![]() Throughout the current US presidential election campaign, and especially in the recent weeks following the tragicomic debate between President Donald Trump and his challenger, Joe Biden, the world has been given a front-row view of the unravelling of a narcissistic, if somewhat psychotic superpower. This has of course elicited great whoops of schadenfreude around the world. Today, democracy seems just as endangered in the US (and in the UK) as it ever was in Kenya and elsewhere. Gone are the heady days when they sought to enforce democracy through manufactured wars and devastating economic sanctions. Countries that just a few years ago were proclaiming the end of history and their triumph as beacons of democracy, liberalism and capitalism – nations that traversed the globe preaching the gospel of good governance, accountability and transparent government to the less fortunate denizens of corrupt, third-world banana republics – have themselves succumbed to the lure of authoritarian, right-wing populism. However, the last four years have done much to draw back the curtain on the hypocrisy that has always lain under the pontification. Still, sitting on the porch of its mansion watching over its global plantation, having grown fat off the wealth it had taken from others, the West came to believe its own rhetoric of racial and moral superiority. Of course, much of the narrative of enlightenment was little more than myth – a convenient fable to cover up the brutal profiteering off the oppression and exploitation of other human beings and destruction of their societies. ![]() And the world it built was meant to reinforce this hierarchy. “The developed world” it has vaingloriously referred to itself as, a model of enlightenment for the rest of “underdeveloped” humanity to follow. The West has made and remade the world as it saw fit and projected itself as the pinnacle of human achievement. For several centuries, the countries of Western Europe and North America, led primarily by the UK and its colonial spawn, the US, have dominated the globe in economic, military and cultural terms.
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