The mid-term elec­tions hav­ing defied pre­dic­tions and avoid­ed cat­a­stro­phe, it would be a wise deci­sion for the U.S. and a wel­come relief for the rest of the world, if Amer­i­cans heed an obser­va­tion from one of their most tren­chant home­spun philoso­phers, Mark Twain: “The right word may be effec­tive, but no word was ever as effec­tive as a right­ly timed pause.”

Part of that includes refrain­ing from pos­tur­ing as the leader of the free world and a bea­con for democ­ra­cy. The U.S. is indeed excep­tion­al as a democ­ra­cy, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly in all the ways its peo­ple perceive.
In an inter­con­nect­ed world beset by Covid, the effects of the war in Ukraine, cli­mate change and ongo­ing refugee crises, oth­er nations don’t have the time, nev­er mind incli­na­tion, to sit back and wait for the U.S. to solve its domes­tic issues, let alone step up to help, guide or inter­vene in the way it used to do.
Does any­one real­ly need direc­tion from a nation where Don­ald Trump and his acolytes are a major pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of the body politic?

                                     YOU VOTED FOR THAT?

Evi­dence of how bad­ly the self-cre­at­ed man­tle of Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism has been tar­nished, is pro­vid­ed by that most Amer­i­can of ways, opin­ion polls. An AP Vote­Cast sur­vey of more than 94,000 par­tic­i­pants in the midterm elec­tions, found that two thirds of Repub­li­cans sup­port­ed Trump’s “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again” movement.
Anoth­er poll found 54 per­cent of Repub­li­cans had a very favourable opin­ion of him.
And how on earth did Her­schel Walk­er, who can­not string a coher­ent sen­tence, nev­er mind thought togeth­er, with a doc­u­ment­ed past of moral turpi­tude that is the antithe­sis of his party’s pol­i­cy (abor­tion), end up win­ning enough votes to force a run-off? Espe­cial­ly against a man with the record and cre­den­tials of Rev Raphael Warnock.
The only nations where peo­ple believe they must vote for a par­ty regard­less of whether they find its poli­cies, politi­cians and rhetoric accept­able or not, are dic­ta­tor­ships, where there is no choice. 
To will­ing­ly endorse abhor­rent ideas, mal­prac­tice, obfus­ca­tion, hate-preach­ing and a stat­ed posi­tion that “if my side doesn’t win the elec­tion was rigged”, pure­ly on the basis of not vot­ing for any­one else no mat­ter what, risks putting Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy on the same lev­el as that espoused by two of Trump’s most fer­vent for­eign admir­ers, the auto­crat­i­cal­ly-bent Pres­i­dent Recep Tayyip Erdo­gan of Turkey and Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban of Hungary.

                  A LITTLE LESS WOULD BE MORE    

Lest I seem par­ti­san, let it be not­ed that obses­sion works both ways.The fol­low­ing head­lines appeared as columns and Op-Eds (now pre­ten­tious­ly renamed “Guest Essay”), on the same day and page of an edi­tion of the NY Times online:
“The Trump Show Is Back. Let’s Not Tune In.” (Excel­lent advice)/“Don­ald Trump Is Final­ly Fin­ished” (Hope­ful­ly, but a tad premature)/“Trump’s Announce­ment Is a Sign of Weak­ness” (Maybe, but then, hubris is an Amer­i­can polit­i­cal constant)/“The Chaos Inside Don­ald Trump’s Mind” (Does any­one real­ly want to go there?)/“The Big Liar and His Los­ing Lit­tle Liars” (The best col­umn of them all)/“Why Trump Could Win Again” (Sad­ly, not nec­es­sar­i­ly a crazy premise.)
All of them were, to one degree or anoth­er, wor­thy efforts. But when even FOX News and the New York Post are giv­ing His Trump­ness short-shrift, is it not time for the main­stream media to afford a “right­ly timed pause” and leave him to the late-night comics, for whom MAGA world is the gift that keeps on giv­ing? (And yes, I know I just con­tributed to what I derided.)
 
                   TONE DOWN THE ENTITLEMENT                    

A pause in the whin­ing about how much Amer­i­can motorists have to “pay at the pumps” every time the oil pro­duc­ers choose to gouge us, wouldn’t go amiss either. Euro­peans, among oth­ers, have been pay­ing more for gas than Amer­i­cans for years and will do so in per­pe­tu­ity. The idea that Amer­i­cans have a right to con­sume fos­sil fuels with­out any lev­el of sac­ri­fice is as per­plex­ing as the con­cept of a God-giv­en right to car­ry semi-auto­mat­ic weapons in public.
Dit­to Amer­i­can politi­cians, who had the temer­i­ty, or maybe that’s per­fidy, to bring their domes­tic pol­i­tics to COP 27, in the form of con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans rail­ing against “rad­i­cal environmentalism”. 
Har­jeet Singh, head of glob­al polit­i­cal strat­e­gy for Cli­mate Action Net­work Inter­na­tion­al, react­ed this way: “The U.S. has no sym­pa­thy, has no empa­thy. Peo­ple are dying, and they don’t even want a sys­tem here to help them.”
Con­sid­er­ing that Pres­i­dent Joe Biden vowed Wash­ing­ton would both hit its cli­mate com­mit­ments and share its progress with the rest of the world, that’s a lit­tle harsh.
How­ev­er, it’s worth not­ing that seen from afar, the Amer­i­can ide­al of the right to the “pur­suit of hap­pi­ness” tends to super­sede con­sid­er­a­tion of the effects “the Amer­i­can way” has on the rest of the world.
It might also be a moment for “a right­ly timed pause” to con­tem­plate the wis­dom of the philoso­pher Immanuel Kant: “Hap­pi­ness is not an ide­al of rea­son, but of imagination”.

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