American Presidential Elections in a Comparative Perspective. Группа авторов

campaign and presidency, TV continues to be a main source of information for American voters. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, from November 29 to December 12, 2016, 54 percent of the voters said that they obtained most of their election news from television. Of the Trump voters, 40 percent mainly relied on Fox News, while Clinton supporters relied on varied sources.⁵² For Thomas E. Patterson, news coverage was fundamentally “negative in tone and light in policy,” confirming a pattern first established in 1984. Trump received more coverage than Clinton did, maybe because of his sensationalist statements or because “his words and actions were ideally suited to journalists’ story needs.” The 2016 election confirmed the post-1970 tendency for “the horserace” to outweigh policy coverage: 42 percent of news reports were about the horserace; 17 percent about controversies; 24 percent other and only 10 percent about policy.⁵³

For global and domestic audiences, the spice of the 2016 election was Donald Trump. His outrageous statements, his vulgar language, his aggressiveness, his ignorance, and his constant lies made it difficult to turn off the TV or ignore the election. Trump captivated audiences. His behavior was provocative, his arguments debatable, and his campaign-style was a gift to the media. TV, social media, blogs, radio, and newspapers were always ready to report, to exhaustion, Trump’s latest polemic statement or scandal. Of course, Hillary Clinton contributed her own controversies and scandals to the reality show. The candidates’ policy programs were almost meaningless—mentioning the subject but not how properly execute the policy. All this made the election as much about entertainment as a political event. Sensational journalism and scandalous candidates were a perfect match. A Leslie Moonves, the Chief Executive Officer of CBS, said in 2016 when talking about Donald Trump’s presidential run, “it may not be good for America, but it is damn good for CBS.”⁵⁴

The 2016 presidential election did not present a positive or inspiring image of the United States to the world. On the contrary, it helped to reinforce negative stereotypes, as many of the contributors to this volume attest. Trump’s propensity to lie, for example, captured the attention of people all over the world. PolitiFact declared, “70 percent of Trump’s statements during the campaign were false with only 4 percent completely true, and 11 percent mostly true.” It found that 26 percent of Hillary Clinton’s statements were false.⁵⁵ The media reported candidates’ statements even when they knew they were untrue. In the 2016 election, lying often seemed to be simply a tool to arouse emotion, generate passionate feelings, and produce approval.⁵⁶

Trump’s constant lies in the 2016 campaign shocked observers all over the world. In September 2016, the cover of the British Magazine, The Economist featured the headline “The Art of the Lie.” The accompanying editorial underscored Donald Trump’s constant fabrications, calling him “the leading exponent of ‘post-truth’ politics—a reliance on assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact.” The magazine defined “post-truth” as when “truth is not falsified or contested, but of secondary importance.” In The Economist’s view, Trump’s falsehoods are not typical political lies, but some of a particular kind, “they are not intended to convince the elites … but to reinforce prejudice.”⁵⁷

For Italian Fabio Chiusi, Trump’s ceaseless lies were and continue to be part of a general policy strategy. The Trump administration, argues Chiusi, invents “alternative facts to justify its immigration policy…. Trump’s lies are part of his strategy to repress dissident” and delegitimize the media. According to Chiusi, Gary Kasparove understood this very well when he asserted: “If you are able to convince people that true news is false, it becomes much easier to convince [them] that your false news is true. If what matters is to protect your propaganda narrative from reality, again, the priority is to destroy the real, and turn it into story.”⁵⁸

For Chiusi, current American politics is incredibly confusing because it is difficult if not impossible to understand a world in which “true and false are deliberately manipulated from above, even from the White House.” The French press also expressed its uneasiness with Trump’s lies. After the 2016 election, Liberation highlighted some of the most egregious “lies and absurdities pronounced by the billionaire.”⁵⁹ In Mexico, Rafael Alvarez argued that to reach the presidency, the “unpresentable businessman, ignorant and mendacious, lied again and again, establishing lies as a way of acting, and creating a new words in English: fake news, false news, which in fact are vile lies….”⁶⁰

Trump’s constant lies and the complicity of other politicians are a serious threat for American democracy and global security. For a democratic system to work properly, citizens need to be informed and have a clear view of what the government is doing. To distort reality, to misinform the public conflicts with the aspiration of any democratic system to be transparent, objective, and clear, and to inform its citizens and allow them to make well-versed political decisions. Lies create a political fiction in which voters live in what Umberto Eco has called hyper-reality, a world in which the “logical distinction between Real World and Possible Worlds has been definitely undermined.”⁶¹ In this world, reality becomes fantasy, distortion veracity, and misrepresentation unobjectionable. In this world the critical media, one of the main institutions of any democratic system is marginalized or even considered the enemy. In this world, democracy is peril.

       TEARS IN THE AMERICAN SOCIAL FABRIC

      Many inside and outside the United States believe that the United States has a longstanding, historically rooted, and fundamental problem: racism. From the early stages of the colonial period, the institution of chattel slavery became a central basis of the southern economy, securing labor to maintain the plantation-based production. Slavery and the subsequent legal discrimination against African Americans were perceived by many outsiders as inconsistent with the United States’ discourse of freedom. Today, in the eyes of many foreign observers, African Americans and other minorities have been mistreated and denied full access to the American democratic system. Overseas observers are often aware of the fact that even after the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s many forms of intolerance and discrimination persisted.

Many thinkers and writers from around the world have examined the US racial history. Alexis de Tocqueville saw slavery an uneconomic, abhorrent system “contradicted both Christian belief and tradition and the political philosophy of the rights of man.”⁶² More than a century later, Octavio Paz averred that the racial question was one of the “great contradictions that tears [the US] apart.”⁶³ The radical Egyptian writer Syyid Qutub declared that the United States “treat their colored people with despicable arrogance and distinguish barbarity.”⁶⁴ The Swedish writer and scholar Sven Delblanc wrote in 1969, after spending a year in Berkeley, that he “encountered a country with an ingrained tradition of racial oppression and racism.” He wrote, “I ask myself if the US will ever learn to live with the truth, the whole truth, about its history?” He characterized American freedom as a myth and concluded “violence and oppression were endemic in American society.”⁶⁵

      The issue of race