US$5.3 trillion of national debt over the next decade and his stated foreign policy having no more depth other than "so much winning" against ISIS, he still took people's votes.
Secondly, that there needs to be serious consideration of regulating what can and cannot be campaigned in elections. These things would most likely include the ability to blatantly lie and skew up facts, the sanctioning of fear-mongering, racist, bigoted, and sexist commentaries, and the unsupported and deliberate incitement of doubt towards the democratic system. Because despite the fact that these might be legitimate grievances of society, being democratic sometimes mean keeping them untapped knowing it would violate basic democratic decency.
Thirdly, that professional politicians and the media should start evaluating the way they identify and respond towards society's demands. Because as stated by Fareed Zakaria, the main reason why fringed populist movements gain ground in key demographics is due to elite political parties slowly moving to the centre whilst failing to educate and channel grievances of the demographic they left behind in a constructive and transformative way. Only when politicians realize that voters will not move to the centre unless they educate and persuade them to, can future Trumps can be prevented.
But lastly, it is worth noting that the 'Trump phenomenon' is not an isolated case. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, Rodrigo Duterte's presidency in the Philippines, Marie le Pen's rise in France, are all a series of geographically isolated events stringed to one by a common thread; the usage of undemocratic values (i.e. the lack of respect for human rights, equality, and differences) as platforms for policies that is used to appeal as solutions to suppressed voter anger and grievances. Thus we need to beg the question, if the democratic platforms we have fought so hard to establish are used to forward undemocratic principles, can we really say that we are really democratic?
ALIF SATRIA
