Politics drives the well-being of society. Without good politics, society would be taken over by vested interests, beginning the process of its downfall. In the last thousand years, the largest empires of the world have survived a maximum of three hundred years of continuous rule. Keeping this in mind, it may be that the 2020 US presidential elections marked the beginning of the fall of democracy as a political philosophy.
The US presidential elections for 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, 2000 and 2020 have all been accused of electoral fraud. However, the 2020 election has been the most noteworthy because of how mail-in ballots tilted the outcome against the incumbent and destroyed the credibility of American elections. The unverified mail-in ballots that have been returned to the state election bodies are more in number than the total ballots issued. In some verified cases, ballots were issued to dead people also. This exercise has been the source of all election frauds.
American elections of late have shown that money is the most important factor in an election. Money buys you the media and the media buys you a narrative along with votes. And anyone can buy a narrative and its influence because the votes of the majority of the population do not matter—it is the money that rules. Why else have some of the well-known media networks emerged as the voice of division and irrationality? Ever since 2016, they have been consistent in their hateful campaign against Donald Trump and bringing out propagandist comparisons between Trump and everyone else. It has been the longest-running soap opera in the US which can put to shame any Netflix or Amazon productions. The managers of these media firms have acted as directors of the propaganda and their reporters have played their roles like actors. The objectivity of news collection and dissemination has transformed into a business of narrative-based news reporting. It is no longer news, only opinions coming from a huge ecosystem consisting of politicians, attorneys, judges, and powerful businesses. The biggest casualty of their propaganda has been the truth.
Democracy has been the biggest American export since World War II. Democracy also defeated Soviet communism during the Cold War. But despite the absence of any external symbols of communism, elements of socialism and communism crept into the educational system of the US as American democracy grew complacent over the years. And while American policymakers became busy making China the economic behemoth it is today, the Chinese ploughed their profits back into the American media and education system to buy a narrative and an influence. The same was done by the Middle-Eastern countries. All this while, the American media kept alive the bogey of a Russian threat to keep American voters distracted with imaginary and emotive issues, while mainstream institutions were taken over by communists and socialists. The once powerful and free social media is also completely under the control of these very powers which control the narrative and have deprived many Americans of their constitutional right to freely express themselves. All of this is part of the strategy to deplatformise Americans who would try to find the truth.
Democracy had assumed a hallowed status globally because of India and the US. But such forgery has made American elections a laughing stock in Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific region. India’s Election Commission has emerged as the only government agency that has held large-scale elections free from such interference. However, the money model that American elections have promoted in 2020 is likely to hurt Indian democracy in 2022 and 2024. Given the impact of the US elections on the world, it is going to affect democracies around the globe, especially in South America and Europe.
In such a scenario, the other democracies can take a few urgent measures to protect their elections in the future. First, they must ban the American and international social media giants who exercise control over the data of their voters and the health data of citizens. Two, these countries should regulate foreign investments. Another safety tip would be to ban Chinese telecom switches that route their data through Chinese data centres.
As the 2020 US elections show, democracy can be held hostage by the media and vested interests. But is it too early to write the obituary for democracy? Well, one hopes democratic institutions across the world are strong enough to withstand the challenges facing them.
The writer is the founder and chairman of Sentinel of Dharma PAC and an advocate for the interests of the Indian-American community. The views expressed are personal.
