日志
America's democracy is broken 美国大选让敬畏美国民主的国家嘲讽
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Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Counterpoint: Democracy Is Broken
Opinion: America's democracy is broken and they can't fix it
PAUL MCGEOUGH November 5, 2016
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said, "Our country is a total mess," as he made his case for becoming the next president.
OPINION: The crazy campaign to elect the 45th US president, a choice between the two least trusted candidates ever to seek the White House, is just the latest in a long line of sick jokes by a self-serving political class that's broken every democratic bone in the body politic.
Americans now think more highly of cockroaches than of their Congress – as few
as 20 per cent trust Washington to do what is right.
But, instead of fighting for their own best interests, voters view the collapse and chaos as spectators, hostages to a process in which they have become powerless.
Polarisation is more toxic than ever and the two Americas literally can't stand each other – half of Republicans and a third of Democrats say they'd be unhappy if a son or daughter married someone from the other party.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
The United States has never been more disunited.
Amidst gridlock in Washington, the parties don't connect. The nation's founders insisted on a process of bargains and compromise, but today's tribal warriors will have none of that – so landmark legislation like Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act, the antidote to the catastrophic 2007 financial collapse, were carried with zero Republican votes.
A Texas senator thinks he's the Lone Ranger and actually manages to shut down the entire government. Members of Congress become independent contractors – picture Obama on bended knee, pleading with members of his own party to support Obamacare; and the Tea Party hatchet men, 70 per cent of whose followers disapprove of their own congressional leadership, hold those same leaders to ransom because ideologically they must never compromise – political enemies have to be destroyed.
Ousted by his own in 2015, Republican House speaker John Boehner explained his predicament: "You learn that a leader without followers is simply a man taking a walk."
Organised labour has been decimated and the elite gorge themselves in the midst of obscene income disparity. But wage stagnation didn't just pop from the ether – it was created to enrich the privileged at the expense of the unwashed. The moneyed class has bought the political process – but it took an absurd Supreme Court decision called Citizens United to let them close the deal.
We're into the 21st century, but at times it might be the Dark Ages.
Brian Snyder/Reuters
Politically, ordinary Americans are virtually powerless.
In Flint, Michigan, much of the city was made to drink lead-poisoned water. The whole country is swept by an epidemic of opioid addiction, killing as many as 50,000 people a year – and Congress is accused of being more sensitive to protecting Big Pharma's US$9b-a-year opioid trade than to remedying the cause.
Secretaries pay more tax than hedge fund managers. A fat cat like Donald Trump pays no income tax at all; and he gets away with writing up the business losses he inflicted on others as his own, thereby incurring a billion-dollar tax write-off.
No surprise then, that research confirms that politically, ordinary Americans are virtually powerless.
Former Republican House speaker John Boehner was ousted by right-wing rebels in 2015. Gary Cameron/Reuters
A landmark 2014 study found the majority in the US does not rule: "When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organised interests, they generally lose ... the impact of average citizens' preferences [is] ... near-zero."
The US has dropped to 20th on the Economist Intelligence Unit's ranking of democracies – down three places since 2007. It's now tucked in below Uruguay.
And still Americans affect a certain disdain for the rest of the world, tying their historic virtues in a package of red, white and blue ribbons and calling it "American exceptionalism".
Donald Trump doesn't pay a cent in income taxes. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
But former Democratic congressional adviser Tad Daley detects an unravelling: "More and more Americans have a vague and increasing sense that our government is simply incapable of addressing basic challenges like immigration, guns, entitlements, trade, climate and environment, privacy and security, the federal budget, spiralling inequity, money in politics ... or even a health emergency like the Zika virus.
"It's no longer hyperbole to say that American democracy is broken," he concludes.
Enter Trump, the nasty candidate, of whom one of the pundits opined: "Maybe he didn't create an appetite for authoritarianism. Maybe an appetite for authoritarianism created him."
A Donald Trump supporter at a campaign event in North Carolina. Carlo Allegri/Reuters
Thanks to Trump, we learned that the GOP's supporters are not as conservative as the right-wing radio talkshow hosts whom the party's establishment had blithely thought would keep the rank-and-file in line.
That same rank and file's visceral response to Trump's opposition to global trade deals, his savage attacks on migrants, defence of social security and other entitlement programmes the GOP was forever insisting must be cut, is a detonation that will reverberate through the party long after this election – that is, if the party survives.
