Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine.
The stunning election of Donald Trump and his allies in the U.S. Congress has set America on a starkly divisive course not seen since the Civil War era.
Several things bear pointing out.
Those who implicitly trusted the electoral system lost decisively, while trust has apparently been restored for those who suspected all the institutions of democracy were corrupt. Conspiracy theories about stolen ballots have evaporated overnight. No one this time around is plotting to block the transfer of power.
The “strong gods” of family, faith and nation prevailed against the culturally liberal sentiments of the open society, which we wrote about recently in Noema. That is a trend across the West that will now receive a further boost as the ascendant direction of history.
Festering resentment against elites — who were seen as insulated from the consequences of their woke tolerance, including on immigration — conjoined with the economic headwinds battering working America. Despite the headline statistics trumpeted by the Democrats, or the barely manifested results of President Joe Biden’s industrial policies, the ongoing reality of inflation and the unequal conditions in daily life could not be masked. As recently reported, the top 20% account for 40% of all consumption, which drives the American economy, while the bottom 40% accounts for only 20%. And that is not to speak of the third factor of a creeping isolationist temper that sees entanglement in conflicts abroad as worsening damage at home.
Whether all those across a surprisingly broad spectrum who amassed the popular vote for Trump fully grasped what they were mandating, illiberal democracy is what we will all now get.
Illiberal Democracy Is Not Fascism, Exactly
Illiberal democracy may not be the fascism of historical precedent, but a close enough cousin to fear. The historian and author of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton, has said about the MAGA movement: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.” Similarly driven by dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence, Trump voters, says Paxton, have an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”
It’s more than a bit unnerving to remember that, even at the height of its popularity on the path to power when it banned other parties, the Nazis received 37% at the ballot box. Hitler was appointed as chancellor in 1933 by German President Paul von Hindenburg because his party was the biggest in a parliamentary system. He never won a direct popular vote in a competitive election. Trump won nearly 51% of the popular vote in this week’s election.
Elections Alone Are Not Democracy
When Nicolas Berggruen and I published our 2019 book “Renovating Democracy: Governing In The Age of Globalization And Digital Capitalism,” The Economist asked us a question that could fit this very moment as well: “You argue that we need to ‘renovate democracy.’ But another way to see things is that democracy is working just fine, it’s just that the outcomes don’t appeal to comfortable cosmopolitans… What makes you convinced that democracy is broken?”
The answer now would be the same as then: “What we are seeing is the result of elections. But democracy is as much about what happens outside the ballot box: impartial rules, practices, institutions — and political culture — that are not only inclusive, but that foster the reasoned discourse, negotiation and compromise necessary to reach a governing consensus in diverse societies.”
We pointed out then that Trump’s first victory was not the cause of our governing crisis, but a symptom of it:
In recent decades this system has decayed. The mainstream political parties were captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment that failed to address the dislocations of globalization and disruptions of rapid technological change. This led to a deep distrust of governing institutions by all those left behind. Such disaffection gained more traction than ever before because of the participatory power of social media.
When an unresponsive elite forsakes the average citizen in a system legitimated by popular sovereignty—and fortified by social media—demagogues who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people ride the rage to power. …
The danger now is that the fevered populists are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, assaulting the very norms and institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against governance itself. The result is protracted polarization.
The chief challenge, we said at the time, is not for partisans to put their team back in power through elections, but to mend the breach of distrust between the public and all the intermediating institutions of self-government that have decayed.
This can be done, we argued, by integrating social networks and the broader civil society into governance through new deliberative practices, such as citizens’ assemblies and other forms of impactful citizen engagement “that complement representative government and compensate for its waning legitimacy. In our book we call this ‘participation without populism.’”
The X Factor
What has fanned warranted ressentiment against the “cosmopolitan caste” and the so-called “coastal elites” into an inflamed culture war with the divergent “values of the heartland” is not only the ever-evolving clash between liberal modernity and tradition and their associated status-spheres, but the consolidation of rigid worldviews through the siloed virality of social media.
The newest challenge liberal democracy faces is a digital media ecosystem that both empowers a multitude of voices and concentrates control. The digital oligarch mostly closely linked with the Trump revolution, Elon Musk, has not turned X into a public square, but into a partisan propaganda platform for the MAGA movement.
Indeed, the public square where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole has virtually disappeared.
Peer-to-peer connectivity fosters this deformation because, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes, it “redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.”
Without a common public space where the credibility and trustworthiness of information can be established, there is no solid ground for meaningful discourse. What takes its place is an arms race of ploy and counter-ploy, which we witnessed in spades during the election campaign.
Just as republics have historically created institutional checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place, as should now be the case with ownership of the means of connectivity, so too we need to foster checks and balances for an age when information flows are so distributed that the public sphere is disempowered. The deliberative practices already discussed are but one way to do so.
Liberals Must Deliver The Goods
Finally, the Trump movement has triumphed in the U.S. for much the same reason Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party succeeded in Mexico. Despite the party’s now realized pledge to gut the independent judiciary by mandating direct election of judges, the party’s presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, won last summer’s balloting in a landslide.
For all the endless talk of threats to the “rule of law” and “democracy” by the previously governing elites, they failed to move the needle when in power by delivering the goods for the majority who were left behind. For most Mexicans, liberal concerns were a meaningless abstraction in the context of their meager prospects, which never seemed to improve.
Whether Trump’s election marks the last sigh for the ideology of liberalism in the U.S. rests on two things. First, whether his illiberal regime can deliver the goods any better than liberal democrats. Second, whether the opposition does not simply focus on how to get their partisans back in power, but grapples seriously with how to deepen democracy by restoring its connective tissue beyond elections through practices and institutions that enable and encourage negotiation, compromise and consensus rather than partisan combat and culture wars.
Majoritarian Rule Is Not Constitutional Government
To base the idea of democracy solely on elections invites illiberalism because it implies that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary. But, as the American founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally. That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a liberal polity.
In constitutional theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the negative that makes the constitution, and the “positive” that makes government. The one is the power of acting, the other is the power of preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional government.
It is this governing arrangement that has made America great. The biggest danger of Making America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien regime to keep the masses down.
