Americans like to think they have the greatest democracy on earth, often for good reason. However, the last four years under the Presidency of Donald J Trump and his Republican enablers, Americans, and the rest of the world, have seen just realised how fragile their democracy is. guest column:Cedric Steele The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President-elect and Vice-President-elect, respectively, is a victory for democracy, despite the fact that Trump has not conceded defeat. The Biden-Harris ticket, with over 75 million vote count, garnered the highest tally in the history of American presidential elections. Worryingly though, Trump’s over 70 million votes is the second highest vote count, ever. Four years with Trump at the helm has been a painful horror show replete with racism, constant lying, ignorant rantings, childish name-calling, unbelievable corruption, wanton illegality topped off with culpable mass murder and devastating unemployment; not to mention the fact that he was impeached. And yet, despite all this, around 47% of the electorate voted for four more years of this madness. Therein lies the tragedy of America. The rest of the world, although blowing a collective sigh of relief at the demise of Trump and hopefully Trumpism, can’t help but ask themselves, how and why would so many Americans return to the ballot boxes and vote for him in such astounding numbers? I think the answer is two-fold; firstly, to coin a phrase, it’s all about race, stupid! America begins and ends with the issues surrounding race, and by that I mean the dynamics between black and white people. Four hundred years of slavery in America plus another hundred or so years of widespread post-emancipation discrimination have caused deep-seated problems that have never been properly addressed. America has never had its version of a truth and reconciliation moment to redress the sins of its past. The perpetrators of the evil that has been meted out against black people have rarely, if ever, been held accountable. Slavery, which was the economic exploitation of blacks through policies of white supremacy, actually pre-dates the birth of the American Republic. Let us not forget that the white population of the southern states opted for secession from the United States, over giving up the holding of humans as chattel to be bought and sold, worked to death, raped as a matter of routine, castrated, whipped mercilessly, lynched, denied all forms of education, among other atrocities, were not only prepared to kill, but also to die for it to continue. History records that these Confederates were in fact traitors to the United States. However, after the bloodiest war America has ever participated in, with the loss of over a recently corrected figure of 750 000 lives, none of the Confederate leaders were ever prosecuted or held to any account. Since the end of the civil war, the inherent racism of the south has undergone a peculiar sanitisation based on misinformation and downright lies. The villains have re-emerged as heroes and now have n