Q24N (Confidencial) At the end of 2023, well-known political writer Robert Kagan wrote an article that provoked controversy among the politically aware public. The title speaks for itself: “A Trump dictatorship is ever more inevitable.”
The reason Kagan cited to prove his thesis was the demonstrated inability of the US institutions – especially the justice system – to prevent a second ascent to power of a man who hadn’t hesitated to call in his mobs to assault nothing less than the US Capital building, the living representation of deliberative democracy in his country.
To many, Kagan’s warnings of a dictatorship in the United States, but also as a president who – in a system that is already president-centered – has concentrated more power than the majority of his predecessors.
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It may be that the solid U.S. institutions are more powerful than the unchecked ambitions of an egomaniac president. But the certain thing is that if Trump desired to become a dictator, he wouldn’t have a very difficult path to get there. He holds an absolute majority, controls the Senate, and will almost surely also have a majority in the House of Representatives. And if that wasn’t enough, he has the backing of the richest billionaires and, at the same time, of the poorest sectors of his country. Finally, he has the autonomy that comes from having been much more than just his Party’s candidate.
Let’s be clear – Trump is the leader of a mass movement that goes far beyond a party. Trump is a Republican, but above and beyond that, he’s a Trumpist. Before Trump, the Republican presidents represented a party. Today the Republican party represents Trump.
The new power born with Trump in the United States is essentially a personality-centered power.
The political analysts will say that we’re looking at a new populism. But that’s not saying much. In the end, all the large mass movements based around a messianic leader are populist. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the so-called populisms – consider the Latin American ones – have managed to appear in countries with low intensity institutions and weak democratic traditions. Trump’s version, in contrast, emerges in a country with a tradition of strong institutions and a long democratic trajectory.
How do we explain this new reality? If we pay attention only to the coordinates of US history, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to explain it. If, instead, we look beyond the United States, we find, not an explanation but, yes, a more visible global tendency. I’m referring to the permanent ascent of non-democratic and anti-establishment mass movements across different countries of the world.
In all the European countries where autocrats govern, or where the nationalist populisms form part of government coalitions, what we call liberal democracy is either en route towards or in danger of disappearance. Effectively, there are many European “Trumpisms,” be they far right versions, or certain anti-democratic leftists with real and growing power. Even when other sectors have succeeded in defeating them, as in France, they maintain themselves as the country’s primary electoral force. We can say with certainty that the autocracies will be ever more numerous on the European political map.
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When at the beginning of his mandate Biden accurately stated that the contradiction between democracy and dictatorship was dominant in the world, he was probably thinking not only of China or Russia but about the political development that was happening in his own country. That perception of Biden’s could be viewed as an exaggeration, But no one can deny that the liberal version of democracies is in retreat, facing not only dictatorships, but also the non-democratic forces of the nationalist-populist movements, even if Francis Fukuyama continues believing the opposite.
Everywhere you look, you see the emergence of, if not dictatorships, autocratic and authoritarian movements and governments. In countries with a long democratic tradition, the new forms of autocratic power maintain some external elements of a democratic type but subordinated to non-democratic powers. Some authors, with a certain benevolence, call them “hybrid democracies.” Here, I’ll call them simply authoritarian and/or autocratic republics This means that, alongside the institutional framework inherited from the old democracies, pre-democratic republican institutions are maintained. Those types of government can fluctuate from one side to the other.
Hence, we see how, in the last Polish elections, the democratic forces defeated the authoritarian ones, but the conflict between the two remains in play. In the case of Latin America, we can look at Venezuela, a country that during the Chavez rule was constituted as an autocratic republic, but under Maduro – following his recent criminal electoral fraud – it has become a brutal de facto military dictatorship. So, yes, that anti-democratic wave (to paraphrase Hungtinton) that has devastated the world though different versions from right to left has also muddied the United States. Except that for Donald Trump, unlike Joe Biden, the world conflict isn’t between democracies and dictatorships, but between successful and failing countries.
Through Trump, global nationalist-populism has succeeded in imposing itself as a trend in the United States; however, like every type of populism, it follows guidelines traced by that nation’s cultural and political reality. In other words, while the national-populisms of Viktor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, and the right-wing Polish PIS party are all religious and confessional, Trump’s populism is at the same time nationalist and economic. (To fully understand this, one should read Walter Benjamin’s work “Capitalism as religion.”)
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In that sense, Trump hasn’t invented anything new. What he has done is to elevate very typical old beliefs and cultural norms in the US into political spheres. Trump’s populism – and this is important to understand – hasn’t been imposed from above to below, like Maxist-Leninism in the USSR under Stalin, but instead has gone from below to above.
In a country where the majority worship personal economic success, it’s normal that they would rank nations, as well, according to their global economic success. Trump’s take on it, if we want to understand it like that, is an economic patriotism, one that penetrates very strongly and deeply into the souls of most citizens, be they white or black, mixed race or Latino, rich or poor, Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Jews, Muslims, men or women. That is, like all populism, Trump’s version isn’t horizontal or vertical, but transversal, as transversal as fascism, Peronism, Chavism, Milei-ism or even Putinism before that was transformed into a totalitarian power. Trump’s doctrine is based on that objective reality.