Former GOP congressman Tom Davis says the leadership thought "we're smart, they're stupid". But ordinary Americans were not so stupid as to not feel the pain of a near 50-per-cent cut in median net worth in the aftermath of the 2007-09 Great Recession. If they didn't lose their own home, they knew someone who did; and as jobs disappeared and wages flattened, more than half of GOP voters turned against the holiest of GOP sacred cows: free trade.
Bernie Sanders was a serious threat to Hillary Clinton's presumed ownership of the Democratic nomination. Brian Snyder/Reuters
The populists were rejecting not just the elite, but their movement's intellectuals as well.
In the 1990s, Bill Clinton sold globalisation as the "bridge we built to the 21st century" – but on crossing, most Americans found it was just another version of Sarah Palin's infamous bridge to nowhere.
Ordinary Americans were utterly unsurprised by an economist's report that shocked Western governments early in 2016 – on sifting 25 years of data, Branko Milanovic revealed that a global process of wealth redistribution was afoot, but unevenly.
It turns out globalisation's winners were Asia's emerging middle and upper classes and the West's notorious one-percenters, all of whose real incomes had almost doubled since the 1980s.
But the American and European working and middle classes were the biggest losers – their earnings barely shifted. And nobody in the corridors of power, Republican or Democrat, seemed to care too much.
In hindsight, that the GOP deception held for so long is remarkable. As set out by The New Yorker's George Packer, it was an impossible construct:
"[2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt] Romney, who belonged to a class that greatly benefited from cheap immigrant labor, had to pretend to be outraged by the presence of undocumented workers. Lower-middle-class Midwestern retirees who depended on Social Security had to ignore the fact that the representatives they kept electing, like [House Speaker] Paul Ryan, wanted to slash their benefits.
"Veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan returned to Indiana and Texas embittered at having lost their youth in unwinnable wars, while conservative pundits like Bill Kristol kept demanding new [wars] – but their shared contempt for liberal elites kept them from noticing the Republican Party's internal conflicts."
Clear proof this deception had been seen through came in the madness of the March primaries, when a Trump supporter told The New York Times: "I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party." And from his buddy: "We're going to use Trump to either take over the GOP or blow it up."
Meanwhile, another insurgent candidate, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, became a serious threat to Hillary Clinton's presumed ownership of the Democratic nomination by espousing the same trade-and-jobs arguments as Trump, and stoking the anger and anxiety of millennials burdened with fat college debts and minimal job prospects.
The Democrats are not without their problems – they like a good trade deal too. But the crisis is more acute on the right. Ben Domenech, publisher of the conservative Federalist magazine, puts it this way: "Trumpism is not the same as populism or the New Right, and it speaks to something much worse than an intellectual crisis – it's what happens when no one trusts anyone any more."
Some find it challenging that so much blame is heaped on the Republican Party, but that's the considered view of many – inside and outside the party.
In a seminal work – published first in 2012 as It's Even Worse Than It Looks and updated in 2016 as It's Even Worse Than it Was – the respected DC duo Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write: "The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
"When one party moves this far from the centre of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country's most pressing challenges."
Still, not enough Americans wanted to do anything about it. When Arabs had had enough of their overlords, they attempted a revolt, rising-up and paying in blood in what became known as the Arab Spring. American are required merely get off the couch, pop around the corner and cast a damned vote – but still no American Spring.
Belgians [87 per cent], Turks [84 per cent] and Swedes [83 per cent] head to the polls in droves; but Americans can't be bothered – in 2012, just 54 per cent voted, a turnout that ranked 31 among the 35 OECD countries. And that's among registered voters – in a country in which voting is not compulsory, an estimated 50 million more "could-be" voters are not on the rolls.
HOW THE GERRYMANDER WORKS
To the extent that the rigging of the system is such a distortion, Americans might be forgiven their resignation.
In other developed countries independent commissions draw boundaries by a set of national rules; in the US, the task is commandeered as war booty by the party in power in each state, whose weapon of choice is mapping technology that is so refined, they can surgically excise a residential block or even a single house from a district to gerrymander the result they want.
The only ballot that matters, then, is the ideologically-driven primary election to select the dominant party's candidate, a smaller, intra-party contest in which would-be nominees skew towards an uncompromising diehard base – as few as four per cent of all eligible voters in the district.
