"The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Donald Trump’s record of refusal to concede defeat after the last US election could have disqualified him from running in 2024. His criminal indictments could have meant banishment from mainstream politics. His campaign rhetoric – a rambling litany of occasionally outlandish accusations mixed in with substantive policy – should not have carried beyond the fringe.
But what use are could and should against the brute force of can and does? Things that are supposed to be self-evident in a constitutional democracy have ceased to be obvious to millions of Americans voters fed up with the way things were. We don’t need to wait for all votes to be counted to wish for a stronger cultural inoculation against demagoguery.
A healthier body politic would have resisted Trump’s almost subversive (for breaking established norms) candidacy. How then did the democratic establishment’s immune system fail? Certainly he is gifted with a remarkable kind of resilient charisma, but it also needed a confluence of economic stagnation, cultural polarization and technological revolution over many years to achieve maximum contagion.
There is always a risk of romanticizing the past when coping with anxiety in the present as candidates with varying success from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan have found out. Aggressive nationalism that bristles with anger, tinges of misogyny, fear of the Other and swaggering machismo is an old style in American politics. There is also nothing especially new in polarized social attitudes. Culture wars have been waged with varying degrees of intensity for generations.
What stands out as a uniquely 21st-century innovation is the segregation of political tribes into discrete and self-reinforcing information silos. In the past, even in times of fierce political division, there were still institutions and rules that governed debate. There were commonly agreed facts as a unifying foundation that might be subject to rival interpretation while still connecting partisans of opposite views to some sort of generally understood shared reality.
While that way of conducting politics is not obsolete, it is rooted in systems that seem analogue today. It relies on real-life interactions, deliberations, clunky old institutions that function most times, meandering conversations, small talk. It is the stuff of people mingling in assemblies and town halls, breaking bread together to share views or debate them. It is the opposite of politics played in digital mode where the platforms on which debate is conducted are also furiously driving engines of radicalization, where differences of opinion are accelerated at warp speed into irreconcilable enmities and raw hatred.
“Let’s agree to disagree” has morphed (or degenerated) into “Your momma!” or worse invectives (usually followed by an obscene gesture or two).
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an elegy for some net golden age of enlightened public discourse. Prejudice, misinformation, venality, sheer stupidity and abuse of power were abundant enough when information flows were tightly controlled (Richard Nixon rings a bell), but volumes seemed a tiny fraction of what they are today. Baseness, avarice, stupidity and condescending arrogant elitism masquerading as meritocracy were just as prevalent then as now.
While an apparent correlation between extreme politics and the rise of social media doesn’t necessarily prove a causal link, there is a plausible argument that a very online culture, marked by increasingly short attention spans spawned by , narcissism and impatient consumer appetites, has a more natural affinity with shallow quasi demagoguery than with representative democracy.
The whole apparatus of voting for a candidate who might not satisfy your exact needs, and probably doesn’t embody all the values you hold sacred but might at least make some half-decent decisions for the country as a whole over the coming years, feels oddly antiquated, even quaint. It seems as alien to the click-and-collect spirit of digital commerce as a lunar lander to a neanderthal.
A democratic election is the very antithesis of an internet transaction for it contains not just an expectation of delayed gratification, but a guarantee of frustration. Why? Compromise, imperfection and disappointment are the necessary price for having a government that tries to balance the complex demands of a variegated society. Contrary to popular belief and media manufacturing, a proper functioning democracy doesn’t result in everyone getting everything they want. That most people get most (on balance) of what they want and need, is enough.
The alternative is a political movement, such as MAGA, that treats elections as an opportunity to display or give voice to rage, outrage, frustration or exultant self-actualization. Trump’s campaign never construed voting in terms of civic choice, with more than one potentially legitimate outcome. It was always going to be either a heroic restoration of the rightful president or another iteration of the deep-state conspiracy fermenting mischief against him. There is no place for defeat in the script except as material to bolster either the claim of a higher victory or stolen glory.
