If, in January 2015, someone had asked me if I could imagine that, in November 2024, the American people would be ready to re-elect as president a man who, on losing his first attempt at re-election in 2020 had summoned a mob on January 6, 2021 with the express purpose of pressuring the U.S. Congress into not recognizing as president-elect the winner of the 2020 election, a man who, when the assembled mob actually assaulted and pillaged the U.S. Capitol, was clearly delighted by innumerable crimes committed by his followers, and who, in the wake of the debacle, insisted that he and his followers had done nothing wrong, but rather had been robbed of victory—a victory, moreover, by an overwhelming margin—my answer would have been “no”. And yet here we are.
Here we are with Donald Trump and all his outrageous crimes repeatedly defended by outrageously political maneuvers engineered by former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, current House Speaker Mike Johnson, and, worst of all, by six members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Here we are with virtually the entire Republican Party united behind him, with large sections of the American business elite falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with him, and “even” many of his declared opponents in the media hedging their bets by spending more time finding fault with his Democratic opponents than with Trump himself, as if making sloppy and emotional charges against an amoral sociopath who attempted to overthrow our very system of government were the equivalent of attempting to overthrow our very system of government. Yes, let’s have an extended debate over whether Trump is “really” a “fascist” or “only” a corrupt and lawless authoritarian? Is expelling 14 million harmless people “fascist” or “only” “authoritarian”? Discuss amongst yourselves! Anything is better than contemplating what an actual Trump presidency would be like.
It's certainly true that the Democratic response to Trump has been less than perfect. The enormous political pressures generated by “globalism”, to compress all of the contemporary world’s ills into a single word, have divided and damaged the Democratic Party. The Democrats are flawed and uncertain. But they are honest. It is terrible how few people care.
The USA is, clearly, caught up in a global “crisis” whose dimensions are entirely without precedence. The tragedy is that Trump is guaranteed to worsen the crisis, to the extent that the nature of the “remedy” cannot, at the current time, even be guessed at, because we have no clear idea of what the U.S., and the world, are going to look like in the coming years. At the current time, “tribalism” is in the saddle; it will remain in the saddle until its supposed solutions are revealed as disastrous rather than remedial. But the extent of this disaster in the making—the “bottom” we must endure until the path of escape becomes visible—could be terrifying. I keep hoping we’ll be lucky, and I keep being proved wrong.
Afterwords
I have, on numerous occasions, “warned”, directly or indirectly, of the continuing dangers of authoritarianism. I guess I wasn’t pessimistic enough. For “samples”, click on any or all of the links given below.
