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The author is a contributing editor at the FT, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a fellow at the IWM in Vienna.
Until the moment an assassin’s bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear, the US presidential election had looked like a tragicomic clash between the convicted and the underdog. The blunders of the elderly Joe Biden in the recent debate with his almost equally elderly predecessor have reinforced an already growing sense that American democracy is at stake, regardless of who wins the November election.
The assassination attempt on President Trump dramatically heightened this sense of crisis, and the intrusion of violence into the election campaign raised fears that democracy was degenerating into civil war.
Those of us outside the United States used to love voting in American elections, which have always seemed more dramatic, unpredictable, theatrical, and momentous than anything our democracies have to offer, much less the succession of ageing leaders in the former Soviet Union, or today’s rigged elections in Russia, or the tedious Communist Party congresses of China.
In 2008, for example, many people around the world would have jumped at the chance to vote for Barack Obama, just as people once dreamed of space travel. And in 2020, more than a few foreigners were eager to put their finger on the scales to decide the fate of Trump’s reelection campaign.
But this year may be the year when US elections finally lose their magic. The November polls will likely be the most important in several generations. But when I talk to people outside the US, I no longer hear them dreaming of participating in the only election that matters. Experts around the world rightly argue that the US faces a dramatic choice. But something has changed. From afar, the contrast between Biden and Trump doesn’t seem as sharp as it once did. People just see two old men who were both unpopular presidents.
In a recent controversial essay, historian Niall Ferguson argued that the comparison between today’s American gerontocracy and the late Soviet Union is misleading but still instructive. He’s right: the comparison is a warning, not a prediction.
Washington in 2024 is very different from Moscow in the late 1980s: The U.S. economy is thriving, the U.S. military is strong, and people still risk their lives to come to the U.S. But as was the case toward the end of the Soviet Union, there is an emerging consensus that American society is in crisis and American power is in decline.
Without dramatic change, the United States and its global influence could be the biggest loser in this election. The more America looks endangered and unsafe — and this weekend’s shooting in Pennsylvania will only add to this — the more America needs a president who can speak to and represent the future.
In 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, died at the age of 75. Like many of his colleagues in the Politburo, Brezhnev was old and sickly. He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, who had ambitions to reform, or at least discipline, the Soviet system, but he too was old and infirm and died after only 15 months in office.
Andropov was succeeded by 73-year-old Konstantin Chernenko, whose plans are unclear, as he too died just a year after taking office. When Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest Politburo member ever to come to power in 1985, the task of overhauling the system became impossible.
I was in my 20s when all this happened, and the succession of funerals shaped my view of the communist system and its future more than anything else. You could even say that the USSR died of the exhaustion of standing in line to say goodbye to its leaders.
The coming months will shape how men and women, citizens and foreigners alike, view American democracy. Democracy’s magic lies in its ability to regenerate and self-correct. In this respect, neither Biden nor Trump’s victory looks promising for the future. Biden is a noble defender of a vanished world, while Trump, unfortunately, mistakes revenge for greatness.
The Biden team must recognize that in a situation like this, the greater risk is not taking risks: if people no longer expect democracies to be able to change themselves in a moment of crisis, democracies will lose their most important advantage over non-democratic systems.
