Donald Trump should have been disqualified from running in this election, given his record of not admitting defeat after the last US presidential election. His criminal charges were supposed to mean his expulsion from mainstream politics. His campaign rhetoric, ramblings of bigotry and spite, never crossed the line of paranoia.
But what use is there to the brute force of “can” and “will”? Things that should be obvious in a constitutional democracy are no longer obvious to millions of Americans. There is. We don’t have to wait for every vote to be counted to hope for stronger cultural inoculation against tyranny.
A saner politician would not have been infected by Trump’s candidacy. Why did the democratic immune system fail? He is gifted with a malignant kind of charisma, but for it to be maximally contagious it takes years of economic stagnation, cultural deterioration. Polarization and the fusion of technological innovation were necessary.
When dealing with current anxieties, there is always a risk of glorifying the past. Aggressive nationalism, rife with racism, misogyny, and arrogant masculinity, is an old style of American politics. There is nothing particularly new about polarized social attitudes either. Culture wars have been waged with varying degrees of intensity over the generations.
A distinctive innovation of the 21st century is the separation of political tribes into separate, self-reinforcing information silos. In the past, even in times of intense political division, institutions and rules existed to govern debate. There were commonly agreed upon facts that bound parties with opposing views to a common reality, yet were subject to conflicting interpretations.
This way of managing politics is not outdated, but it is rooted in an analog system. It relies on real-life interactions, contemplation, awkward old institutions, meandering conversations, and small talk. It’s about people gathering in councils and city halls and breaking bread together. This is in contrast to politics, which takes place in digital modes, where the platforms on which discussions take place are also drivers of radicalization. There, disagreements accelerate and develop into irreconcilable hostilities.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaign in final push before Election Day – video
This is not an elegy to a pre-internet golden age of enlightened public discourse. Prejudice, misinformation, sheer stupidity, and abuse of power were abundant in a time when the flow of information was tightly controlled and the amount of information was a fraction of what it is today.
While there is a clear correlation between extreme politics and the rise of social media, causation cannot be proven. But it seems plausible that a highly online culture characterized by short attention spans, narcissism, and impatient consumer desires has a more natural affinity for shallow demagoguery than representative democracy. There is a debate.
It may not meet your exact needs, and perhaps it doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred, but it will be at least somewhat decent for the country as a whole in the coming years. The whole system of voting for potential decision-making candidates feels oddly outdated. It’s alien to the click-and-collect ethos of digital commerce.
Democratic elections are the antithesis of internet transactions. It involves not only the expectation of delayed gratification but also the certainty of dissatisfaction. Compromise, imperfection, and disappointment are the necessary price to pay to sustain a government that seeks to balance the complex demands of a diverse society.
The alternative is political movements such as the Maga cult, which treat elections as cries of anger or jubilant self-fulfillment. The Trump campaign has never interpreted the vote in terms of a citizen’s choice with multiple potentially legitimate outcomes. It will always be either a heroic reinstatement of the legitimate president or a repeat of the deep state conspiracy against him. There is no room for defeat in the script except as fodder for claiming a higher victory.
This is a method of campaigning that goes against the basic premise of democratic voting, that either side can win and that vote-counting actually matters.
It also taps into a culture of political journalism that measures professional integrity by refusing to choose sides. It is strange that America’s liberal media continues to apply its traditional reporting template, which includes the implicit judgment that both candidates have equal democratic credentials. If one of them openly despises democracy, that’s ridiculous.
Many of America’s moderate conservatives and liberal establishment appear to have spent their campaign going through political normalization moves, hoping to exercise their muscle memory and return the system to resilience. it doesn’t work.
But sounding the alarm about the specter of fascism is also ineffective. There is no doubt that Trump’s temperament and ambitions are fascist. He admires dictators, lusts after absolute power, describes political critics as enemies, and boasts of his willingness to use the state’s armed organs to crush them.
Still, calling that kind of politics by its proper name does not provoke any censure among his supporters. Part of the reason is that the currency, which has been compared to 20th century dictators, has become overused and dulled. More than 100 years after the word was coined, the label “fascist” remains too casual as a thoughtless abuse to be remediated as a tool with moral precision and rhetorical impact. has been applied far too often.
This does not mean that the lessons of the 1920s and 1930s are irrelevant to our current predicament. It’s easy to see disturbing similarities, but when white supremacists and card-carrying neo-Nazis are active cadres of a new radical right coalition, the connections are impossible to ignore.
But there is also a danger in liberal opinion leaning too far into familiar cautionary tales from history.
By positioning this threat as an old one, a resurgence of zombie ideology that has risen from the post-war grave, the convenient idea of liberal democracy as a more modern, more highly evolved political system is preserved. Dismissing nationalism as an ideological front for angry whites who lack the skills to compete in a dynamic, globalized economy and express their dissatisfaction as a bigoted reaction to progressive social change. It’s instinct.
While there may be some truth to that analysis, it does not contain any arguments in favor of liberal democracy beyond the implication that only stupid and bad people are opposed to liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, those same people don’t find that argument very convincing.
For those of us rallying to defend liberal democracy today, the troubling truth is that liberal democracy has undergone no appreciable renewal since its peak at the end of the last century. Like nationalists, we too are caught up in nostalgia and wish the future was like the past. As such, we find ourselves constantly testing the limits of analog defenses against viruses transmitted through digital means.
Raphael Behr is a columnist for the Guardian
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