If nothing else, Donald Trump has done the world a valuable service by focusing attention on the American political system.

A highly polarising figure, Trump has challenged America to examine what they consider appropriate character, behaviour and values in a leader. As a result, the very word “leader” has acquired a dangerous edge: Trump is messing with what we take for granted at the conceptual level.

What delicious complications this raises! Post-colonial discourse on democratisation and development has privileged America and Western Europe as the ideal, so naturally any aberrations that tarnish the said ideal are of interest.

If Americans are willing to follow a man who is far outside the norms and conventions that have guided notions of “fitness to serve,” then what makes them any different from people who follow other leaders who are similarly outside of convention but who give their followers what they need?

The American voter starts to look remarkably like the African voter or the Arab voter – puzzlingly prone to support a seriously dubious character for reasons that at first glance appear inscrutable. Listen, the jokes have already been made from the superior position of African cynicism.

There is nothing about Trump and his ridiculousness that is unfamiliar to us; he is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect caricature of the people Charles Onyango-Obbo affectionately calls our Village Chiefs. Rich, entitled, chauvinistic, opportunistic and shrewd about it, “eccentric” and more often than not utterly morally bankrupted.

What makes this interesting is that considering how much America has invested in bringing liberation and its version of democracy to the world by setting itself up as the example, what effect has Trump’s candidacy had on our conversations about democracy?

I am specifically interested in colonial hangover sufferers who advance the idea that Africa was liberated “too early.” If we had only been oppressed, exploited and denigrated by Europeans a little bit longer we would have emerged as strong and prosperous independent democracies! If that logic is resolutely blind to the realities of the international regime and full of self-hate, at least it highlights the belief that “more mature” democracies know what they are about.

I contend that they don’t. Look: Trump happens. Theresa May happens. Rodrigo Duterte happens (he’s a bit of a favourite of mine at the moment.) If the Philippines is a thatched house, Duterte seems to be trying to set the roof on fire to smoke out the mosquitoes infesting his domicile.

Alarming statements and extreme actions are no longer the purview of the blessed few, the Zimbabwes and North Koreas. Every generation or two believes that it is probably the last one before the End Days arrive – we human beings are wired to seek elements of the apocalypse in every upheaval they encounter. But in 2016, I don’t think it is hysterical in the least to say something is up.

My worry is that these crises of leadership that we are suffering as a global society will serve to strengthen the arguments of those who prefer autocracies to democracies.

It seems contradictory to me that in times of democratic crisis, instead of doubling down on what democracy is good at – getting rid of bad leaders – we run in the opposite direction. Uncertainty brings out the neediness in us, which may explain our perpetual quest for the strongman. Unfortunately for us, in evolutionary terms, this is an outdated social reflex.

This crisis of electoral representative democracy suggests to me that we need to move further away from the practice of investing an individual with power, not closer.

The Americans are lucky in that Trump has given them an opportunity to examine their current political health to understand how they got to this point in the first place.

Trump is even being so kind as to present an odious caveman code of sexual conduct to test his supporters’ commitment to a Village Chief at any cost.

For those of us observing from the outside and trying to parse the implications for democracy, it is a wonderful learning moment. Maybe even an opportunity to nudge the conversation about how to steer democracy out of the slump it has fallen into since the end of the Cold War and try to bring a bit of contemporary thinking into it.

Speaking of contemporary, next week let’s talk about the need to render extinct the kind of men who think that grabbing women’s crotches is acceptable courtship behaviour. People, we have to exit the cave. We just do.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]