No Cheers For Democracy.

Sic’em! The silver-tongued demagogue whips up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the nation’s decline and their own immiseration. He then proceeds to direct his mesmerised followers against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

HOW WILL YOUNG AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES, after registering painfully the second coming of Donald Trump, assess the value of democracy? The political choices of more than half their fellow citizens have dashed their hopes in ways that a great many of them will find it impossible to forget – or forgive. They will ask themselves: “Can progressive ideas and policies ever endure under this system?” Many will be sorely tempted to answer: “No.” Some will give up on politics and progressivism altogether. Others, taking in the new political order through narrowed eyes, will give up on democracy itself.

For most of the post-war period, in the United States and across the Western World, democracy has been celebrated as an unequivocally good thing. This is hardly surprising, given the ghastly nature of the political ideology that the democratic nations of the West were required to defeat in the Second World War.

And not just the West. Even the totalitarian communist regime of Joseph Stalin felt obliged to at least pretend to be fighting for the American President, Franklin Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms”.

The “United Nations” (as Adolf Hitler’s enemies described themselves) promised an exhausted and traumatised humanity that the post-fascist world would be one in which there was Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. As depicted by the American artist, Norman Rockwell, this new world of freedom promised to make all the wartime sacrifices worthwhile.

In 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill prophesied that the ultimate defeat of Nazi tyranny would allow the life of the world to move out of peril and into “broad sunlit uplands”. Even if the British Empire, which Churchill loved so dearly, and defended so doggedly, would not long survive its epic victory over the Third Reich, this last grand gesture of democratic defiance was, indeed, its “finest hour”. In the words of former Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar: “There are worse epitaphs than: ‘Died fighting fascism’.”

All of which explains why democracy, and the freedoms it enshrined, had, by 1945, become the desideratum of every existing and aspiring nation-state. Everyone valued it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone defended it – at least in public. For those experienced in the ways of power, however, democracy has always been regarded as an inherently volatile, and potentially highly dangerous, political system.

To remain safe and stable, democracy has to be accompanied by a substantial degree of social and economic equality, backed by a solid political consensus in favour of preserving and, where possible, increasing that equality.

For those generations unlucky enough to have been born too late to enjoy their benefits, the institutions and policies of these post-war “social-democratic” societies must seem quite fantastical. What must be understood, however, is that they were constructed to reward and absorb the millions of young men returning from the War with expectations of the peace that could not safely be denied. Highly trained and experienced in the use of weapons, and imbued with the combat virtues of solidarity and comradeship, these were not the sort of citizens to be disappointed – and they weren’t.

Nor were their children. The great “boom” in babies that followed the return of the men in 1945 both prolonged and intensified the social-democratic policies of successive post-war governments. With little to choose between the policies offered by the parties of the Left and the Right, elections soon became low-stakes affairs for everybody but the candidates.

By the 1970s, democracy and prosperity had become fused in the minds of most Westerners. Certainly, the capitalist democracies outperformed the “peoples democracies” and “democratic republics” of “actually-existing socialism”. Up against the Four Freedoms, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism turned out to be anything but competitive. The outcome of the Cold War was always a foregone conclusion. To emerge victorious, all the capitalists had to do was wait patiently – and carry a big ICBM.

The serpent in this social-democratic Garden of Eden turned out to be the debilitating impact of egalitarianism on the wealth and power of capitalism’s ruling-classes. Since the War’s end, the relative strength of the upper-classes of the western democracies, vis-à-vis their middle- and lower-classes, had been steadily declining. If democracy and equality continued marching in lock-step, then the very survival of capitalism, along with the skewed distribution of economic wealth and social influence that kept it functioning, could no longer be assured.

Accordingly, and for the next fifty years, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual resources of the Western ruling-classes were poured into one, all-encompassing political project: to break-up the partnership between democracy and equality. In accomplishing this system-busting objective nothing was ruled out-of-bounds.

The new social movements born out of the steady expansion of equality in the 1960s and 70s: the civil rights movement; feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights; environmentalism; all were transformed into cultural battlegrounds upon which the forces of tradition clashed with the rag-tag armies of social progress.

Both sides quickly discovered the efficacy of mobilising citizens on the basis of racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms. The Four Freedoms ceased to act as unifiers, becoming instead the bitter pretext for zero-sum arguments over whose speech, whose God, whose resources, and whose security ought to be accorded priority.

The Ancient Romans dubbed this strategy divide et impera – divide and conquer – and it proved no less effective in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries than it had in the First and Second.

With society divided, and the forward march of universal – as opposed to sectional – equality halted, the capitalists’ next project was to persuade people that they had more to gain by identifying themselves as producers and consumers than they did as citizens. It was, they argued, through the relentless balancing of supply and demand, and the unerring democracy of the marketplace, that life was made better or worse. Dollars equalled votes in this never-ending global election. Except, in this contest, no one cared how many you cast.

