America Made Trump. Will Trump Unmake America?

Can You Have Authoritarianism Without the Authoritarian?

I read the same idea three times today on Twitter, from three different people in positions of high leadership: “the problem isn’t partisan politics — but Trump’s character flaws.”

Let’s examine this narrative for a moment. Trump’s character flaws are more than obvious. And yet. When we say that they don’t reflect politics, it’s precisely equivalent to saying that demagogues arise ex nihilo, from the void. That they’re just natural catastrophes, like a meteor strike or an earthquake. Random, unpredictable, uncontrollable. And that’s precisely equivalent to saying that politics had nothing to do with the rise of Trump. Can anyone seriously believe that?

Where did Trump come from, really? Trump came squarely from American politics. American politics is a fantasy. Americans have always believed that they are above the natural laws of political economy, that they are exceptional. But they are not. Let me explain.

One party in the American mainstream does not support rights for women, minorities, immigrants, the poor, and the middle class. Whether they are rights to privacy, due process, suffrage — it doesn’t matter. The most basic fact of American politics is: one major party doesn’t believe in any single right everyone should have.

What can we call such politics? We can’t really call them “democratic”, because before democracy is a system of voting it’s a set of inalienable rights. But this party doesn’t believe in any single inalienable right, thus by definition it doesn’t believe in rights, thus it’s not democratic at all. What is it?

These are the politics of authoritarianism.

And that is how Trump arose. Authoritarian politics give rise to authoritarian figures. The politics of authoritarianism naturally sooner or later yield authoritarians. The logical and inescapable endpoint of not believing in any single inalienable right is the rise of a strongman who champions exactly that. What else could be? Could such politics select a power-sharing council of kind, wise saints? Of course not. By definition, authoritarian beliefs select strongmen.

Americans appear to want a kind of middle ground: to have the politics of authoritarianism, only without an authoritarian strongman. But such a thing isn’t possible. It has never happened once in history, because one necessarily reflects and causes the other. To believe that one can have authoritarian politics without authoritarians is a kind of magical thinking, a fantasy, that one is above the natural laws of political economy.

America is not above the natural laws of political economy. No one is. A polity governing with authoritarian beliefs, ideologies, ways, processes, will end up ruled by an authoritarian. A society that champions authoritarian beliefs is already conquered, whether or not it knows it yet. It’s a Rubicon waiting for a Caesar.

America made Trump. The question is this: will Trump unmake America? America has never been the shining example of freedom it supposes itself to be. It’s long and ugly history of enslavement, war, and genocide is the reality the myth is there to polish over. Perhaps the best thing that can happen now is that Trump unmakes this myth at last, reveals it as only one. That Americans come to term with the reality of a history that it still hopes to pretend away. Make the reckoning, the peace, with a traumatic past, that they have not done yet.

That reckoning, in turn, might disabuse Americans of the badly mistaken notion that they can have the fantasyland middle ground of authoritarianism without an authoritarian. Perhaps they would learn from their very own history that people denying themselves basic rights only ever really leads societies into dark and forbidden places, and that is why every political “side” in a civilized nation must — must — begin with some set of inalienable rights.

But that reckoning, that peace with history, is what is really being left undone when its leaders say: “Trump’s character flaws are the problem!”. They are not. They are just glimmering reflections of the real problems. An authoritarian politics which denies inalienable rights, in turn a product of a long, long history of cruelty and violence and vengeance.

Umair
June 2017