And, yes, Trump does have a doctrine, although many don’t believe it. We can summarize it thus: for Trump, as for some Marxists of the recent past, the secret of each nation’s power is based on its economy. True to that premise, each nation is thought of as a company. Between the nation-companies, there are certain compatibilities, competitions, and rivalries. That explains why Putin’s Russia isn’t an enemy nation for Trump. From an economic point of view, the Russian nation is irrelevant to the President-elect. To Trump, the true enemy, the economic one, is China. But not because Xi Jinping has a different opinion, but because his view is nearly identical to that of Trump himself – China wants to be the principal economic engine of the world, the same thing Trump wants for the United States.
The economic war between China and the United States has been set. Trump is prepared to defeat China’s economic power, beginning with the imposition of high tariffs on Chinese exports, and thus lay the bases for an extreme economic nationalism and protectionism in his country. That means events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine don’t interest Trump, because they’re not profitable nor do they threaten the US economic hegemony.
To a certain extent, Trump is repeating, from the heights of power, what some humble citizens say over one beer and another: “that’s not our war – let them screw each other.” If someone wanted to convince Trump to support Ukraine, they’d have to tell him: “Donald, this war in Ukraine, is going to make Russia and Europe poorer, and if they get too much poorer, they won’t have the money to buy our exports.” Only in that way could Trump reconsider – or maybe he already has, and that’s why he wants to sit Zelensky and Putin around a table and fix the problem “in one day.”
Like all nationalist-populists, the magnetism that Trump exercises resides in his capacity to cover up and tweak in his favor the principal topics of concern to the electorate. Hence, during the electoral process, he took on issues such as migration, war and abortion. By playing up the immigration problem, he won over those to his side, those who fear being invaded by hordes of the poor coming up from the south. Thus, in passing, Trump artificially created an “our United States,” prosperous and hard-working. Stirring up the topic of peace in Ukraine, he ignited an old nationalism based on non-intervention in extra-continental affairs, originally sparked by the idea of a “decadent Europe.” Stirring up the topic of abortion, he won over for himself the support of all – I mean all – the country’s religious orders.
In accordance with his doctrine, Trump sought political and military ties only where he could reap economic gain. That wasn’t the case with Kamala Harris, his rival, who offered rational arguments on the three main topics, which seemed to make the majority of the public see her as moralist or elitist. Thanks to his effective coverage of these issues, Trump went from being the “candidate of the middle-class white man,” to a transversal candidate that appealed to the majority of the country’s voters, irrespective of social class, religious affiliation or racial and cultural identity. Trump the billionaire became the candidate of the people. In contrast, Harris, the woman of color, was presented as the candidate of freedom, a notion too abstract to be assimilated by the chronically discontented large majorities.
“The people” is a heterogeneous notion, in itself a contradiction, whose capacity to unite resides in the creation of an “empty signifier,” to use a Lacanian concept politicized by Ernesto Laclau. Precisely because Trump is an empty signifier, he managed to unite around his image a series of contradictory interests. In effect, thanks to his own conceptual emptiness, Trump speaks to sectors that appear in reality to be antagonists. Because of that, Trumpism can be seen as the expression of a “possible impossibility.” In brief, he represents the unity of opposites.
Within the Trump ranks are extreme conservative sectors, and also anarchist sectors that pronounce themselves against the establishment. Trump himself is both: an extreme conservative in his objectives, and an anti-system anarchist in his manner. On that point, but only there, Trumpism can be compared with the old fascisms. More than a political leader, Trump is a strongman figure to the masses. He represents the authority of power and the power of authority.
Regarding whether a Trump government will morph into a dictatorship, as Robert Kagan prophesized, we don’t yet know. The only thing that can be said for sure is that no one imagines how long it takes for a liberal democracy ruled by an omnipotent executive to stop being liberal and mutate into an authoritarian republic, whether or not this be Trump’s aim.
With the parliamentary voice silenced, and without the deliberation that makes society think for itself; with the courts impotent, with control over most of the nation’s states, we won’t be able to speak of liberal democracy in the United States that’s coming. In the best-case scenario, it will become a direct democracy, as Carl Schmitt conceived of it: one that doesn’t need the institutions to exercise its power.
A philosopher would say: in the November elections, Kant was defeated by Hobbes in Trump’s country. But that, as I’ve repeated, isn’t just a United States problem. The advance of authoritarianism, of Trumpisms in their most diverse versions, is a global airplane flying through nearly all the political West; traveling from Argentina, passing over Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, and Austria, before, at last, landing in the United States.
One day we’ll know if liberal democracy, what we call here constitutional democracy, was nothing but a failed project in the tangle of universal history, or if we’re merely living a momentary setback that will be overcome with the emergence of new democratic and anti-authoritarian movements whose principal task will be to restore the democracy we’ve known up until now.
In history, we say – be it only to console ourselves – the last word is never spoken.
This article was published in Spanish in Confidencial.
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