How Trump’s demagoguery fuels the global rise of xenophobia and political intolerance

Both candidates competing to lead the American people and the “liberal democratic order” barely mentioned the rest of the world in their recent debate. 

They wish to lead us, but give us no consideration as they make their pitches to American voters. For both the Harris and Trump campaigns, international issues don’t seem to feature beyond competing to see who can offer more support for Israel, a state openly perpetrating a genocide.

It was no different in South Africa in the run-up to the May elections.

A number of political parties, some that are now part of the coalition running the country, didn’t even mention foreign policy in their manifestos.

But, with the exception of the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, our politics has very little influence on the rest of the world while what happens in the US has a powerful effect on the world. 

The degeneration of democratic politics is a global phenomenon, one that cannot be blamed on the situation in the US. 

All over the world it seems that as we have become more “connected” we have also become more disconnected, less willing to listen and learn from each other and to be tolerant of different perspectives. 

Politicians around the world have exploited these divisions from South Africa and the United Kingdom to France, India, Brazil and elsewhere.

Social media has driven polarisation and radicalisation around the world. And when the cost of living rises and life becomes more difficult, when people do not see a way out of their lot, when they do not see a better future and when they feel disconnected from policy making, they start questioning the political system. 

They can become disillusioned and purposeless. Politicians and other forms of power, such as business and the media, can be looked at with scepticism and distrust. People can come to think that democracy is a scam and that it is the reason why they can’t give themselves and their children a better life.

Demagogues slide into this space, augmenting people’s fears and feelings of insecurity. They exploit people’s fears. They cast themselves as outsiders, as not part of the “system”, as the ones that understand the people and have the solutions that can take people out of hardship. 

They ignore the powerful actors that have made people’s lives worse and scapegoat vulnerable people, such as migrants and others. 

Ambitious politicians presenting themselves as “outsiders” on the side of the people are often able to turn the general populace towards accepting and wanting strong men who they imagine will be their saviours. As this kind of politics grows in power people can become more right-wing, anti-establishment, anti-immigrant and generally intolerant. 

Nonetheless what happens in US politics has a far greater influence on the rest of the world than what happens in any other country. This can be for good or ill. 

Black Lives Matter raised important questions about race and policing around the world. Before that, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X became global icons. 

But Trump’s open racism and turn to conspiracy theories have also had a global effect creating a legitimation structure for new forms of right wing politics around the world. 

Since the civil rights struggle in the 1960s racism has not been acceptable in polite company in the US. 

Trump has changed that, and the reverberations of his turn to open racism have been felt around the world, including here as we have recently seen with the Roman Cabanac scandal, who Democratic Alliance leader John Steenhuisen appointed as his chief-of-staff, and then asked him to leave because of the backlash.

It is unimaginable that someone like Cabanac would have been given such an important job before the American alt-right spewed its hate around the world on social media.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have now taken the racism of the Republican Right into a new realm of the grotesque by repeating the bizarre lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their presumably white neighbours’ dogs and cats. 

As usual the immigrants targeted by these lies are not white people. Since the revolution against slavery in Haiti in 1804 Haiti and its people have always occupied a particular place in the fevered imagination of American racism. 

Trump and Vance are not only telling xenophobic lies, they are also telling racist lies that draw on the particular history of American racism and its deep fear and loathing against Haitians after the revolution.

Most South Africans would be able to see and condemn this racism straight away, even if they do not know the particular history of how Haitians are understood in American racism. But we shouldn’t be too self-righteous in our dismissal of the grotesquerie of American politics. 

We have plenty of xenophobic politicians, politicians who project our real fears about unemployment and out of control crime onto migrants instead of dealing with the actual issues that need to be resolved. It is always African and Asian migrants who are targeted, meaning that our xenophobia is, like Trump’s, tangled up with racism.

We also have plenty of populist politicians speaking to people’s most base instincts, casually lying and acting with reckless disregard for the common good. A populist politician here would, aside from the shared xenophobia, speak a different language to an American populist but the style — the recklessness, the machismo, the disregard for the truth, the crudity — is the same. Like Brazil we now also have politicians and their fellow travellers who refuse to accept clearly credible election results. 

The second “attempt” on Trump’s life tells us that the levels of political intolerance in the US have reached levels not seen before. It used to be that “banana republics” were the ones where political contestation could lead to violence. Now in the space of two months, in the world’s “greatest democracy”, Trump has twice been in the crosshairs of aspirant assassins. 

We should be worried about how the escalation in the political temperature will play out as the election comes closer. We should be equally worried about what may happen in the days following the election. 

We should be worried for Americans, but also for ourselves, and the world. If America can’t contain Trump’s demagoguery, and can’t find some sort of common centre within which to manage political contestations the ramifications will affect us all.

Nontobeko Hlela is a research fellow with the Institute for Pan African Thought & Conversation in Johannesburg and a non-resident fellow on the Global South with the Quincy Institute in Washington, DC.