The most powerful country in the world has elected as its leader someone who is not only stupendously ill-qualified for the role by any intellectual or moral measure, but who is routinely described as a “fascist”.
While it is doubtful whether Donald Trump really understands the term or its history, the fact that sober analysts use the term should alarm anyone who thinks, like Churchill, that for all its undoubted problems, some form of democratic governance is probably as good as it’s likely to get at this or any other moment in history.
Indeed, history provides sobering reminders of just how fragile democracy can be and why authoritarianism remains attractive, and not just for autocratic leaders and their cronies. On the contrary, the re-election of Trump could not have happened if millions of Americans hadn’t changed their political allegiance despite the potential dangers.
Smarter people than Trump will ensure that this political dominance will be entrenched through institutional reforms and appointments, directly threatening the future of democracy in the United States.
Most explanations of this unpredicted shift in political attitudes have focused on Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the presidential contest, a lacklustre, elitist campaign that failed to address the concerns of “ordinary” Americans, and the pervasive influence of social media and fake news.
No doubt there is something in all these claims, but what if there is something more fundamental, visceral and altogether unsettling about voter behaviour in this election? After all, it’s not as if the electorate didn’t know what they were likely to get from a Trump presidency. The fact is they embraced it and him, nevertheless.
Theodor Adorno, one of the more influential observers of authoritarianism, especially the German variety, argued that the reason people were drawn to seemingly implausible populists and demagogues like Trump, or Hitler for that matter, owed as much to psychology as it did to any rational calculation of political self-interest.
In this context, material circumstances – declining standards of living, aggravated by the belief that immigrants or hostile powers are at least partly responsible, for example – may help to provide the sense of common cause with others in the same identitarian boat. The fact that Trump’s oratory is incoherent, contradictory or inconsistent is of no concern. On the contrary, Adorno argues it is essential:
Since it would be impossible for fascism to win the masses through rational arguments, its propaganda must necessarily be deflected from discursive thinking; it must be oriented psychologically, and has to mobilise irrational, unconscious, regressive processes.
The most alarming aspect of the contemporary American experience is that Trump’s triumph and methodology have been embraced by formerly conservative, mainstream Republicans and even Christian evangelicals, and are now seen as the key to electoral success. Smarter people than Trump will ensure that this political dominance will be entrenched through institutional reforms and appointments, directly threatening the future of democracy in the United States.
Unfortunately, this is part of an international trend, which includes Germany, the apogee of authoritarianism and formerly a reliable bulwark against its return. And yet the rise of Alternative for Germany with its populist mix of anti-immigration rhetoric and hostility towards the technocratic, sovereignty-pooling European Union is ringing alarm bells, not least because its leader, Björn Höcke, says he is convinced “the Germans’ longing for a historical figure who will once again heal the wounds of the nation, overcome division and put things in order is deeply rooted in our souls.” Sounds familiar.
Aspiring despots the world over will have been encouraged by Trump’s win, which helps to legitimate both a successful political model and the rhetoric of division and national self-interest that accompanies it. It is far from clear who, if anyone, is going to champion the liberal values that have been staples of American foreign policy rhetoric, if not always its practise, since the Second World War.
Even America’s most enthusiastic and uncritical allies, such as Australia, will find it difficult to adjust to the new international order, which threatens to undermine the foundations of economic and strategic policy. We know that Trump understandably “scares the shit out of” Anthony Albanese, despite the usual platitudes about working with whoever the Americans elect. But what if Trump reflects a deep-seated, isolationist authoritarian turn in American politics that is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future?
The continued refrain from democrats everywhere that Trumpism and its imitators are “not who we are” is being put to its most important test in a century. In America’s case, at least, as far as more than half the population is concerned, that’s exactly who they are. History suggests that is unlikely to improve in troubled times.
We must brace for an era of strongman leadership in which, as Richard Higgott points out, “many major global leaders as people are, by personal socio-psychological disposition, ill-suited, if not downright antithetical, to the advancement of the wider international cooperative endeavour.” The chances of slowing, much less reversing, the breakdown of the natural environment upon which we all depend in such circumstances are not good, to put it delicately.
