Triumph of the Swill

Trump's Second Coming

Many years ago, in my late teens, I read Anatoli Kusnetzov’s documentary novel Babi Yar about the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. In one chapter, Kusnetzov steps away from his boyhood memories of the Nazi occupation, and delivers a stern warning to the post-war generation that had not experienced the horrors that he described:

THE PERSON WHO TODAY IGNORES POLITICS WILL REGRET IT. I did not say I liked politics. I hate them. I scorn them. I do not call upon you to like them or even respect them. I am simply telling you: DON’T IGNORE THEM.

At the time, I took these words to mean that politics can be vicious beyond our immediate ability to imagine it; that we should not take the stability of our political systems for granted, because the most brutal and unpredictable outcomes can emerge seemingly out of nowhere. We might also find ourselves facing some incomprehensible calamity, just as the youthful Kusnetzov once did in Kiev when he watched the Soviet flag replaced by the swastika, and saw his own countrymen assist the Nazi occupiers in the massacre of 100,000 Jews at Babi Yar.

It’s more than five decades since I read those words, and in that time many countries have been engulfed by wars, civil wars and dictatorships that took them by surprise. For most of those years, western democracies considered themselves immune to political calamities of a similar magnitude.

Their citizens might not like or may even loathe their governments; they might become disillusioned and disgusted with those they voted for. They might even be bored by the tedious rituals of democratic politics. But most of them believed that their societies were resilient enough to avoid the political disasters to which supposedly less-favoured countries were prone.

We were citizens of the free world, after all. We were taught to believe in consensus, in the peaceful handover of power, and the concept of accountability that all politicians were expected to observe, especially those who aspired to leadership positions.

These views were particularly strongly held in the United States, where the office of the presidency or the ‘commander-in-chief’ was imbued with the quasi-sacred aura passed down through the constitution and the wishes of the founding fathers.

Since 2016, that model has been crumbling. Or perhaps more accurately, 2016 revealed the cracks that too many Americans had previously ignored. That year, America elected a wealthy reality tv star as their president, despite clear indications that he was morally and intellectually unfit for the office he held.

In 2020, American voters rejected Trump and gave the Democrats a narrow victory. Despite the Trumpian/MAGA refusal to accept this outcome, which veered into vexatious litigation and sedition, the famous guardrails prevailed and decency was reasserted, or so it seemed.

And yet last week, 74, 264, 469 Americans voted for Donald Trump a second time. Only a few days after Trump had been mimicking giving a blowjob on camera, they elected a convicted felon who has presided over one of the most savagely racist electoral campaigns in American history.

No one made them do this. Voters had a choice, however imperfect, because democratic politics rarely is perfect, and millions of Americans chose Donald Trump.

Over the last week I’ve read many explanations for this outcome: that it was the Democrats’ punishment for turning their backs on the working class. That Harris was a weak candidate who fought a weak campaign. That Harris was a good candidate who waged a skilful campaign, but had no time to make it count. That voters were worried about inflation. That it was payback for Gaza. That Biden should have stepped down. That Biden shouldn’t have stepped down. That Elon Musk and Joe Rogan swung it.

Whichever explanation or combination of explanations you accept, the fact remains that America has just elected an authoritarian demagogue with ties to the extreme-right, who once tried to overthrow an elected government and might have attempted to do it again if he hadn’t won at the ballot box.

Some may say that Trump’s supporters don’t believe he was guilty of any of these crimes and misdemeanours. But there can be no excuse for not knowing what Trump was and is. Everything about him has been out in the open for the last four years. And the fact that so many people have willingly embraced a man of such low character, morals and intellect, is a stunning indictment of American society.

In making this choice, Americans have opted for the worst that America has to offer. Many commentators have sought parallels in 1930s Europe for this descent into the authoritarian vortex. Such comparisons are not groundless. Trump’s movement has reached into the political emotions that informed fascism - the cruelty and resentment, the ethnonationalist chauvinism, the racism, brutish hyper-masculinity and the loathing of liberalism. Trump has identified and catered to the cult-like compulsion that can overtake electorates at certain times, to prostrate themselves before a strongman/leader.

But Trumpism is too corrupt and ideologically incoherent to morph into fully-fledged fascism. It doesn’t - at least for now - have an imperialist military dimension. Although Trump, like Hitler, came to power through elections, his movement lacks the fully-thought out program that enabled the Nazis to impose their gleichshaltung (coordination) on German society in a matter of months. Unlike the 1930s, Trump’s second coming did not follow a global depression, or the years of political street fighting that the Nazis helped orchestrate in order to present themselves as the antidote to Germany’s national insecurity problem.

