My friends on the right are still peddling stories that promote variants of the culture wars insisting that the market place of ideas is functioning especially badly on elite college campuses, where political correctness is generating ideological conformity. Somehow the market in educating (forgive the oversimplified claim to follow) the primarily upper-middle class kids, who excel at taking tests, cannot be trusted to sort itself out one matriculation decision at a time.
My friends on the left are euphorically sharing the Panama Papers, expecting the latest exposure of tax evasion, legal or otherwise, will lead the masses to revolt against the neoliberal 1%. This, despite all the empirical evidence that given a political choice the demos wants crony capitalism to benefit it rather rather than end cronyism.
Old habits die hard. To be sure, free speech and equal burden sharing are noble aims. Yet, the relentless reiteration of familiar wedge issues, disguises the menace of our times: liberal democracy is in retreat. Capable and creative authoritarian and xenophobic politicians are in the ascent not just in recent democracies like Russia, Turkey, the Philippines, Hungary, and Poland, but also in longer established ones like Austria, France, and, most fatally of all, the United States.
My data-crunching friends Stateside tell me that Donald Trump will be defeated in a landslide. From their mouth to God's ear. Even so, it is not a comforting thought, if he succeeds in transforming the nature of American politics: normalizing abhorrent ideas (ethnic profiling, deportation of innocents, war crimes, etc.)+ and a dangerous cult of personality. His rise will encourage others to explore xenophobic and polarizing sentiments. Even if, ceteris paribus, demographic trends will make this a non-majoritarian strategy, there is no reason to expect that ceteris will remain paribus. Once America's enemies, which are no friends of democracy and thrive on permanent conflict, recognize that their provocative actions will enhance if not Trump than his would-be-successors, we should expect a steady stream of provocations. Given that Trump openly and regularly flirts with violence, he is signaling that he will play his role in future escalations. It is a familiar fact that cross-border antagonists, which benefit from enmity, are each other's most reliable (indirect) allies.
It is also a familiar historical phenomenon that humane critics of the status quo will find elements to admire in Trump's plans and utterances. The temptation will arise that they will be wooed by deals that will be too good to refuse. After all normal politics is about finding new possibilities to reach one's ends. But all such deals will only strengthen and normalize Trump not the democratic experiment or the rule of law.
Of course, it's not as if the relentless rise of Trump as such is being ignored. And, perhaps, giving him more attention is a mistake. But judging by the existence and liveliness of the old habits, it has not yet sunk in that his democratic (!) ascendancy could represent the onset of one of those periodic crises that endangers our flawed and often petty democracies. The historical record shows that liberal democracies, too, can implode (not just by civil wars, coups, and conquests, but also through the ballot box) and that there are periods in which they implode at alarming rates. A few weeks ago, with my students, I counted more than fifty liberal democracies that had imploded at one point or another (once you pay attention to South America the numbers start to accelerate).
I suspect that when liberal democracies implode they do so, at bottom, when the political, economic, and intellectual elites have stopped believing in a joint enterprise and a common good worth acting on and sacrificing for (recall here; and this post; and also this one on the Roman republic).* But, it is not impossible, that in the moment, our historical counterparts, who may not have understood themselves as belonging to the elite (these are always others), had no clue that their way of life was in mortal danger.
The beauty of democracy is that in general no single election is a final resolution of social conflict. The next election is within a foreseeable temporal horizon and this allows the partial pacification of conflicts, while sustaining the hope for a better result next time around. The problem is that this hope can also sustain illiberal forces, especially once they recognize that ongoing polarization is a growth strategy that will pay off not, perhaps, by generating an electoral majority, but by producing the failure of nerve common to those that are relentlessly besieged.
+Many of these unjust practices exist Stateside already--some of them on a large scale, but Trump is proposing to turn them into the main ends of policy.
*Of course, there are also other sources of social extinction (recall here).
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