Liberal imperialists, who would have been delighted with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as president in the last US election, are now up in arms, mourning the global embarrassment Donald Trump has caused them on the pages of The New York Times and beyond.
Trump is too obvious, too crass, too vulgar an imperialist. Their first instinct is to disown him as an anomaly. He looks like a Latin American dictator, an African despot, an Oriental tyrant, or a Russian czar.
He is cast as the American version of Erdogan, Putin, Sisi, Xi – anything, anywhere, so long as it seems far from the US of A. He cannot possibly be American. Except he is – more than any of them – representing 77,284,118 Americans just like him, who eagerly rushed to vote him into power.
This is a bizarre intellectual malady on full display in the US, where badly defeated and demoralised liberals refuse to acknowledge that Trump is a 100 percent American phenomenon.
He is a homegrown dictator with unabashed fascistic proclivities, barely able to contain his urges, and surrounded by equally 100 percent American sycophants – worse than any clown or court jester ever conjured from their Orientalist imagination.
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Just summon your courage and look at his cabinet: doormat lickspittles, competing in barefaced sycophancy.
This is all American. “Made in America.” It is not an import. They are making America great again!
Without owning up to Trump as a homegrown crook with a crown on his head, this country will never have a snowball’s chance in hell of disentangling itself from this murderous mess.
From Mussolini to MAGA
If there is any context for Trump, it is the long and recent history of European fascism – from Hitler and Mussolini to Franco, and now all their heir-apparent lookalikes: Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, ad nauseam.
Go to the roots of America’s claim to democracy, and you will see fascism staring you down
Columnists at The Times are now fond of comparing Trump to a Mafia boss, or else to their favourite villain, “Soviet-style” Putin.
But Mafia is an aberration, and Putin is a scapegoat. Much closer to Trump are Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – even closer still are the exposed fascistic roots of American so-called democracy.
Go there: go to the roots of America’s claim to democracy, and you will see fascism staring you down.
This is Trump doing exactly what he always said he would. And what he does is backed by his claim to represent the will of the American majority.
But here is the heart of the paradox: this is not merely the rule of the majority, but the tyranny of the majority – a term made potently insightful by Alexis de Tocqueville in his two-volume diagnosis of the malice and maladies of American democracy, Democracy in America (1835-1840).
Tyranny
Trump’s barefaced vulgarity – his outright disregard for even the most basic norms of human decency – is, in its own way, refreshing.
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I much prefer it to Obama’s sleek duplicities and fake sincerity, beneath which he advanced some of the most vicious imperial designs imaginable – including the hyper-militarisation of the Israeli settler colony – far more effectively than Trump ever could.
Trump’s thuggish demeanour is, in fact, quite liberating.
The more liberal Americans detest him, the more I appreciate his having exposed the true face of America – unvarnished, with the thick democratic lipstick they have plastered over their tyrannical pigs now smeared and exposed for all to see. But such characterisations should not descend into ad hominem name-calling. Presidents and other leaders become symbolic, allegorical of the nations that elect or tolerate them.
So it is with American presidents. What do they represent? Who gave them the authority to do what they do? The majority of the electorate, of course. And that majority is the point.
Diagnosis
We have to go back to arguably the most astute foreign thinker ever to write about this so-called “democracy” in America – Tocqueville, who visited the US between 1831 and 1835 to study its penitentiary system.
In his classic work, he offers the best remedy for this pathologically myopic fixation on Trump as an aberration, as if he somehow fell from an “Orientalist despotism” sky. He is no aberration. He is a symptom of something far deeper, darker, and more enduring in the American experience.
Americans avoid facing that fact at their own peril – and in doing so, they await something even worse than Trump in their future.
Tocqueville always understood America through the aristocratic legacy of Europe that it had ideologically left behind. In doing so, he uncovered what he saw as the single most diabolic force at the heart of this imperial republic.
“The authority of a king is purely physical,” Tocqueville observed, “and it controls the actions of the subject without subduing his private will; but the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.”
That is the power of the majority – the tyranny of the majority – or what is perceived to have been the majority.
There is, therefore, no true independence of mind and freedom of discussion in America. Tocqueville detected in the most vital characteristic of American democracy – rule by the majority – its most dangerous flaw: a proclivity towards despotism, now plainly visible in Trump’s White House.
‘Soul enslaved’
Tocqueville diagnosed the depth of moral depravity in the US like no one before or after him.
He wrote: “In America, the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy.”
That “daily obloquy” is now called doxxing – a vicious act of intimidation perfected by genocidal Zionists against anyone who dares cross the boundaries of manufactured consent that cast Israel as God’s gift to humanity.
Tocqueville diagnosed the depth of moral depravity in the US like no one before or after him
Israel can commit outright acts of genocide in broad daylight before global witnesses – but dare to speak against it in public, and trucks will circle your neighbourhood with your full name and address, accusing you of the vilest of crimes. That is your “daily obloquy”.
“Fetters and headsmen”, Tocqueville added, “were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilisation of our age has refined the arts of despotism which seemed, however, to have been sufficiently perfected before.”
Propaganda organs of liberal imperialism – of the gaudiest and most dysfunctional sorts – like The New York Times, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal define the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
There may be no visible chains, but the restraints operate through moral and intellectual pressure, daring any would-be dissenter to defy them and speak out.
As Tocqueville warned:
The excesses of monarchical power had devised a variety of physical means of oppression, but the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as that will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of an individual despot, the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.
His prophetic soul: Tocqueville read the soul of American democracy before its mask ever slipped.
Majority myth
The mettle of the person is tested by resistance to tyranny – whether under the theocracy of Ayatollah Khamenei, the gaudy sultanism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the barefaced vulgarity of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, or the dangerous delusions of Donald Trump and every single US president who came before or will come after him.
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What defines the American predicament is this: how is the opinion of the majority – and thus its unyielding power – manufactured and sustained?
Three ways: through general elections, periodic polling, and, above all, through dominant media outlets.
These institutions manufacture the illusion of majority opinion by demonising critical thought, and by normalising compliance, acquiescence, and subdued fatalism in the face of a cruel fate too deeply internalised to even be recognised.
That is democracy in America.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
