Our Third-World Future

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On October 30 of this year, Botswana will hold its 13th set of general elections.

The Republic of Botswana rarely makes international news.  With only 2.6 million inhabitants, this southern African country ranks between Mississippi and New Mexico in population.  Its land is mostly empty desert, and its only noteworthy industry is diamond mining.  Yet Botswana’s inhabitants do have something to be proud of: according to the people who keep track of these kinds of things, their country, which has always had clean and peaceful power transfers since its independence from Britain in 1966, is the longest-running democracy in Africa.

That may be about to change.

Ian Khama is the mixed-race son of Botswana’s first president, Sir Seretse Khama, and his English wife Ruth Williams.  He served as Botswana’s fourth president between 2008 and 2018.  After leaving office, the younger Khama fell out hard with his chosen successor, Mokgweetsi Masisi.  It began with disputes over economic policy, but by the end of 2021, Khama, fearing for his life and liberty, had fled to South Africa.  The next year he was charged with numerous crimes, including money-laundering, receiving stolen property, and illegal firearms possession, though apart from the firearms charge (apparently a matter of Khama not getting the proper licenses to arm his security detail), Masisi’s government was unable to produce any substantial evidence.

During his years in exile, Khama helped organize and campaign for Botswana’s opposition parties.  At one point he even posted a video of himself dancing while wearing a hat emblazoned with “Make Botswana Great Again.”  This September, Khama finally put everything on the line by returning to his home country in the run-up to the election, in spite of his arrest warrant, though after turning himself in at court, he was released until his trial can begin.

Stories like this are a dime a dozen in what Americans usually call the “Third World.”  Everybody knows that a national president — someone who has to divide his attention among thousands of pieces of paperwork during his time in office — doesn’t end up in prison because he failed to see to it that each of his firearms was properly registered.  Rather, what happens is that defeated or cast-off politicians get punished for things that are unlikely even to be noticed in a non–politically charged case.

The list of countries whose presidents have ended up in exile is long.  If one starts in 2014, it includes (in addition to Botswana) the Central African Republic, Ukraine, Georgia, El Salvador, Burkina Faso, Yemen, the Gambia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Sierra Leone.  To the surprise of nobody, these nations provide a fairly even sample of the third-world governing conditions that most Americans want to avoid.

Granted, some of these fugitive ex-presidents are guilty of real corruption, and thus, unlike Ian Khama, they arguably deserve what happened to them.  At the same time, they generally come from countries where corruption is de rigueur and is almost never punished within the ruling party.  Thus, the general pattern — namely, that these defeated politicians are getting punished for things that the law is unlikely to care about when done by someone who still has the government’s good graces — still holds.

Lawsuits regarding election eligibility can be just as blatantly political as the trials of ex-presidents.  For instance, back in April of this year, South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), filed a lawsuit to delist uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), a newly formed opposition party, on the grounds that MK hadn’t met the proper registration criteria.  Yet the supposed irregularities hadn’t been at issue in late 2023, when MK originally registered itself and began competing in by-elections.  What changed was simply that former president Jacob Zuma, who had been ousted in 2018 for (genuine) corruption but remained popular with his Zulu base, started campaigning for MK, leading the ANC to see MK as a threat to its majority.

Fortunately for South Africa, the lawsuit failed.  MK ended up winning about 15 percent of the parliamentary seats in the general election in May, and the ANC was forced to make a coalition with a different opposition party, the center-right Democratic Alliance, in order to stay in power.

We Americans are used to being able to say that these kinds of things don’t happen here.  And yet, as of this year, they do.

The attempt, earlier this year, by activists in several states to strike Donald Trump from the ballot on the grounds that he was an insurrectionist — despite his never being tried for insurrection in criminal court — is a close parallel to what South Africa’s ruling party tried to do to Jacob Zuma’s party.  Both of these failed attempts at ballot removal were legally groundless, and they got attempted at all only because of strong emotions about a particular person.

Unfortunately, the Democrat party has gotten much farther in its criminal prosecutions of the former president.  If one is looking for examples of the misrule of law, then Trump’s conviction on 34 counts in the New York hush money trial can’t be surpassed.