So another extremist congressman packs his bags for DC where, instead of representing his constituents he'll represent the interests of his corporate donors – those who'll fund his campaigns and those who'll give him a cushy job when he's done with Congress.
In the first dozen of the 2016 primaries, only 17 per cent of eligible GOP voters participated; just 12 per cent of Democrats. So that early, commanding lead that became Trump's springboard to the GOP nomination was based on a fraction of a fraction of nothing.
Take Massachusetts, where egregious boundary rigging more than 200 years ago gave us the term "gerrymander" – because the Democrats have the game stitched up, their primary contests are the only elections that matter, so the 62 per cent of Massachusetts voters who are Republican or independent are disenfranchised.
The Democrats have also sliced and diced Maryland, Connecticut and Illinois. But elsewhere, it's the Republicans who shamelessly wield the redistricting scalpel.
You can't even call it a deceit – the late Paul Weyrich, the religious conservative figurehead, laid it all out in the 1980s: "I don't want everyone to vote – our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."
And just weeks before the 2010 census, GOP strategist Karl Rove wrote an article in The Wall Street Journalthat carried the headline: "He who controls redistricting can control Congress."
Rove and GOP corporate backers invested US$30 million in what became REDMAP, perfectly legal butnonetheless a scam – going all-out in state elections, they captured 675 seats in state legislatures, by which they were able to seize redistricting power over 40 per cent of federal House seats – compared with just 10 per cent in Democratic control.
In a subsequent GOP-controlled redistricting frenzy, Democrat voters were so packed into contorted urban seats that at the 2012 election the Republicans reaped a bonanza, in seven states in particular: Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
With 107 seats up for grabs in those states, the parties polled neck and neck – GOP, 16.7 million votes; Democrats, 16.4 million votes – by which an evenish 54-53 party split of the seats might have been expected. Instead, the Republicans 'won' 73 seats to the Democrats' 34 seats and Karl Rove's thesis that control of redistricting would deliver control of Congress was proved.
District boundaries are so uncompetitive that only 33 of 435 house seats are deemed to be genuinely competitive in the 2016 election. Even a uniform 6 per cent swing to the Democrats will not deliver control of the House to them.
THE QUEST TO 'SHRINK' DEMOCRACY
On a nod from the Supreme Court in 2013, more than 20 states began another exercise in crimping democracy, ruthlessly rolling back voting rights. In the same year, the man who now is governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, parried charges that his state's latest gerrymander was racially motivated, explaining: "[It's] designed to increase the Republican Party's electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats."
But if a gerrymander doesn't disenfranchise a voter, there's a good chance that one of a raft of Republican-backed voter suppressions will – all dressed up as necessary to counter electoral fraud, which is virtually non-existent in the US.
In Georgia, which seemingly became more competitive in the lead-up to this election, civil rights activists were fighting to thwart Republican tricks to block likely Democrat voters – as many as 100,000 new voter registrations simply were not being processed; in one of the biggest counties, just one early-voting station was opened; in a predominantly black precinct, there was a bid to move a polling station from a gymnasium to the less-friendly confines of the sheriff's office; pleas to extend voter registration deadlines because hurricane Matthew had blown through were denied; and in a spurious purge of almost 35,000 names from the rolls, 64 per cent were black – just 14 per cent white.
That 2013 Supreme Court decision was based on a belief by the justices that deliberate racial discrimination was a thing of the past. But affronted by the GOP's immediate resort to Jim Crow tactics, the courts have taken to ripping them apart, in language that is astounding.
In a 'gotcha!' decision against North Carolina in July, the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit accused the state legislature of targeting African-American voters with "almost surgical precision".
In North Carolina, the Republican gerrymandering was so preposterous that the
Democrats, who actually won 51 per cent of the midterm vote in 2012, captured
just four out of the state's 13 seats in the US Congress.
In striking down new Wisconsin voter restrictions that were sold as a counter to voter fraud, US District Judge James Peterson was withering, observing that the state "could not point to a single instance of known voter impersonation in Wisconsin at any time in the recent past".
The tricks vary from state to state: Put fewer polling stations in minority communities; get the cops to harass them about their voter registration; insist on them producing the kind of photo ID they are least likely to have; set aside their votes if they can't prove US citizenship; restrict access to absentee and early voting; and launch criminal investigations into voter registration drives.
