Whom does the possibility of a coup in the US make weep, whom laugh?

Never-ending wars, turmoil, civil wars, occupations and coups, systematic human rights violations, imprisonment and torture... These are the scenes we have grown accustomed to seeing often in the Middle East.

Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Turkey: picture the images of what each of them has lived through over the last 10 years as reflected on television screens. This is exactly what a friend of mine with a strong sense of irony was doing some time ago. "Look at an image reflected on television screens from over there!" he had said. "And take a look as well at the screens that reflect daily political or social life in the US and Europe. They have no action to show, no blood, no fighting, no violence. The events that make news are people playing golf, the gossip events of high society, and so on."

While comparing these two scenes, my friend of course grieved over the fate our own geography has been subjected to, but he was not unaware of the share in the making of this fate of precisely those whose prosperous lives are reflected on the screens. Who does not know that the US, in order to sustain its own economic prosperity, is constantly imposing on the Middle East and every part of the world orders of sometimes "creative", sometimes merely "sustainable" chaos? Could the conflicts and instabilities experienced here possibly be solely the result of the will, the temperament and the disagreements of the people who live in this geography? Had these peoples who lived together for centuries waited for these days to enter such deep conflicts?

Undoubtedly, these scenes are for the most part the work of the way the US and Europe have governed this geography. The claim that the US is trying to export democracy to the Middle East or any other part of the world is actually just a notorious fallacy of a rumor. Not even the US itself believes it. On the contrary, all it does, sometimes even under this pretext, is to strangle on the spot the emerging possibilities of democratic development. Because it is very hard for the US or the EU to govern countries ruled by democracy.

I feel like asking my friend, who had been making that comparison for some time, what he has been feeling lately. Especially what has been happening in the US in the Trump era has reached a level that would put any Middle Eastern country to shame. As the country's democratic traditions and conventions are razed, events show every day how short the distance is between democracy and authoritarianism in the country regarded as the cradle of democracy.

In contrast with the chaos experienced during the Covid19 pandemic in the US and throughout Europe, Turkey's way of dealing with the problem had turned the picture completely upside down.

And most recently, the night when members of Congress were to elect the president, there was the storming of Congress, with Trump not recognizing the election results and provoking his fervent supporters by claiming that the election had been rigged. An event unprecedented in US history. Whether it will be seen again, who knows. But it is certain that this event is a sign of a serious fracture taking place deep within American society. It is also very clear that the event cannot simply be reduced to Trump's personal traits, to his exceptional personality that has not internalized America's democratic conventions. Masses that can be set into such extraordinary action by a single word from Trump give signs of a far deeper fracture in the depths.

The first great prejudice about Trump was that, with his truly exceptional personality and his unpredictable attitudes and behavior, he had no serious counterpart in the US and, as someone elected by accident, might quickly lose his support. The most important factor supporting this prejudice was the opinion polls and the open stance against him of most of the media, art and famous names.

Yet, in contrast to these attitudes that came to the surface, there is also a kind of silent majority, and Trump, whatever one may think of the goodness or badness of the values he represents, is the voice of this majority. Even in the election he lost, he managed to get the votes of 75 million people, unrepresented in media, art and business circles, quiet but with anger at the point of exploding. It is not hard at all to foresee that these votes will be a great headache for the US's governance from here on.

These masses demand a change in American society, and it is very difficult for Biden, who is nearing eighty, and his administration to meet these demands for change. In any case, when these demands are met, nothing will remain of America's democratic values. In either case the US is being dragged toward a deep impasse.

Supporting dictators in the rest of the world while strengthening democracy in its own country was bound sooner or later to come back to it, and it did. As things stand, the US has a democracy that is hard to sustain, whose fragility has greatly increased, and which is under threats.

It is a truly sad and worrying development for the US. But that this sadness was not shared in most parts of the world, and indeed that in many places people watched these developments like an exciting movie scene, almost hoping things would get even worse, should be all the more saddening and, equally, thought-provoking for the US.

Immediately after the 11 September attacks, the son Bush had the sense to ask "why do they hate us?" Although it was a question whose answer he did not seek properly, on the occasion of this event Biden should take his seat in the chair seeking an answer to this question: "why did such a calamity threatening American democracy not much grieve others?"