I think about this line a lot when confronted with what appears to be the “all at once” phase of the destruction of American democracy.
The Trump Administration has deported a Lebanese visa holder on the grounds that she sympathises with Hezbollah and sent alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador against court orders.
Thus, we have an executive living in defiance of its own constitution and the rule of law.
Congress is not just controlled by the president’s party and appears happy not to be an equal branch of government. The handing over of the federal bureaucracy to a secretive clique run by an apartheid-nostalgic South African billionaire fond of making Hitler salutes is too kooky even for Hollywood. But here we are.
The rapid pace is dizzying. Tariffs are on, then they’re off. Declarations of the media being illegal or that the previous president’s pardons aren’t valid flurry into our inboxes and cell phones like severe weather alerts.
Voice of America radio went silent suddenly. USAID’s quick closure sent the Global South into a tailspin. Federal employees don’t know if they still have jobs or not. Universities face the fight of their lives as the federal government looks to withhold funds unless they adopt an anti-liberal program.
The democratic collapse seems to have started in January, with the inauguration of the second Trump Administration, foreshadowed by attempts at democratic erasion in the first Trump term and in the failed insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Commentators in various media are united in fear that the Trump White House isn’t simply far-right but on the brink of an authoritarian counter-revolution against democracy.
Those voices aren’t wrong. And yet, American democracy has been in crisis, slowly, for quite a while.
Let’s start at the beginning.
To appease southern slave states, the founders inserted into the constitution a quirky method for electing a president through apportioned electoral votes by the states rather than a popular vote.
This not only created a system where certain states would be empowered over others through their number of votes and where a candidate could ascend to power while losing the popular vote. It validated an American political ideology grounded on the principle that people–living, warm-blooded humans–should be kept as property because of their skin colour.
Other problems rest on the constitution. The other levers of government are no more democratic. Federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, are appointed by the president and serve for life, accountable to no one.
The upper lawmaking house, the Senate, is anti-majoritarian. Tiny Wyoming and enormous California have the same number of votes: two.
The only majoritarian institution is the House of Representatives, the weakest part of America’s government, at best a farm system for ambitious politicians and at worst a playground for machine bosses.
And yet, despite all these foundational problems, American democracy has endured as a model for open society not necessarily because its system is the most egalitarian or fairest but because it is the strongest.
Unlike France, the United States hasn’t had multiple republics. Unlike the United Kingdom, governments don’t collapse suddenly. Only one president, Richard Nixon, was forced to resign, while four British prime ministers have quit since the Brexit vote.
America is the only country that constitutionally ensures freedom of speech, and the constitution has survived from a small batch of ex-British colonies to the world’s most powerful hegemonic power.
Even radicals who fought against the American empire like Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X looked to the founders for inspiration.
American history has its terrible moments. Several genocidal wars against the Native Americans and a civil war over the aforementioned ownership of Black people. The Great Depression. Jim Crow.
These trials have exposed some of the worst attributes of the American project: systematic racism, imperialism, and capitalist greed. And yet these problems have also, at times, created more democracy.
Segregation gave way to the civil rights movement and its advancements. The massive poverty that followed the Depression gave us Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which included new rights for organised labour and Social Security.
An expansion of post-war prosperity sent more and more young Americans to college, whose activism and agitation, alongside the flourishing of the civil rights movement, propelled movements for gays and women. A forward-thinking Supreme Court issued new constitutional rights for a host of marginalised groups.
Then, something happened.
The agitation of the civil rights era, the antiwar movement and the general upheaval of the postwar period had led to a backlash, embodied in Republican President Ronald Reagan, that sought to restore law and order and to roll back the excesses of democracy. There was too much feminism and gay rights.
FDR’s legacy created a sub-nation of unionised public sector workers who governed through regulations and a web of federal agencies, all anathema to the free market impulse.
A decade of union-busting and deregulation began to accelerate economic inequality. The next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, didn’t help matters when he moved his party away from labour and toward corporations, and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meant the decimation of many American industries.
With the rich getting richer, the upper class grew its hand to manipulate politics in their direction. With limits to political contributions undone by the Supreme Court, money in politics flowed in ways the founders could not have imagined. Candidates competed for donors first and voters second.
Money gave corporate and political lobbies outsized influence in the federal government, and families like the Koch Brothers were funding new legislative agendas to move the American system closer to the interests of Wall Street rather than Main Street.