It is a mode of campaigning that is hostile to the basic premise of a democratic ballot, which is that either side might win and counting votes actually counts. It also exploits a culture of political journalism that measures professional integrity by a refusal to pick sides. It has been a sight to observe the largely liberal American ‘mainstream’ media continuing to apply their conventional reporting templates, which contain the implicit judgment that the two candidates have equivalent democratic credentials. That it is patently absurd when one of them transparently despised or vilified the manifestations of conventional democracy like freedom of speech, assembly or the right to articulating counterpoints.
But the old elites were also complicit in this masquerade. They did not express outrage when the Left devolved into wokery and excessive outrage at straw men like “toxic masculinity” or when minority rights were held up to be more important than those of Nixon’s great Silent Majority. Enough of that Majority, put off by these extremist views, broke away from their previous voting patterns to vote for the candidate whom they thought had the best chance of swinging the policy pendulum towards less esoteric causes.
“Are you better off today than you were four years ago” still resonated
Much of America’s moderate conservative and liberal establishment seems to have spent the campaign going through the motions of political normalcy, hoping to stir the system into resilience by operation of muscle memory. It doesn’t work.
But ringing the alarm at the specter of Trumpist fascism doesn’t work either. There is no doubt that Trump’s temperament and ambitions veer towards a right-wing conservative brand seldom seen or expressed in post-World War Two political history. He has openly expressed admiration for dictators, closet or otherwise, teases an oft-expressed desire for absolute power, excoriates political critics as enemies and boasts of his willingness to crush them by utilizing the full force, armed or otherwise of the state apparatus.
And yet calling that kind of tendency by histrionic invective doesn’t necessarily provoke any scruple among his core of supporters. Partly that is because the currency of comparison with 20th-century dictators has been dulled by the left’s pervasive overuse. “Fascist” is a label that has been applied all too casually and too often as unthinking abuse to be rehabilitated as a tool with moral precision and rhetorical impact more than 100 years after it was coined.
That doesn’t mean though the lessons of the 1920s and 1930s are altogether irrelevant to the current predicament. It can be easy to find disturbing parallels, and the connection can’t be ignored when white supremacists and card-carrying neo-Nazis are an active cadre in the new radical-right coalition, being referred to by the 47th president in his previous tenure as the 45th as “good people on both sides.” The implication shows a predilection of belief that extremism from either end of the political spectrum is acceptable as a substitute for rational, if unfiery discourse and disagreement.
In the current Trumpian worldview politics is nothing short of gladiatorial combat.
Casting the threat as a resurgence of something old – a zombie fascistic ideology risen from its postwar grave – preserves the convenient idea of liberal democracy as the more modern and more highly evolved political system. It is the instinct to dismiss nationalism merely as an ideological retirement home for angry white people whose skills don’t equip them to compete in a dynamic, globalized economy, and who express their frustration as bigoted reaction against progressive social change.
While there might be a dose of truth in that analysis it doesn’t contain an argument in favour of liberal democracy, beyond the implication that only stupid, bad people from a single monolithic race and class oppose it. Unsurprisingly, those same people don’t find that argument very persuasive.
The awkward truth for those of us who seek to rally in defense of liberal democracy today is that it has undergone no obvious renewal since its peak at the end of the last century. We, no less than the nationalists, are imprisoned by nostalgia, wishing the future could be more like the past. And in so doing, we find ourselves constantly testing the limits of analogue protection against a virus that is digitally borne.
It is time to see the issue for what it is and begin the effort at intellectual honesty with a painful recognition that we must start anew to confront the fact that the center cannot hold, that we must find a new path forward that rejects both the idealistic lens in which we view what once was and come up with a viable alternative that steers a path between the extremes. That we must somehow evolve our ideas and ideals so that we as a race can clasp hands across the bloody chasm of belief systems.
Comments