Behind all this voter suppression, there's a serious push among conservatives to "shrink" democracy.
A vocal proponent of this is Trump supporter and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel – he seriously argues that capitalism has to be saved from democracy. The gist of Thiel's argument is that the creation of the welfare state and allowing women to vote has empowered too many people who are hostile to capitalism.
The Federalist's David Harsanyi is a believer too. In an op-ed in The Washington Post earlier this year, he shamelessly urged the "weeding out of millions of irresponsible voters who can't be bothered to learn the rudimentary workings of the Constitution, or their preferred candidate's proposals or even their history".
Trump's riff about "real" Americans – "we" native-born whites, against the black and brown "others" – plays to the same ideal. In the glory days that the GOP candidate promises to restore, the riff-raff would be kept in their place.
Trump is right – things are rigged; Americans, all of them, do need to take back their country. But as much as the GOP candidate likes to think everything is about him, the truth is that a vast conspiracy, to coin a Clintonism, has been accomplished in the broad light of day – but the victims are the American people.
In a recent Gallup poll 67 per cent of voters said Trump has neither the personality nor the leadership qualities for the presidency. They at least, appreciate that the makeover America needs requires more intellect and sophistication than, say, gatecrashing a house party.
So Hillary Clinton gets the nod? That would be a pity too – as a status quo candidate she represents more of the same; perhaps some tinkering at the edges, but certainly none of the root-and-branch surgery that this country needs.
- Sydney Morning Herald
GRIFF WITTE
Last updated 14:43, November 7 2016
The dramatic 2016 US presidential campaign has had everything from xenophobia to conspiracy theories, with perhaps the most unpopular nominees in the modern-era as its stars.
The United
States presidential election – America's quadrennial chance to showcase to the
world how democracy works in the most powerful nation on Earth – has become
instead an object lesson in everything that ails a country.
Debates devoid of issues and deep in the gutter of personal insult.
Interference from foreign intelligence services. Endless leaked emails, and FBI
investigations that could extend long beyond Tuesday.
Americans may cringe watching their own election at close range. But the world's reaction has been, in a sense, even more poignant and foreboding.
People in small
and distant countries who count on the US to stand up for democratic values
have been astonished to see the essential components – a free press, the rule
of law, respect for the outcome of elections – trammelled.
READ MORE:
* Opinion: America's democracy is broken
* US Election: When two tribes go to war
Long-standing allies have been left to wonder whether the essential American
character has changed, and whether the United States can be relied on when it
counts.
CARLOS BARRIA/Reuters
Never before has a presidential campaign done so much to directly undermine the United States' core credibility.
Adversaries have looked on with glee, surprised at how easily the country that casts itself as the greatest can be knocked off kilter.
And though the election has yet to come – with the outcome very much in doubt – the damage to American moral standing may already be done.
"I heard the election is being controlled by Russia. Is it true?" asked Anas Al Abed, 27, a Beirut cafe worker who said he has been following the campaign closely ever since he read that the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, had bragged about assaulting women.
"America always spoke to Arab countries as if they had so much to learn," he said. "And now we see their own democracy involves choosing between a woman from a dynasty and a man who says the system is manipulated. If that's democracy, then we don't want it."
This is not the first time that America's international reputation has been dealt a grievous blow. In recent years, the Iraq War brought global perceptions of the United States tumbling, only to be revived by the election of President Barack Obama – who remains broadly popular overseas.
But political analysts worldwide said that never before have they seen a presidential campaign do so much to directly undermine America's core credibility.
"It's very shocking and disturbing to see this happening on such a scale in the richest country on Earth," said Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University in Tokyo.
It is not, of course, happening in a vacuum. Democracies from Southeast Asia to Western Europe are under pressure from within as populism and xenophobia surge. Autocrats from Moscow to the Middle East, meanwhile, are feeling emboldened.
"It isn't just about this election," said Jacob Parakilas, deputy head of the US and Americas programme at the London-based think tank Chatham House. "It fits into a broader framework of rising nationalism and the destruction of existing political norms."
But with the breakdown of those norms happening so vividly in America – a nation that proselytises the virtues of democracy more aggressively than any other – the global swing toward less free and open societies could accelerate no matter who wins Tuesday.
"This campaign makes the implicit argument that the US model of liberal democracy isn't what it's cracked up to be," Parakilas said.