Workers had fewer avenues to express themselves, principally labour unions. Many were simply too exhausted from working several jobs to stay afloat and work up the energy to vote.
The nation’s worst terrorist attack on 11 September 2001 so devastated Americans that many affirmatively said that they would give up civil liberties if it meant strong security against this new kind of global enemy.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” said founding father Benjamin Franklin. But those iconic words were drowned out by the War on Terror fervour, fanned by a new, monied far-right media outlet called Fox News.
Something else happened at the dawn of the new millennium.
George W. Bush became president under what many believe to be an election he stole: the son of a former president going through his governor brother and appealing to a court favouring his political party to stop a recount in a close race. Banana republic, anybody?
Like the first Trump Administration, Bush also won with the electoral college majority, but not the popular vote, exposing that brutal flaw in the constitution.
George W. Bush’s election also set a new geopolitical reality.
Presidents before him had won their elections with all sorts of electoral assortments. Winners took states from all over the country, and no state belonged to a party.
Bush’s election began a “two Americas” political dichotomy. Democrats were owed the coastal states (except the former Confederate states), the Republicans got the heartland, and every election was more or less about which candidate could win Pennsylvania and Michigan.
American democracy had been sick for a long time before Donald Trump became president for the first time. And, like with George W. Bush and Barack Obama, there was an air of disbelief at Trump’s success.
Liberals didn’t believe Bush had rightfully won, and many conservatives, egged on by Trump, thought Obama wasn’t a natural-born citizen, ergo not eligible for the office. Trump was explained away in liberal media as the result of Russian interference, not the appeal of his xenophobic message.
The Guardian reported that one-third of all Americans believed Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was rigged. For two decades, the United States was never united in thinking that the person in the White House was the rightful president. Abraham Lincoln famously invoked the biblical lesson that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
It wasn’t just the mechanisms of democratic power that have been under such stress. A democratic society isn’t just about voting in lawmakers and executives but also about institutions that uphold the rule of law, egalitarianism, equal protection, and freedom of expression and association.
It is often believed that American and European voters always choose democracy over the alternatives. But a democratic society must mean we are constantly facing questions and making our destinies. What is best for our families and communities? What is morally right and wrong? How should our resources be invested?
These are tough questions for anyone. To make them, one needs education and information. Humanities and social sciences in universities aren’t just meant to prepare students for law school and voting but for a life of making choices. Free and open media inform a population so that it can act responsibly.
But media outlets have collapsed. More and more news platforms close every year, and layoffs abound. The only people who can afford to work in journalism are those wealthy enough to endure the poor pay and precarity, creating a hollowed-out press that doesn’t report enough and serves the interests of one class.
University education is too expensive. The cost of the debt far outweighs what the job market can reward. Learning increasingly ends with high school.
In the end, making our own decisions can be scary. More often than liberals might want to admit, a great many people are okay with a higher class thinking for them.
The post-liberal era that Trump has ushered in isn’t simply the final deterioration of democratic government, but a rejection of the democratic ideal as a whole.
No, not all people are equal. No, not everyone should have a say in calling the shots. No, you don’t need media and universities to prepare good citizens.
Religion is in; secularism is out. Nationalism is in; cosmopolitanism is out.
Movements for marginalised communities went too far, and we need to get back to the Bible. Science, once the great equaliser and hallmark of human advancement, is now viewed with suspicion, as if Galileo were being made a heretic.
If this could happen to the world’s oldest and strongest democracy, what would happen to Europe?
By all measures, the United Kingdom, France and Germany seem only a few years away from Trump moments of their own, all with the burden of their own democratic weaknesses (France’s many republican fails, the UK’s growing hostility to human rights, Germany, well, the less said, the better). A neofascist party already leads the Italian government.
Far-right parties look specifically to a non-democratic form of rule. Contemporary Russia, with its oligarchs and obsession with sovereignty, is their model.
For socialists like myself, liberal democracy can seem like a mixed bag. Yes, it is better than the authoritarian and unenlightened alternatives. And yet we remember that it is a temporary state of being that can’t truly be democratic because capitalism divides us into the exploiting and the exploited.
There is a temptation in the United States and Europe to simply save the fragments of our democracy in the face of these ascending fascistic movements. But perhaps it was the weakness of non-socialist democracy in the first place that brought us to this point.
The revolution seems far off. But the task now is to address the class divide, the racism and the hollowing out of the public good that created this mess.
The only democratic alternative is an egalitarian, worker-determined socialist society.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