It was no accident that with every significant advance in the acceptance of this new doctrine – neoliberalism – the redistribution of wealth and power from the bottom of society to the top gathered pace. The state was transformed into a mechanism for ensuring that as little as possible was done to impede the upward flow of money and influence to those least in need of either.

The societies fashioned for the men and women who had defeated fascism in the 1940s, and their children, were fast becoming unrecognisable. Nothing worked, nothing was repaired, and no one paid the slightest attention to the victims of the system’s spectacular dysfunction.

The same parties that had once competed to develop and deliver the most effective social-democratic policies, now find it more expedient to compete for the praise and patronage of the reinvigorated ruling-class. Such promises as the centre-left and the centre-right see fit to make to western electorates are seldom kept, and even more infrequently delivered on time or to budget. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance is fast disappearing.

Precisely the moment of maximum peril, argued the first political philosophers more than 25 centuries ago. With democracy and equality diminished, and opportunistic oligarchs redirecting society’s wealth into their own treasure-chests, a disoriented and increasingly distraught citizenry stands ready to succumb to that classical harbinger of doom – the demagogue.

Recalling the golden age that was, but which is now no more than a bitter memory, this silver-tongued devil will whip up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the state’s decline and their own immiseration. The demagogue will then proceed to direct this mesmerised mob against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

There are many progressive young Americans who see their country poised at exactly this point – between demagoguery and tyranny. Tragically, at this moment of maximum danger for the American republic, the only ideology capable of rescuing it, egalitarian democracy, is being rejected as the racist, sexist, trans-phobic, and generally deplorable author of all its woes. Confronted with the genuine tyrannical potential of Donald Trump and his populist Republicans, the Democratic Party shows every sign of wishing to install, by whatever means its billionaire donors care to make available, its own, unassailable, tyranny of the pure.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Tuesday, 12 November 2024.

Donald Trump And The Art Of Populist Grotesque.

Empowered By His Contradictions: Trump is a populist demagogue, and like all such demagogues he is empowered by his contradictions. This very special kind of leader is required to dance not only with the people, but also with those individuals and institutions he has promised to protect the people from.

JANE KELSEY, in a recent post, identifies some of the more important challenges posed for the Left by Donald Trump. His peculiar mix of worker-friendly policies and corporate concessions. His willingness to advance protectionism – along with a host of other ideas long-declared “verboten” by neoliberal ideologues. His brazen rejection of globalism. His reaffirmation of the citizen’s indissoluble duty of loyalty to the nation state – and vice versa.

These contradictions are impossible to reconcile with either old-school socialism, or its “Third Way” bastard offspring. They are, however, entirely consistent with the logic of  populism. Trump is a populist demagogue, and like all such demagogues he is empowered by his contradictions. This very special kind of leader is required to dance not only with the people, but also with those individuals and institutions he has promised to protect the people from.

These populist politicians typically arise in circumstances of socio-political deadlock: reconciling in their own persons the irreconcilable differences of contending social forces – and classes. What these vast conglomerations of conflicting interests cannot achieve – having lost all opportunity for strategic and/or tactical manoeuvre – is achieved in the populist’s personality. A volatile mixture of ignorance and vanity which permits the demagogue to believe in, as Lewis Carrol so memorably put it, “five impossible things before breakfast” – and then tweet about them.

To rational men and women, the demagogic personality is a standing affront to the complex art of politics. What they fail to understand is that, under the conditions which give rise to populism, rationality has very little political utility. In the populist moment: which is itself the product of antagonistic social and political forces’ inability to compromise; it is irrationality that makes the “politically impossible” possible.

Because the average man or woman finds it relatively easy to hold two contradictory notions in their heads, believing in both, they are not in the least perturbed by a leader who is constantly demonstrating his ability to do the same. Indeed, they are likely to feel more comfortable living under such a leader than they are under someone who is constantly requiring them to choose one or the other.

This celebration of ignorance, along with the constant and wilful distortion of the truth, goes hand-in-hand with the demagogue’s acceptance and promotion of irreconcilable ideas. And, once again, he or she is rewarded for doing so by the endorsement of a significant minority of the electorate. Politicians who make voters aware of their intellectual shortcomings are seldom thanked for the experience. The demagogic ignoramus, on the other hand; the master of that new school of performance art “populist grotesque”; by demonstrating his or her solidarity with the average punter’s lack of knowledge, is rewarded with their undying loyalty and affection.

None of this should strike an old Marxist like Jane Kelsey as in any way surprising. In what is indisputably his greatest piece of political journalism, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx explains in riveting detail the way in which Napoleon’s nephew – a politician with more than a little in common with Donald Trump – set about seizing control of the French state:

“Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: ‘inquiry into paternity is forbidden’ After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people.”