America's top diplomat has acknowledged as much. Speaking to students in London on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry called the campaign "downright embarrassing" and said that it has already damaged American influence.
Thanks to the election, he said, he is greeted with skeptical looks – or worse – when he sits down "with some foreign minister in another country or with the president or prime minister of another country and you say: 'Hey, we really want you to move more authoritatively towards democracy'."
In the state-controlled media of America's non-democratic rivals and adversaries, the campaign has only exposed what they long knew the country to be – a declining and morally bankrupt power.
"We are seeing the failure of US democracy," wrote Zhang Zhixin, an expert on American politics at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations.
The message is not only that America is floundering but also that China, prosperous and stable, is growing strong in its place.
With Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte promising to "separate" from the United States and realign with China's "ideological flow", Communist Party-approved writers seem to see an opening for more shifts in China's favour.
A recent piece in Xinhua, the state-controlled news wire, cited work by Li Wen, an academic at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences, who argued that instability in the US shows the "twisted mentality of an empire moving downhill".
In Russia, the campaign has not exactly reshaped perceptions of the United States. But it has reshaped Russians' perception of what their country is capable of doing to the US.
Russian observers barely hide their joy at the notion that Americans think that Moscow has the power to affect the outcome of a US presidential election.
"When we hear that we are sitting here in Moscow and interfering in America's life, that makes us all happy," said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who served at the Kremlin between 1996 and 2011.
"We don't need to do anything; we can just sit here and organise elections in the United States."
Like most Russians, Pavlovsky is unwilling to acknowledge the US administration's accusation that Kremlin-sponsored hackers have been meddling in the campaign.
But in a country where people feel the US has overplayed its hand as the world's sole superpower, American officials' consternation over Russia's suspected role is seen as payback – and a possible political advantage.
"The feeling is that the chaos, the turbulence that all this is causing in the American electoral process is good for Russia," said Alexei Venediktov, editor in chief of Ekho Moskvy radio. "Whoever wins will have to deal with domestic upheaval and internal problems, rather than paying attention to Russia, and that is a good thing."
To US allies, however, it is potentially disastrous. Trump has struck fear into the hearts of European leaders with suggestions that he may not come to the aid of fellow NATO members if they are attacked. Several have broken with protocol – which calls for strict neutrality – and denounced the Republican nominee, while praising his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
But Europe is confronting its own backlash against international cooperation.
Across the continent, anti-immigration politicians who want to pull their nations out of the European Union have exulted in Trump's success.
"Until about a year ago, when I would meet American counterparts, they'd ask: 'What is happening in Europe?'" said Marietje Schaake, a member of the European Parliament. She listed far-right leaders and parties that no longer seem so alien in the US.
"We're seeing a shared challenge arising: challenges to the open economy and open democracies," she said.
Among some American allies, the US campaign has even been a strange source of comfort because their own politics no longer look so bad.
Israel, known for its bare-knuckles brand of political jousting and for corruption cases that have snared presidents and prime ministers, has been unusually fixated on this year's race.
"Our politicians are perhaps not as crooked or corrupt as yours," said Jonathan Rynhold, a political scientist at Israel's Bar-Ilan University. "Ours are fairly mild by comparison."
In India, too, the effect of such an ugly contest has been surprisingly validating.
"For many middle-class Indians, the US is a model for democracy. But watching the election campaign there now makes Indians feel slightly superior," said Shiv Visvanathan, a government professor at OP Jindal Global University.
It has also been deeply disquieting.
"How can such a trigger-happy nation be part of the great nuclear club, and take global decisions?" he asked.
Many in the Arab world are asking similar questions and are particularly unnerved by the rise of Trump, said HA Hellyer, a political analyst and author of a book on the 2011 Egyptian uprising.
"The fact he's a genuine contender has damaged American standing almost everywhere – not least within the Arab world and the wider region," Hellyer said. "His discourse, which has attacked Muslims ... is not marginal. It is now mainstream, and that's deeply troubling."
The worry has also been especially acute in Mexico, where opinions toward Trump are overwhelmingly negative – no surprise given that his signature issue is building a border wall. He also launched his campaign by calling Mexican migrants "rapists".
Mexicans accustomed to feeling indifferent toward the US presidential campaign have found themselves actively rooting for Trump to lose.
"For the first time there is a distinction: There's an American good guy and an American bad guy," said Ilán Semo, history professor at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. "It was never like this in Mexico."
