Once upon a time, when Trinidad and Tobago was new(ly independent) and there were differing views on how the nation’s path should be charted, our aspiring political leaders needed to organise themselves into groups that shared the same vision.

I sometimes wonder what those founding members of our political landscape would think if they could see where we ended up: aligning ourselves by and large into two teams, one of which plays racial games while the other leans into class warfare.

I’m under no illusions about what our first Prime Minister would think of my politics (I’m aware of his political leanings and not naive about the external pressures he must have faced to make some of the decisions he did), but I wonder if he’d have made those same decisions if he knew we’d end up perpetually picking between team ketchup and team mustard.

Regardless, as the years go by and the politicians on both sides continue to fail at the most basic tenets of leadership, I’ve only become more convinced that party politics has outlived its usefulness in T&T (assuming it ever had much to begin with).

Given the embarrassing display put on by the Democrats and Republicans in the United States last year, I’m similarly convinced that they’re facing a similar problem.

I’ve also realised that—if we don’t hurry up and learn from the glaring mistakes of our neighbor to the north—we’re likely to end up with a similar electoral outcome in the short term. And much bigger challenges in the long term.

Mind you, the first warning signs about the cliff we’re rapidly approaching didn’t emerge from the US 2024 election cycle. I suspect they’ve been a long time in the making, but, for me, they became apparent back in 2010, when a coalition called the People’s Partnership came into power.

I was but a simple UWI almost-grad during that election cycle. Having only returned to the country a few years prior, I didn’t know enough about local politics to have loyalties to either side.

What I saw from my inexperienced vantage point was the incumbent PNM, which claimed to have a vision for the future, and the opposition UNC, which opted to form a coalition of assorted parties offering lots of pretty (if illogical) promises.

If you’d asked me who’d win, I’d have said it would be a PNM victory right up until just before the end. They were the more experienced party leadership-wise and they seemed to have a coherent plan (whether or not they actually intended to carry it out).

But then, as election day drew closer, I remember sensing a change in the wind. The UNC had allied with (and would later subsume) a number of organisations, including an up-and-coming party that seemed to excite a significant number of voters (especially young ones) with its vision for change. Combined with the UNC’s fantastical promises, it seemed like perhaps things wouldn’t be so cut and dried after all.

I knew the PNM was in trouble when they outright refused to engage in a public debate. Perhaps they felt secure in the knowledge that the UNC was selling obvious dreams and expected the public to see that too.

Alas, they did not, and UNC won the election, which the PNM had called two years early. The fact that they proceeded to vindicate at least some of the PNM’s warnings did nothing to mitigate the damage they did. That’s damage from which T&T has yet to fully recover, nine years after they were voted back out of office.

And now it’s an election year again.

The PNM, having long squandered the considerable goodwill it earned from its early handling of the pandemic, appears to be counting on the public to recognise that it is the only adult in the political room.

The UNC is once again forming a coalition and peddling all kinds of wild right-wing promises copy-pasted from the US Republican playbook. The exciting new party (no longer exciting or new) is attempting to shake itself off while seemingly making the same mistakes it made last time.

The public, weary from the significant challenges directly tied to the ongoing global pandemic the PNM currently prefers to ignore (among other assorted geopolitical shenanigans), is disgruntled.

It was giving déjà vu all over again even before the PNM confirmed a leadership change, a move that (while not surprising given the sitting PM’s earlier statements) definitely echoes one of the Democrats’ final fatal decisions.

All of that said, despite the obvious parallels (and the Opposition Leader’s best efforts), US politics don’t really map onto ours. We don’t have local versions of the Democrats or Republicans. But our leadership (and our opposition in particular) is not above leaning into a semblance of their shenanigans (or borrowing their tools—like, say, Cambridge Analytica) to get what they want.

So when I see the stars aligning as they are and look at how things played out just a few months ago up north, I wonder whether the PNM has learned the lessons they should have learned, particularly when the opposition is leaning so hard into conservative propaganda.

I wonder if they’re making a similar mistake to the one their party leader made back in 2010 (and that the Democrats made  just last year), assuming that the public remembers the opposition’s shenanigans and wouldn’t dare let them back into leadership.

I sure hope not.

Because while I personally need only look around at the state of our country to know that the PNM isn’t particularly concerned with righting this ship, I also remember enough about the opposition’s reign (and have been listening closely enough to the propaganda they’re spewing) to know that they intend to sink it.

But I also see that people are fed up with the status quo, which hasn’t been serving the majority of us (and has been getting less and less useful since the “return to normal”).

So I would like to believe that the PNM has enough sense to know that they can’t rely on the Democrat’s failed tactic of “they’re so much worse than we are” to win.

I also hope that they know that they have to do more than play to their captive base and financiers this time around. Because the opposition knows that. That’s why it’s talking coalition: in order to offer disgruntled former PNM voters a more palatable alternative than voting for the UNC.

And then there are the voters who don’t see their interests represented in either major political party. The ones who may have stained their fingers for the PNM last time around, just because they knew there was no way the “sunlight kills covid” crew could be trusted to lead the country through a pandemic.

Having watched the PNM falsely declare an end to the pandemic in order to rush the country back to “a new normal” that turned out to be worse than the old normal while boofing the public for pointing this out, I’m not so sure these voters will be as willing to hold their nose and vote for more of the same this time around.

Will enough of them be willing to do that to counter the UNC’s gains from its Trumpian campaign?

Perhaps.

But perhaps not. Remember when I said that US politics don’t map onto ours? As it relates to our political parties’ leanings, we don’t have a conservative/liberal (but really conservative-lite) political split.

We are a conservative society. Point blank. There are variations of type (partly along religious lines), but by and large, most of us are of a conservative bent. Which is why Kamla Persad-Bissessar, a proud Hindu, is busy parroting fundamentalist Christian propaganda. She knows how many of us—across party lines—agree with at least some of what she’s saying.

And she’s betting it’s enough of us to carry her back to the Office of the Prime Minister.

Given how closely she’s hewing to Trump’s playbook, one only needs to glance north to get a sense of what would happen next.

I’m hoping she doesn’t get that chance and that the rest of us start thinking hard about whether the political path we’re on is the right one for our nation going forward.