While US elections during the Cold War were the West’s most important status-symbol, The November 5, 2024’s exercise will not bring citizen’s interest to the fore, making it meaningless.
From Colonial Empires to ‘Democracies’
However, 9 Out Of 10 Countries with The Highest Homeless People Are in the West, the UK having 400,000 homeless in its streets or temporary shelters. Similarly, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development counted over 653,000 homeless people in one winter night of January 2023. Also, about 40 million Americans are poor, according to the US Census Bureau and the country experience the highest college-dropout rate among developed countries. Clearly, regular elections have not helped the US society to get leadership that can address citizens’ glaring manifestation of poverty and deprivation. Therefore, attempts by the West, including American ambassadors to Nairobi, to set her country (the US) as an example to Kenya does not augur well. 2024 US elections are unlikely to bring a winner that will focus on citizens’ needs, as the elected president will focus on imposing the country on the world.
Vying to Rule the World
On November 2, 2024, France 24’s newscaster stated that the free world will get a leader in 3 days. Therefore, the 2024 US elections’ campaigns are shaping up as another competition for winners to continue propagating global hegemony. It is not a forum for American citizens to canvass on how to be governed. The democrat’s contender, Kamala Harris, has insisted on continuing Biden’s policy of death and destruction in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan to prop up America’s fleeting hegemony. Meanwhile, the republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in an interview with Tucker Carlson on November 1, 2024 stated that his priority is preventing the US dollar from losing its global-reserve-currency status. He argued that the loss of this status would be equivalent to ‘losing a war’, suggesting that his country waged and won an undeclared war to impose its currency on the world.
However, this ‘victory’ and the US dollar status has not addressed citizens’ poverty, high homelessness, high college-dropout rate, fentanyl crises, or gun violence. Still, Trump’s or his opponent’s victory will see Washington continuing to impose itself on the world. Trump continued that the greatest threat to his country was Russia and China uniting. Both countries will not participate in the US elections, but that will not stop Trump from dictating to them. Therefore, the 2024 US election is just another circus designed to produce ‘world’s leader’ and not American’s presidents.
The US should refrain from spreading its governance model or imposing its leaders on the world, as both have failed at home. Despite its remaining the most successful Anglo-Saxon’s country globally, other societies have successfully used alternative models to achieve richer, and freer societies. Unlike in the past when Western-style elections were framed as a perquisite for socio-economic progress, countries like Qatar have developed world-class infrastructure according to (Donald Trump), while America’s is crumbing. Also, China has overtaken the US in Purchasing Power Parity even without such elections. Furthermore, the freedom of speech that western countries boasted about has been exposed as nonexistent, such that in 2024, a British journalist was granted asylum in Russia, expanding lists that includes the American Edward Snowden that had to flee the west to Russia and hence escaped inhuman treatment received by Julian Assange in the UK. Assange, the Wikileaks co-founder, was directly and indirectly imprisoned in the UK for a decade, where he ended up in His Majesty’s Belmarsh prison for exposing US war crimes in Iraq. He (Assange) had to plead guilty of journalism to secure his freedom, in the UK, a self-styled ‘democracy/fighter of autocracies’. Not only have large Eurasian countries built better systems employing nonwestern models, but Libya, a smaller African country, proved that socio-economic progress can be achieved without US-style elections.
Despite the West’s regular elections, their countries face worsening socio-economic parameters, with the UK falling (in GDP) behind India, from which it looted 45 trillion dollars during colonialism. Libya under Muammar Gadhafi’, whom the West labeled a dictator, achieved progress that only shames their supremacists minds. Gadhafi, despite knowing that he would not face elections, dedicated his life to alleviating poverty, providing housing, education, healthcare, and boosting agricultural production. Conversely, US politicians, while knowing they will face flag-waving voters after 4 years, ignore citizens’ interests. Some of these citizens wave their flags while homeless or dropping out of college. Gadhafi had eradicated poverty and established a welfare state that funded education and healthcare, including paying unemployment benefits. In contrast, some Americans grapple with poverty, college dropout, unemployment, drug problems, mass shootings, and expensive healthcare despite voting after every two years in the main or midterm elections.
Americans’ problems seen today may have been easier to justify in the 1980s by stating that other countries had worse troubles. However, many countries today, including those the US and the UK term as adversaries, have lower numbers of homelessness or poverty. In addition, even poorer and smaller countries, say Kenya, that remained in single party dictatorship between 1982 and 2002 have poverty figures that are comfortably below half those in the US, and negligible homelessness.
US Elections as Circus
Citizens’ voting in US election is only meant to create an illusion of electing leaders, who will embark on a hapless attempt at world’s conquest. Both US parties will purport to disagree on anything that can enhance citizen’s life but adopt all bills meant to benefit big corporations, big Pharma, and the military industrial complex. The Congress features debate of how groups or countries in faraway land ‘present’ this or other threat to the US’s patchy empire, and how to authorize military intervention, fund rebels, terrorists, or NAZIs. The congress even gets time to listen to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and to applaud him as he sells endless wars. Oppositely, debates of how to reduce poverty, homelessness, lower the cost of healthcare or reduce the college dropout rate are rarely seen. Therefore, US elections are simply a circus that gives citizens an illusion of control while producing politicians that will only seek to impose Washington on the world.
Simon Chege Ndiritu, is a political observer and research analyst from Africa, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
