The comforting conceit that Donald Trump is an unpleasant yet passing American aberration, often heard during his 2017-21 presidency, is harder to believe than ever after his Iowa caucus landslide victory last week. As matters stand, Trump is on course to win a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination and a possible second White House term.
The bigger, worldwide picture is more alarming still. Far from being an exception to the rule, Trump reflects, amplifies and popularises a regressive global trend towards authoritarian, totalitarian, dictatorial, nationalistic and religiously, ethnically and culturally majoritarian forms of rightwing governance.
To put it more simply, fascism is once more on the march – and liberal democracy risks being trampled under its marauding boots. Is this a disagreeable hiccup, a passing phase? Or does it herald the start of a post-democratic age?
Iowa was a reminder that Trump’s brand of nihilist anti-politics readily transcends the national borders he is so keen to fortify. It has near-universal, compelling appeal among those who distrust or feel betrayed by their leaders. Trump epitomises the big man, the national strongman, who vows to defend and support the little guy and his threatened shibboleths of identity and community. In return, he demands a dictator’s unlimited power and fealty.
It’s the old-new deal of the century: security, uniformity, conformity and social validation for the dominant majority at the cost of civic freedoms, legal accountability, independent media, diversity and minority rights. This is the model in place, or gaining ground, from Beijing, Moscow and Delhi to Cairo and Buenos Aires, by way of Rome, Paris and Berlin.
Trump’s approach to Iowa exemplified how anti-democratic anti-politics works. He mostly avoided rallies and meet-and-greets with voters, boycotted debates with rival candidates, and travelled, aloof, in a power-tripping motorcade of black secret service limousines. Yet his imperial mien, lavishly funded TV advertising and harsh take-no-prisoners policy agenda produced a record win.
How can this be? Many voters candidly applaud Trump’s autocratic style. Democracy, they say, has not delivered for them; and there are too many liberties, taken and assumed, in a too-woke world. They buy the lie he’s a victim of fake slanders confected by “deep state” opponents fearful of his righteous crusade to rescue America from itself.
Some claim God sent him as saviour; that only he can halt apocalyptic national decline. And vengeance, Trump vows in biblical vein, will be theirs. “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” he declared last year. His is a classic, cultish conspiracy of untruth. Stalin, Mao or Louis XIV would recognise it. Like them, Trump seeks to rule absolutely.
In his 2023 book, The New Leviathans, the English conservative philosopher John Gray develops a general theory of democratic decline. He argues western leaders and writers were sadly mistaken in their “grotesque notion” that the conclusion of the cold war in 1989-91 presaged a permanent “end-of-history” triumph of free societies and free markets.
Instead, powerful rightwing dictatorships have emerged in Russia, China and elsewhere that are dragging the world back into the chaotic “state of nature” first described by Gray’s 17th-century predecessor, Thomas Hobbes. “Enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civilisation based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history,” Gray writes.
Leaders such as Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin – a modern-day personification of “nasty, brutish and short” – are, in effect, building upon Hobbes’s central idea of unfettered sovereign power (the Leviathan) in order to control and direct the lives of citizens, not merely protect and defend them, he argues. “Neo-totalitarian states today aim to deliver their subjects from the burdens of freedom ... The new Leviathans are engineers of souls.”
While Gray concedes the path ahead is not entirely back to black, he believes the myth of an inexorably advancing progressive tendency is exploded. “The world of the future will be like that of the past, with disparate regimes interacting with one another in a condition of global anarchy.”
Russia’s voters, who accord Putin high approval ratings, broadly resemble America’s Trumpers in valuing charisma over character, preferring the strongman to the right man, and turning a blind eye to corruption and lies. Yet Russia is not and never was fully democratic. Its example repels rather than attracts.
China’s Communist party presents a bigger challenge to the western liberal democratic tradition in that it actively projects its state capitalist model internationally while fiercely controlling people’s lives and cultivating a single national culture and identity – as Tibetans and Uyghurs know to their cost. Gray likens Chinese society under Xi to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a vast imaginary prison where invasive surveillance is ubiquitous.
“Enclaves of freedom” still hold out, yet their walls are besieged. India is succumbing to one-man rule, beguiled by the intolerant Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi. Israel’s democracy is presently self-destructing. In Africa, coups abound. In Europe, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, scrambled to shore up the national project last week against a surging far-right tide.
In Germany, Italy and Hungary, much the same struggle against a reviving fascism is being fought (or conceded). So much so that Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, joined street protesters to urge resistance to the anti-migrant, Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany party. In the UK, alienation and an anachronistic voting system turn elections into charades.
In such countries, the battle is not yet over. But unity of purpose is lacking. As in the US, parliamentary and public institutions are weak and discredited. If Americans such as Iowa’s caucus-goers, relatively prosperous and secure, do not stand up for democracy and reject its subversive, disruptive foes, what hope is there for the rest?
In truth, not much. The liberal moment, it appears, is passing; the fascist nightmare looms anew. Under darkly lowering skies, the post-democratic age dawns.