Get Ready for Trump 2.0: The End of the Social Contract
Donald Trump is shaping the Republican Party (GOP) in his image. In the Iowa caucasus primary conducted on the 15th January he took over 50% of the vote — a new record. He didn’t even win here in 2016, when he first won the GOP nomination. He is now the undisputed master of the party and his polling among all voters points to a return to the White House in the November Presidential Election. This, despite facing 91 felonies ranging from accusations of wilfully retaining national defence information when he left office, conspiracy to obstruct justice, attempting to overturn a free and fair election in 2020, inciting a mob to attack the centre of US power on January 6th 2021, 13 counts of meddling in the Georgia state election count to overturn Biden’s victory, and paying hush money to a porn star in the run up to the 2016 election. In any normal political culture, any of these accusations would suffice to preclude someone running for a parish council never mind for the office of US President.
Yet we do not live in normal times. As I written before, we are entering the post-liberal age when the usual principles that govern liberal democratic societies — that we have freely elected governments guided by principles of accountability and justice, and by which citizens consent to be governed — are disintegrating. When these principles — which form the basis of the social contract that ties governments and its citizen in a solemn covenant that is the basis of liberal democratic politics — are no longer believed by electorates, all bets are off. It is often said that liberal democratic systems can only function with “losers’ consent”, an idea that rests on the fundamental assumption that even if we disagree with parties who are elected to govern, our underlying belief in their accountability, fairness and justice (as well as that of the electoral process that brought them into office) allows us to submit to them (until the next chance we get to kick them out). Without this consent liberal democracies cannot function.
Losers’ consent is failing because the social contract which underpins it is failing. As I argued in my last piece, this is because voters no longer think that governments are interested in fulfilling their end of the bargain. In addition to accountable and just government, citizens demand their leaders provide them with security and at least the opportunities for prosperity. Instead, governments are seen as distant, uninterested in responding to their voters’ concerns and presiding over a failing economic system. Narratives spun by governments’ client media about an “undeserving” poor and a “deserving” rich are harder to maintain when increasingly the poor are earning their poverty while the rich have never had it so good. What is clear about the rise of the kind of nationalist populism that appeals to Trump voters in the US and Brexit voters in the UK is the demand for state protection from the damaging headwinds of globalisation. The obvious manifestation of this demand is the issue of immigration. Voters, particularly in areas of the traditional rush belts in the US or the so-called “Red Wall” in northern England, feel vulnerable to what they feel is uncontrolled levels of immigration into their communities, and that governments don’t seem to be willing or able to do much about it.
In essence, liberalism, in both its (progressive) left and (conservative) right manifestations, promised to respect citizens’ individual liberties, increase their prosperity and provide security, but in practice has ushered in more economic and social injustice, as well as insidious power and control over their lives by a state that no longer seems to care about them or their concerns. The overwhelming perception is that the liberal democratic order has failed to deliver on many, if not all, of its promises. The myth pedalled by the libertarian Right is that people hate “big” government. The reality is that this is only true if the state is perceived to be oppressive and dictatorial; voters like big government when they think it is delivering for them. The problem for liberal democracy is that the electorate no longer believed it is, and when the social contract breaks down, the way lies open for those who offer the snake-oil of nationalist authoritarianism.
Donald Trump’s brand of politics appeals to these voters because he seems to promise an authoritarian alternative to the liberal social contract. During his term in office, his attack on the liberal order was considerable, such as rolling back on the so-called “woke” socially liberal agenda, trashing the international liberal rights-based order and attacking liberalism’s association with scientific truth and progress it inherited from the Enlightenment. Witness the age of “alternative facts” and “post-truth”.
Given how Trump reacted to his election defeat in 2020 and the events of January 6th, we must conclude that a second Trump term would involve an escalation in the deconstruction of the social contract. The loss of “losers’ consent” was laid bare for all to see in the most grotesque form. Trump and his MAGA followers’ justification for their actions was steeped in post-truth. Most of those who voted for Trump, while they bought the lie about the “stolen” election, would, one would hope, stop short of supporting insurrection. On the other hand, the hysterical mob whom he incited to storm the Capitol in Washington DC took the loss of losers’ consent to a violent extreme. They were convinced — and Trump did his best to foster such convictions — that Biden had stolen the election, despite the absence of evidence to that effect. Conspiracy theories about a mysterious cabal of shadowy “establishment” figures of the liberal order who “stole” the election from Trump abounded.
Post-truth narratives are key to the fragmentation of the social contract. The political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of how totalitarian governments arise, argued that Nazism helped create a politics reliant on conspiracy theories (mostly about the Jews). Of such people attracted to the Nazi cause, she argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism (p.460):
They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their own imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts…They are predisposed to…explain facts as mere examples of laws and eliminate coincidences by inventing an all-embracing omnipotence which is supposed to be at the root of every accident. Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.
Such a detachment from fact and observable reality was certainly evident in the QAnon-believing, climate change denying, anti-vax Covid conspirators who made up much of Trump’s mob. Their disillusionment with politics and with “mainstream” politicians is so complete that Trump supporters and voters are ready to not only disavow evidence if it emanates from the liberal elite and its client media, but attribute accidental events to the work of these sinister elements trying to thwart the will of the American people. This could be seen when extremely rare incidents of votes not being properly counted — which happens in every democratic election in every country — were immediately seized upon as proof of “the steal” rather than random acts of human or technological error. Such mindsets are grim confirmations of Arendt’s analysis. We are also reminded of George Orwell’s chilling words in Nineteen Eighty-Four that the success of Big Brother’s totalitarian state lay in the Party’s power over the citizens of Oceania to deny reality:
The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your own eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
We are left to wonder (in horror) if there will be any limits to the trashing of the social contract should Trump win a second term. His rhetoric on the campaign trail in the Republican primaries is not encouraging. He has pledged to ‘root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country’ (i.e. anyone who opposes him). Aside from shocking statements like this, it is reasonable to ask if he will attack the sacred document of American liberalism itself and rewrite the Constitution to allow him to stand for a third term. Perhaps he may even try to deprive ‘communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs’ of their democratic rights entirely. As the social contract disintegrates, the tens of millions of voters who support him yearn for the protection of an authoritarian strongman. In 2016, beyond the chaos of a dysfunctional government that is typical of populist administrations, we saw the contempt in which he held the social contract. In 2025, we may just see its demise.
Welcome to the post-liberal age.
