When it comes to the media I choose my poison wisely; and twitter is my poison of choice. Every time Donald Trump promises to “build a wall” or temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country, my twitter feed goes nuts. Between Trump and the pro-Hillary “#Imwithher” hashtags, I exist in exile, wondering if somewhere on a distant lonely star, there are people stuck in the middle like me.
There are. The silent majority in the Western world do not like either candidate. Hillary Clinton is the grand dame of neo-liberalism; the same generation of leadership that ushered in university tuition fees, supported War in Iraq, and presided over the greatest economic collapse since 1929 – in-between giving really, really, expensive talks on Wall Street. Her audacity is almost admirable. Almost.
Donald Trump would do all of these things too, by the way. But at least he’d do it with guns, with the flag, and without swapping friendship bracelets with Joe Biden. If the unthinkable happens and the next President of the United States is in fact a hamster, Trump will tone down the populist rhetoric and urgently move to mend fences with the Arab World. His own party will encourage this as a geopolitical imperative, and the Republican base will give him the benefit of the doubt, so long as they get a vaguely chauvinist sound bite that helpfully equates Islam with Terrorism every so often.
If Hillary Clinton inherits power, the planet will spend the next four years watching America virtue-signal just about everything and we’ll all be wearing bio-tagged friendship bands to monitor our empathy levels. But don’t expect the micro-wars in the Middle East, or the relationship with Russia, to cool down any time soon. The choice between the candidates is about style, not substance.
The good news is that, outside of what journalist Glenn Greenwald has acerbically labeled the “court press,” apathy is turning into forced reflection. How did we get here? I have no idea. But for tweeps in the Middle East trying to figure out how the hell my generation in the West can still be conflicted about Clinton – given the end-of-the-world crazy other guy – I’d like to cast back to a pre-historic period, known as 2008
It was the year Barack Obama promised an entire generation “Change You Can Believe In.” I remember “HOPE” in big capital letters, emblazoned on television screens and newsprint everywhere in Europe. When Obama won the Presidency, friends and family huddled around in the kitchen to watch his inauguration address. The optimism was infectious. The United States was back. Only it wasn’t.
Eight years later, there are over 65.3 million individuals displaced across the planet. That’s the largest number of human beings displaced in human history – greater than after the Second World War. The overwhelming majority are refugees as a direct result of wars in the Middle East.
Today the US economy is growing steadily yet income equality and social mobility – that promise of the heart of the western social contract - are at historic lows, according to Pew research. An article in the Atlantic suggests that nearly half of all Americans would have trouble finding 400 dollars in an emergency. Legitimate questions over the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Deal, or why an American citizen has been forced into exile in Russia, have been left unanswered.
If Twitter has helped in any way, it’s to bring these issues into stark perspective. The network seems engineered at birth to amplify existing narratives and culture wars – but not change them. We saw this with the Arab Spring. We see it in the battles over race, gender, class and Islam itself that take place online every single day, and are tangential to global problems that are shared across borders, regardless of what you happen to believe in. The fact that the best thing the internet has to talk about in the United States and Middle East is Clinton, Trump or a US election that feels like 1993 all over again, is really quite disconcerting. I’m a little bit tired, of choosing my poison.
John Lillywhite is a policy analyst based in the Middle East.
