In his second article covering the run up to the US Presidential election, David Chan provides a viewpoint on the current US political environment.

I am an Anti-Christ
I am an Anarchist
Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passersby
Sex Pistols, 1976

A long time ago, Nick Percy, Andrew Knight, Paul Langlois and I covered this punk classic at the Little Theatre in Guernsey as naïve 15-year olds. It seems apposite. Not that the tipping point for the recent global protests was the repugnant and totally unnecessary death-in-custody of George Floyd, but that the aftermath has brought together some interesting bedfellows – not all of whom seem quite to know what they want.

If the subject were not so serious, one could be tempted to turn to The Life of Brian to explain the politics[i]. As it is, we will just have to wait, watch and see what happens once the initial wave subsides. Here in the US, the obvious focus has been on Black Lives Matter. But it seems to me that the opportunity to exploit events in Minneapolis has straightforwardly come about as a consequence of the months of maximum social deprivation brought about by being cooped-up under COVID.

Put simply, large numbers of people (and particularly young people – of all social backgrounds) have slipped the lockdown leash and opted to riot. After all, when Princeton-educated lawyers are throwing Molotov cocktails into NYPD cruisers, something odd is afoot…

Inevitably, reaction to the scenes of wanton destruction has been dictated by political allegiance. Politicians, medics and scientists who were (and remain) adamant that breaking lockdown rules will lead to re-imposition of stringent social distancing measures have given a pass to the thousands of demonstrators who completely ignored them. President Trump (who under a federal system of government does not have the absolute policymaking authority of, for example, Boris Johnson) has been forced to watch from the side-lines as individual states have managed the reaction to domestic events. Of course, he does have the bully pulpit of the Presidency with which to excoriate his opponents; but, crucially, he is virtually powerless to make them change their decisions. Upon this key fact – and, as always, ‘the economy, stupid’ – rest the election in November. Republicans will point to the fact that 35 of the largest 50 cities in the US are Democrat-run. And that the police in virtually all the hotspots during the riots were working to Democratic mayors, Democratic city councils and Democratic governors. The obvious example would be Minneapolis itself where Democrats have had control (of both State and City) for more than 50 years.

Biden, who is still in his basement, has a very tricky needle to thread in his approach to the election. He has long boasted of his authorship of the 1994 Crime Bill, which is a huge part of the grievance underpinning Black Lives Matter calls for abolition of the police. (Worse, from that perspective, he subsequently bragged that the National Association of Police Officers “sat at that conference table of mine and […] wrote the bill.”) This has led to polarisation within potential Democratic voters that may influence his crucial Black vote. Biden has said that he does not support calls for ‘de-funding the police’, instead seeking to increase funding and reallocate resources to community policing, but that may not help him with either the strong majority of Americans (64%) of all stripes who oppose defunding and reallocation or the mutinous majority within his own party that approves. Still, as a tactic it appears that basement-dwelling is a winner because every time he appears in public it looks as if someone has just turned the lights on.

In the meantime, thin-skinned Orange Man Bad continues to tweet (among many other topics!) his threats to intervene to restore law and order, though the likelihood of him actually deploying the military through the 1807 Insurrection Act remains remote. I would imagine that his thinking veers between wanting to send in the troops and letting the Democrats dig their own hole. After all, if Seattle’s seemingly Democrat-endorsed “block party” in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (now renamed CHOP for ‘Organised Protest’) is still around when it comes to November, there will be an obvious point of comparison in terms of governance. Not all Americans – especially businesses and homeowners – think like the Seattle mayor who apparently believes that “we could have the summer of love.”

There is no doubt that the bookies’ money is now beginning to follow the pollsters in their view of the outcome of the election. How much of this will be reversed by the gradual reopening of the economy will be interesting and Trump is clearly desperate for that to happen.

Moreover, and as in the UK, I sense that once out of lockdown the people will simply not go back in. Equally, that Democratic governors would delay reopening and the associated fiscal improvement in order to ensure a Biden victory cannot be disputed; hate for Trump on their part is absolute and until COVID came along he was an economic lock for re-election.

So, all to play for and, as I write, 140 days to go. When you think that it is only 85 days since the start of the UK’s lockdown and 138 days since COVID-19 was declared a Public Health Emergency by the WHO, a lot can still happen!

[i] Sigmund Freud’s narcissism of small differences, so amusingly satirized by the Pythons, seems already to have affected the protests to some degree.

David Chan is a former colleague at Ravenscroft and an old friend of the business. He now lives in Texas with his wife. A former RAF fighter pilot, David was awarded an OBE in 2006 for his leadership of Eurofighter Typhoon entry-into-service operations.