The stakes could not be higher for the US or the world - Joyce McMillan

President Donald Trump talks to members of the media outside of the White House

Once, long ago, I visited Washington DC during the run-up to a US presidential election. It was a foolish time to go there, of course; the whole political class, and most of the media, were away on the campaign trail.

Yet still, I wandered around the quiet city looking at the political architecture of the American state. Above all, I read the mighty inscriptions written across all Washington’s grand buildings, from the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials to a gloriously autumnal Arlington cemetery, where the most memorable paragraphs from the speeches of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy are written in stone, around their graves.

And if my visit taught me one thing about America, it was this: that the United States is a nation founded not on the accidents of geography, tribe, culture and language that shape the politics of Europe, but on those fine words of the enlightenment era embodied in its Constitution, and on the promise of the rule of law that should help those words become a reality.

When Martin Luther King asked, in 1968, that his country should rise up and “live out the meaning of its creed”, he therefore captured not only a great moment of change in American history, but also a great truth about the nation itself: that it is founded on a creed and a set of principles which still form a high point in the history of human aspiration, and that it is always at its greatest when it is at least trying to live up to those principles.

I thought about all of this again this week, as across lockdown Britain, people who are interested in politics - and a few who just enjoy the drama - consider how to spend next Tuesday’s US election night. Edinburgh’s Lyceum Theatre will livestream a cabaret from the stage of its empty auditorium; and elsewhere, millions will stock up on supermarket beer, and prepare for a night in front of the television and on social media. And throughout - barring exceptional disasters elsewhere - the election and its outcome will dominate our news bulletins, with every detail of the count analysed and debated, until well after daybreak on Wednesday.

The reasons for our relatively intense interest in US politics are complex, of course. Certainly no other country outside the UK ever receives such extensive media coverage, for reasons that range from the convenience of a common language, to outright political bias towards of the US model of free market capitalism. Yet even on the political left, we all remain the cultural children of the great American century that began around 1900, shaped as much by the films and music that emerge from that vast, diverse country as by any aspect of our own heritage. And today, the mighty American tech giants spawned since the turn of the millennium - Facebook, Amazon, Google - now dominate our lives like no commercial operations since the dawn of business itself.

Nor is the UK alone in this. China, and a few other remaining dictatorships, may have shut out American culture and social media; but across continents, the sense of America as the home of modernity and of global popular culture still lingers, along with a profound feeling - particularly in Europe - that whatever happens there must soon happen here. A sense remains, in other words, that when the mighty United States chooses, it chooses for all of us; and with mixed emotions - ranging from resentment and schadenfreude to admiration and envy - people therefore tune in to the battle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, as if it might determine for all of us whether we face a future of bully-boy tribal politics, or a return to at least some commitment to dealing rationally with threats like Covid and climate change, and to co-operating with other nations to deal with them.

Yet this time - as the day of decision approaches - there is perhaps a feeling that the stakes are even higher; in that Donald Trump’s approach to politics often seems to conflict directly with the very foundations principles of his country he leads. From his cruel and hate-mongering attitude to immigration to his refusal to condemn white supremacist organisations, his presidency often seems like a deliberate affront to the enlightenment values that underpin the US Constitution. In his public handling of the Covid epidemic, he has allied himself more closely with the liars, fantasists and anti-mask conspiracy theorists of the American far right, than with his own most senior scientific advisors. And his obvious contempt for many key pillars of democracy, from an independent judiciary to the avoidance by those in power of blatant nepotism and conflicts of interest, only adds to the impression of a nation which, far from becoming great again, is rather decaying away from the principles which tended to drive it towards greatness.

The broad thrust of Donald Trump’s presidency, in other words, has been - metaphorically at least - to pull down those temples of high political, moral and intellectual aspiration which, for 250 years, have often made the United States a beacon to people across the globe seeking better lives, and a greater measure of human equality and dignity. And if a United States riven by the Covid crisis chooses Trump again, this time round, it seems almost inevitable that that beacon will begin to fade; and that when the presidential election of 2048 or 2052 comes round, our screens may no longer be tuned to Washington, but to Berlin, Seoul, Taipei or Beijing, and other capitals that faced the challenges of the 21st century with realism and a sense of purpose, rather than with a mixture of incompetence, denial and reactionary fantasy that could lead only to deep, and perhaps irreversible, decline.