The irrationality that now pervades the US
political system is making sensible debate impossible and undermining its
entire legitimacy, causing a number of commentators to voice their fears over
where the country is headed.
In a book to be published next month,
Barbara F Walter, a CIA strategic analyst, and professor of political science at
the University of California argues that the United States is on the verge of
civil war.
In ‘How Civil Wars Start’, Professor Walter states that “no
one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed
towards war.”
Nevertheless, she believes that the 6
January Capitol riot was “a precursor to civil war” and “the
United States, a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered
very dangerous territory.”
Walter’s warning has been echoed by former
Bill Clinton adviser and historian Sidney Blumenthal, who said this week that “Trump’s questioning of
the election … has led to a genuine crisis of legitimacy.”
At the same time, three retired generals –
Paul Eaton, Antonio Taguba, and Steven Anderson – stated in an article in the
Washington Post, “As we approach the first anniversary of the deadly
insurrection at the US Capitol … we are concerned about the aftermath of the
2024 presidential election and the potential for lethal chaos inside our
military, which would put all Americans at severe risk … in short, we are
chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”
These
views, disturbing as they are, cannot be easily dismissed. The evidence
uncovered recently by the House Select Committee into the January 6 riot makes
clear – even at this very early stage of its investigations – that President
Trump engaged in an attempted political coup following his election loss in
2020.
Trump
pressured Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election result, and
also pressured election officials to falsify results. The 38-page memo prepared by his chief of staff, Mark
Meadows, comprises a detailed plan for a coup. And Steve Bannon has admitted
he conspired with Trump on how to “kill the Biden
presidency” prior to 6 January.
Even
Donald Trump Jr. and a number of Fox News journalists urged Trump to condemn
the riot, but he refused to do so.
Trump’s
coup was only thwarted by the resolute actions of Pence, Attorney-General Bill
Barr, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, upper-echelon members of the
military, and numerous public officials.
Jonathan
Karl’s recently published book ‘Betrayal – The Final Act of the Trump Show
chronicles in dramatic detail the chaos and rank dishonesty that characterized
the Trump White House in the aftermath of the lost election.
Karl
concludes that “the continued survival of our republic may depend, in
part, on the willingness of those who promoted Trump’s lies and those who
remained silent to acknowledge they were wrong.”
Unfortunately,
there is little sign of that happening at present – even those Republican
politicians who despise Trump are unwilling to condemn him publicly, such as
the power that he still wields within the party.
It is
absolutely clear that Trump supporters – perhaps more than 70 million of them –
still do not accept Biden’s election victory, and believe, despite a complete
lack of evidence, that the election was “stolen.”
It is a
fundamental tenet of liberal democracy that those citizens who support the
losing party in an election nevertheless accept the legitimacy of the result.
Democracy cannot function otherwise – yet Trump has overturned this basic
political principle with apparent ease.
More troubling is the blatant
irrationalism exhibited by many Trump supporters. The “stolen election” lie
is frankly irrational, as is the refusal to acknowledge Trump’s egregious
political duplicity. Karl has justifiably accused Trump of “waging a
war on truth.”
More troublingly, this core irrationality
makes sensible political debate in America simply impossible, and this fact
also points to a crisis of legitimacy within the political system.
In his book ‘Legitimation Crisis’, published in 1973, the German
sociologist and philosopher Jurgen Habermas analyzed a trend that was emerging
within Western democracies. His basic point was that all societies are obliged
to legitimize their activities by means of ideologies and that this was
becoming increasingly difficult in the West.
Nevertheless, Habermas believed that human
discourse – what he termed in the abstract “undistorted communication” –
by definition, entailed objective notions of truth and rationality that placed
limits on political activity.
Today, Habermas’ optimistic belief in a
necessarily rational basis for politics seems quaint, if not downright
quixotic. Contemporary American politics no longer obliges political leaders or
parties to justify their policies and actions in rational terms.
That being the case, the fundamental
distinction between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in effect, no
longer matters.
It is tolerably clear, then, that American
liberal democracy is facing a serious crisis – but that should not come as a
surprise.
As Barrington Moore, Jr. pointed out in ‘Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy’, published in 1966, liberal democracy is very much the exception,
rather than the rule – and industrialization and capitalist economic
development, even in the West, can just as easily take place under
authoritarian political regimes.
Nazi Germany and pre-World War Two Japan
are two examples, and France between the wars could easily have gone the same
way.
Nor should it be forgotten that
19th-century liberalism itself was opposed to and fearful of democracy. Even a
cursory reading of Alexis de Tocqueville and John
Stuart Mill makes this clear – and liberal democracy emerged only
fitfully in response to the mass working-class political movements of the late
19th century.
The American founding fathers themselves
were, for the most part, reluctant and uneasy democrats. John Adams, for
example, was particularly fearful of the ignorance of the masses, saying, “Liberty
cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a
right and a desire to know.
”
In a nation in which millions of voters
still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and implicitly condone
Trump’s attempted post-election coup – and in which almost all Republican
politicians remain cravenly silent on these issues – how can democracy survive?
The complete collapse of American
democracy – if it occurs – would obviously have dramatic geopolitical and
ideological consequences globally. One very real danger is the possibility that
the political leadership of a crisis-ridden United States would seriously
contemplate provoking a war with China or Russia in order to “solve” America’s
internal problems.
As Barrington Moore, Jr. correctly pointed
out – he was writing at the height of the Vietnam War – the primary dynamic of
all authoritarian political regimes is “repression at home and
aggression abroad.”
Can anyone doubt that Trump would hesitate
for one moment to provoke a war over Taiwan or Ukraine in order to attain or
hold on to power? In fact, any American leader faced with a serious political
crisis of the kind that has recently emerged would be tempted to do the same.
Such a war, of course, would inevitably
involve the use of nuclear weapons, and completely destroy the Cold War
consensus and peace that has remained in place since the end of World War II.
The complete collapse of American liberal democracy may have very serious consequences indeed – and not just for the United States.
By Graham Hryce, an Australian journalist and former media lawyer, whose work has been published in The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Sunday Mail, the Spectator, and Quadrant.
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