For one thing, it is generally legal, albeit tawdry, for famous men to pay hush money to keep their extramarital affairs under wraps.  So what Trump was actually being tried for was the falsification of business records — he had recorded the transactions, which were handled by his lawyer, as “legal expenses.”  If one grants that this is actually a falsification (a big if), then one runs into the further problem that the statute of limitations for misdemeanors in New York is only two years, and six years had passed between the time of the alleged crimes (2017) and the indictments (2023).

Eric Adams’s prosecutors had another trick up their sleeve: a misdemeanor becomes a felony if done to commit or conceal another crime.  Since the payments were reimbursing Stormy Daniels for her silence during the 2016 campaign season, they constituted an attempt to improperly influence an election and were thus felonies.  This tortured line of thought proved sufficient, and with the aid of pliant Manhattan jurors who seem to have held typical blue-state attitudes toward Donald Trump, Adams got his 34 convictions.

Now compare this byzantine train of reasoning with the much simpler case of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s.  Both Clinton and Trump were trying to keep their adultery under wraps, as untold Americans have done at some point in their lives, but Clinton’s charge — perjury — was much more straightforwardly illegal than what Trump did.  And yet, at the time, the Republicans’ impeachment of Clinton was widely denounced in the media and by legal scholars as a politically motivated intrusion into the president’s private life.  It didn’t get a single vote from a Democrat in either house of Congress, and Clinton was never charged with anything after leaving office.

Punishing an opposition leader for things that are never treated like crimes when done by members of the ruling party (or, for that matter, by non-politicians) is textbook third-world jurisprudence.  And it’s happening in New York just as surely as it’s happening in Botswana or Brazil.

The civil cases against Donald Trump are equally lopsided. His business fraud trial — in which the judgment was handed down in February of this year and is now being appealed — centered on an accusation by the State of New York that he had lied about the value of some of his buildings in order to exaggerate his net worth when applying for business loans.

Since buildings aren’t liquid assets like stocks, currency, or precious metals, it’s normal for people to disagree about their value.  And except at the moment a building is actually sold, there’s no wholly objective way to say who’s right.  Although Trump’s creditors had made their own, lower estimate of his net worth, they weren’t bothered enough by the discrepancy to decline his loan application, and they didn’t lose any money on the loans, which Trump eventually repaid.  But none of this mattered to the state attorneys, who tried Trump anyway, with the judge ordering him to disgorge $354 million in ill-gotten gains.

If this case were to become a precedent and get applied with any degree of consistency, it would make lawbreakers out of practically every real estate developer and venture capitalist in the country.  But of course it never will be applied consistently, because it was never meant to be applied consistently.  It was meant to be used against one specific man.

And then there is the E. Jean Carroll suit, by a woman who claimed, in 2019, that Trump had sexually assaulted her sometime in 1995 or 1996.  Carol had neither informed law enforcement at the time nor produced any evidence apart from her own testimony and that of two friends who claimed she had told them about the incident some two decades earlier.  Nonetheless, Trump was found liable, not only for assaulting Carol, but also for defaming her by accusing her of lying.  (So much for the right of the accused to speak in his own defense!)

It is one thing to dislike Donald Trump, to disagree with his political positions, and to do one’s utmost to defeat him and his party at the ballot box.  It is another thing to transform the United States into a third-world country in an attempt to get rid of him.

We know full well what happens when a nation’s justice system becomes subservient to partisan politics.  We know that El Salvador, Ecuador, Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Brazil aren’t places that we should look to as models for America’s future.

It’s obvious, when you think about it, that if enough people take it for granted that guilt or innocence is merely a matter of which party one belongs to, then corruption will reign.  If being involved in politics means constantly being in trouble with the law, then good men and women will mostly remain aloof and leave the business of governing to the crooks who are used to manipulating the system.  And if politicians can expect a wave of partisan prosecutions every time a new party comes to power, then they’ll realize, sooner or later, that the safest thing to do is to not have any transfers of power at all.

Voters in both Botswana and the United States will have to decide, within the next two weeks, whether they want their countries to go down the same path.  And Americans in particular need to get the idea into their heads that their country is not invincible.  Human nature is just as fallible here as it is anywhere else.  The choice is either to decisively rebuke third-world jurisprudence or keep moving toward a third-world future.

Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree.  You can read more of his writings at his Substack.

Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).

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Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via Flickr, CC BY 2.0 (cropped).