This time there is no Versailles Treaty or military defeat to blame on the Jews. If many Americans are struggling financially, they are not buying bread with wheelbarrows full of dollars. The election took place at a time when the US economy was doing better than any other, when inflation was falling, and wages were rising.

So Trump’s victory cannot be interpreted a cry for help from the hardworking man or woman with no one else to turn to. American voters turned to Trump either because they found his vices appealing, or because they were too selfish to allow these vices to get in the way of their own hoped-for advancement.

In electing a criminal so that he could pardon himself, American voters sent a signal to anyone who can get away with it that the rule of law no longer matters. In ignoring a man who lies whenever he opens his mouth, these voters announced that the truth does not matter to them either.

In their belief that Kamala Harris’s Democrats were communists, these voters demonstrated that they don’t know what communism is. In voting for a man who is now beholden to Elon Musk - an unelected billionaire, far-right extremist and Putin sympathiser - these voters demonstrated an obscene veneration for wealth that is unencumbered by any concerns about the security of their own country.

This is not something you can easily step back from. No democracy can survive such idiocy, superficiality, selfishness and venality, and it is questionable whether American democracy will survive the next four or more years in its current form.

This shocking decision has terrible implications for democracies everywhere. The Democrats were stunningly complacent following their 2020 victory and allowed Trump to rebuild. It’s difficult to have any faith whatsoever in the ability of Starmer and his team of timid technocrats to act as a bastion of democratic values, either internationally or in regard to the would-be Trumps who stalk our own crumbling polity.

Already, the Speaker of the House has reportedly invited Trump to speak in the Commons, and Farage has offered to act as an ‘intermediary’ between the British government and Trump, while calling on the government to ‘roll out the red carpet’ to the rapist-criminal.

Courting political pathogens will not stop them spreading, but this is what Starmer and his government will almost certainly try to do, while claiming to act in the national interest.

The European Union is too divided, and its members too vulnerable to similar movements, to react with the urgency required. The ‘fourth estate’ - as it used to be called - has already begun to turn the Trump mafia freakshow into a celebrity showbiz phenomenon, and normalise what should not be considered normal by an society that values its own democratic survival.

Insofar as there is any consolation to be taken from this calamity, it is that millions of Americans did not vote for Trump. Millions share the views of the Illinois governor JB Pritzker:

This is what the British government should be saying. And what European governments should also be saying, but don’t hold your breath.

Our task is to support that other America, however beaten and vanquished, and remember that it exists. To show solidarity with those who are about to be attacked: women, immigrants, minorities. To continue to tell the truth unflinchingly, and hold onto the idea of the truth even in this rotten age of lies and billionaire-funded disinformation platforms. To find allies and build alliances where we can. To bring pressure on our governments to act with the decency and the urgency required, against a global movement that threatens all of us.

Because all of us must live with the consequences of America’s leap into the void, and many of those who voted for Trump will also have to do the same. They will find out that tariffs will hurt them too; that ‘dark gothic’ billionaires and ‘high status males’ do not necessarily have their interests at heart; that millions may lose their health insurance and any support from their government, as the likes of Musk and Peter Thiel gut its institutions in their own interests; that their friends and relatives will also be deported.

Because America will get worse, before - if - it gets better. And in these circumstances, I’m not going to repeat Kamala Harris’s slogan that when we fight we win, because as last week has shown, you can fight and also lose, even if you have Beyoncé and Taylor Swift on your side. Nor do I want to reiterate hollow platitudes about the audacity of hope, because right now, there is very little hope on the progressive side of the political spectrum.

But no cause is lost until it is finally abandoned by those who once believed in it. And we have no choice but to resist the destructive forces that are spreading across the western world, and to try to believe, despite the increasing evidence to the contrary, that democracy can be saved and that democracy is actually worth saving; that politics can be a vehicle for the common good, not just a confidence trick.

So if you feel the urge to switch off or tune out, I don’t blame you. But heed Kusnetzov’s warning. Because as depressing and dispiriting as our current predicament may be, there really is no escape from the political decisions that other people make.

And in this shallow, foolish, insane political age, we should remember that no country is immune to the disease that has infected the American republic, and which may destroy it.