The angst over Trump is so deeply felt that the peso plunges every time his poll numbers rise, and there could be an immediate recession in Mexico if he comes to power, said Jonathan Heath, an economist in Mexico City.
Anxiety about the presidential contest extends far south of any potential future border wall.
Latin America has been shifting back toward the political centre in recent years after a long period dominated by left-wing populism. But the new crop of pro-business leaders has found that no one in the presidential race is willing to stick up for the principles of free trade and open markets that the US has been pushing in the region for years.
Political whiplash is happening in Africa, too. For many on the continent, Obama's election had been a triumph, evidence that American democracy could be a model of liberalism and tolerance.
Now, eight years later, Trump's threats to jail his political opponents mimics the behaviour of some of the continent's own less-than-democratic leaders.
Among them is President Pierre Nkurunziza of the small central African nation of Burundi. He was sworn in for a third term last August, and exiled activists have been lobbying the United States to help halt the extrajudicial killings and repression that have characterised his new term.
The campaign, however, has offered little cause for optimism in a country such as Burundi, far from America's geopolitical priorities but in dire need of help from a superpower.
Elvis Banyankiye, a 28-year-old Burundian who is now studying in France, said he had once hoped the Americans would do more to pressure his government to stop human rights violations. Watching America's presidential campaign stagger from one new low to the next, his expectations sank.
"The US has been a model for how to conduct elections. We used to see tolerance in the debates," he said.
"We are losing confidence in that."
- The Washington Post
美媒：美国大选让敬畏美国民主的诸多国家转而嘲讽
2016-11-07 16:26:10
【观察者网综合】当地时间11月8日，是2016美国大选投票日。说起这场总统大选，不仅很多美国民众受不了，连美国国务卿约翰·克里都曾说，此次大选让美国在国际社会丢脸，也让他在推广“美式民主”时感到困难。但是，“伤害”还远远没有结束。近日又有美媒发现，连其他国家的民众也在公开嘲讽美国大选。
11月5日，美国《华盛顿邮报》在一篇报道中指出，黎巴嫩人认为，美国大选就是个糟糕的笑话；非洲布隆迪记者则认为，大选使美国颜面尽失；中国人诊断美国为一个“没落帝国”；而克里姆林宫的政治家们则拍手称快。
《华盛顿邮报》报道截图
报道称，原本四年一次的美国大选，是用来向世界展示民主在世上第一强国是如何运作的。但现在，大选却成为了损害自由和希望“灯塔”的反面教材。
报道表示，原本仰靠美国来支撑民主价值的偏远国家和小国人民，现在却发现，组成民主的几个要件，例如：自由的新闻媒体、法治和尊重选举结果，这些条件通通被扼杀了。
印度一名社会科学家希夫（Shiv Visvanathan）表示，“对许多中产阶级的印度人而言，美国曾是民主的模范样本。但看到今年的竞选活动后，印度人还自觉稍微高美国一等。”他接着称，“一个如此好战的国家怎么可以担任核武国家成员一员，并还可做全球性决定呢？”
此外，美国《纽约时报》11月5日也刊文表示，相较于两位总统候选人，此次大选对美国造成的影响更严重。
《纽约时报》报道截图
报道称，美国是被其“民主理想”所定义的国家，但现在，却同样成了反民主力量的受害者。
澳大利亚一名公共关系公司的总经理莱尔（Lyall Mercer）称，“世界上多数国家已不再敬畏美国了。”
黎巴嫩记者沙西姆（Hisham Melhem）也表示，就算在中东最反美的时候，总还是有部分在美国读过书的人向往美国。但是，现在他们当中有许多人已不再认为美国是进步和启蒙的灯塔。
另据美国《外交政策》5日报道，2016美国大选对美式民主来说是一个颇糟糕的广告。希拉里也许是热衷于美国自由主义霸权的捍卫者，并积极想重申美国的“领导”地位。但此次大选可以清楚看出，多数的美国人并不赞同。更详细的说，大部分支持特朗普、桑德斯等参选人的民众就是不希望看到美国再过度干涉它国。
《外交政策》报道截图
报道称，查尔斯·科赫研究所（Charles Koch Institute）上周发表的调查发现，只有14%的民众认为，自2001年以来，美国的外交政策使美国变得更加安全。
