Why US election between Trump and Biden is a moral test, not about democracy or freedom

Imagine a beautiful beach where families are gathered on a clear day with blue skies. Some families are building sandcastles, others are playing on the beach. No one is watching as a tsunami with different waves approaches the shore.

This is the vivid story told by Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The first wave is the pandemic, followed by economic recession, then financial crisis and finally the big wave of climate change.

Why are people and politicians still building sandcastles and looking the other way? A more intriguing question is what kind of sandcastles are still being built. One is called democracy. Another, freedom.

In less than two weeks, we will (hopefully) see the outcome of the US presidential election. Since the 2008 financial crisis, many have lamented that democracy is on the retreat.

Electoral democracy is founded on the idea that each society chooses its own leaders through each citizen having one vote. Abuses of leadership are supposed to be checked and balanced through the trinity of the executive, judiciary and legislative branches.

With the emergence of Brexit, European populists and Donald Trump in 2016, though, the game has become uglier. Political and social views have become polarised as wealth and social inequalities have widened.

Even as land and stock market prices rose when interest rates hit close to zero, politicians were sleepwalking through the seismic shift in social conditions while the bottom half of society became insecure from job losses to technology, globalisation and immigration. Centrist moderates were seen by both extreme left and right as having sold out to the powerful, and politics became more fractious and contested.

Will building a better democracy sandcastle at this point stop the tsunami crashing down on us all? Surely the answer is to run and fight another day. When the tsunami comes, all sandcastles will be swept away and there may not even be a beach any more.

However, some will survive and the rebuilding must begin. This is where the freedom sandcastle plays a critical role. Individual freedom is an anchor of the Western value system, now spread through globalisation.

Individual freedom comes with social obligations, though. The pandemic puts this in sharp focus. Many Americans and Britons feel that wearing a mask impinges on their individual freedom, but not doing so and not following social distancing rules have so far cost them more than 222,000 and 44,000 Covid-19 deaths respectively.

On the assumption that each life costs US$10 million, the cost to these societies are so far US$2.2 trillion and US$447 billion respectively. Former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers has calculated that the total cost of this pandemic for the US economy so far is US$16 trillion, nearly three-quarters of 2019 GDP.

We cannot blame democracy or freedom of choice for such loss of life. The East Asian economies of Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have a combined 2,565 deaths, showing that different systems can produce better pandemic management results than, say, Sweden, which has 5,929 deaths with only a fraction of the population.

We have not yet beaten Covid-19 and the virus is mutating as it spreads. Vaccines are coming, but their usage will not be widespread until next year. Winter is coming and death rates will increase as seasonal influenza spreads. More than ever, we should be prepared when the second and third waves of economic distress, unemployment and bankruptcies surface by next spring.

So why are we still building sandcastles as the waves crash down?

All this boils down to human psychology and reaction to unknowns. Depending on experience and knowledge, as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami showed, some may still wander down to the beach to figure out what is going on. There were more than 227,000 deaths then, but not everyone ran for their lives. Many were brave enough to help others and stayed to help people flee.

Clearly those who deny the current tsunami have an education problem, which boils down to a moral issue. Is your individual freedom so important that you deny this could put your loved ones and many other people at risk? It is not just a health issue as the damage to the economy could be even more devastating.

Central banks printing money cannot stem the losses because they do not address structural issues exposed by the pandemic. Denial, blaming others, sheer incompetence and unwillingness to work with each other at all levels of society in the face of disaster have been hallmarks of economies most devastated by the pandemic.

All this shows that while the science-based approach is validated by the health crisis, human beings do not decide by facts alone. Our economic models based on dollars and cents cannot measure the agony of the masses when they lose their jobs, health and dignity. At the heart of human choice is ultimately a moral issue. Do you care only for yourself, or do you care about other people and Mother Nature?

A Biden win would offer US-China relations a brief window of hope

This is why the US election is ultimately a moral test, not a democratic or freedom issue. Irrespective of who wins or whether the election results in a constitutional crisis, the test is how the individuals involved – the voters, candidates, Supreme Court judges, attorney general and others – decide on their personal sense of moral values. Their decisions in the coming days will have far-reaching consequences for themselves and the rest of us.

We will soon know whether we have four more years of shambolic chaos or perhaps a period of healing after the pandemic. God bless America, and pray for us all.

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker and financial regulator. The views expressed here are entirely his own