Americans are not all that comfortable with historical tradition, but they are particularly admiring of the extremely wealthy and entertainers – both of whom they imbue with almost supernatural powers. In Donald Trump they were confronted with a wealthy entertainer who wanted to be President of the United States. In this “The Donald” went one better than “The Gipper”. Ronald Reagan was only a B-grade movie star, Trump is a billionaire. In his person the broken white American working-class glimpsed the possibility of recovery. Not simply because they judged his promise to run America the way he ran his business empire as unlikely to produce a worse result than the nightmare in which they were currently enmeshed, but because Trump held out the additional promise of telling their supposed “friends” in the Democratic Party, the despised liberal elites: “You’re fired!”

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 12 October 2018.

Republics Of This World: A Meditation on Rome, The USA And Easter.

Not Of Rome's World: While the similarities between the Roman and American republics are striking - especially in terms of the deliberate corruption of their politics by wealthy elites - the notion of belonging to a moral polity, as enunciated by Christ, could hardly be more different. The Kingdom of Heaven will always stand in sharp contrast to the brutally contested rewards of worldly governments.

 

I’VE JUST FINISHED READING Robert Harris’s historical novel, Dictator. Set in the final tumultuous years of the Roman Republic, the book has sharpened my appreciation of the current campaign for the American Presidency. Though separated in time by more than two thousand years, the political similarities between the world’s two most influential republics are more than a little unnerving.

 

In both instances we are confronted with extremely ambitious and fabulously wealthy men joining forces to subvert the institutions of the republic. The weapon of choice against the Roman and American constitutions are the all-too-easily aroused passions of the long-suffering plebs. Having whipped up the fury of the common people against the depredations of the elites, the enemies of the republic then set the plebs to dismantling the constitutional checks and balances which are all that stand between them and the exercise of unbridled power.

 

All that is lacking from the political stage of contemporary America is a Julius Caesar. There is, as yet, no United States equivalent of Rome’s all-conquering general. No one in command of an army of fanatically loyal soldiers ready to march on Washington itself – if that is their imperator’s command.

 

Some would cast Donald Trump in the role of America’s Caesar. Having read Harris’s novel, however, I would rather cast Trump as America’s Publius Clodius Pulcher.

 

Clodius was a populist Roman politician who relinquished his aristocratic privileges so that he could be elected to the office of Tribune – the representative and protector of ordinary citizens. Like Clodius, Trump is vilified by “decent” citizens for adopting the vulgar accents of the mob, and is accused of inciting them to intimidate and attack his opponents.

 

In Trump’s recent prediction/threat that there will be “riots in the streets” if the elites attempt to deny him the Republican Party’s nomination, one detects ominous echoes of Clodius’s actual use of his fiercely loyal plebeian followers to overawe the aristocratic Roman Senate and secure the passage of his populist legislation.

 

The fall of the Roman Republic was, paradoxically, the result of its extraordinary success. As Rome’s conquests multiplied, its wealth grew to the point where the civic virtue so essential to the operation of its complex constitution was utterly overwhelmed by avarice and corruption.

 

There was simply too much money to be made out of Rome’s expanding empire: more than enough to buy up the key public offices of the republic. Gold could also create legions, the military power upon which the city state and its empire ultimately rested. Inevitably one ambitious politician would lay his hands on sufficient wealth, and swords, to dispense with the consent of the Senate and People of Rome altogether.

 

This fascination with Rome, stronger today than it has been for many decades, may strike you as odd until you are reminded, every Easter, of the events which bind the world of two thousand years ago with the world of today. Whatever else it may purport to be, the story of Jesus of Nazareth; his birth, ministry and ultimate execution; is a story which takes place in the context of Rome’s imperium.

 

Jesus and his followers could no more avoid the political and moral questions posed by Roman rule than we can escape the challenges of American hegemony. In his time, as in ours, there were many who sought to free themselves from imperial rule by violence. Only a handful of those struck by Rome were willing to turn the other cheek.

 

The Judea of 33AD was as plagued by terrorism, and the grim reprisals it provokes, as the Israel of 2016AD. It’s people awaited the coming of a mighty leader: someone to make the land of God’s chosen people great again. For a moment, they thought they’d found one. But, when asked by the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, whether he was this long awaited King of the Jews, Jesus replied: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

 

What did Pilate make of that enigmatic answer? Did he shake his head – incredulous at his doomed prisoner’s naivety? How could Jesus not know that imperium and reality are inseparable? That nobody is more of this world than a king.

 

The idea of a moral imperium was as foreign to Pontius Pilate, then, as it is, now, to Donald Trump.

 

A version of this essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times of Thursday, 24 March 2016.