–Analysis–
BERLIN — From now on, there are no more excuses, no apologies, nothing. A good half of American voters did it again, fully aware, enlightened and well-informed: They re-elected Donald J. Trump as president of their country, knowing everything they needed to know about this man.
They knew he was a convicted criminal, a nefarious liar, a miserable rabble-rouser and a vindictive demagogue, as well as an advocate for the rich and powerful. The land of the free has elected an enemy of freedom; a putschist who cheered the storming of the Capitol and kneels before despots.
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Yes, the truth is brutal. Trump was not an industrial accident, not an episode in the history of the United States. He came to stay.
The global alliance of autocrats will hardly be able to believe their luck: when a nationalist is not only elected but even re-elected in the heartland of the West, the star of liberalism falls.
A new era in history is beginning: the era of authoritarian nationalism, of America First.
What has happened? How could it come to this?
What’s behind America First
Trump did not invent the slogan “America First.” It originated, at least in meaning, in the mouths of the Founding Fathers. But back then, almost 250 years ago, it meant exactly the opposite. America, they hoped, would lead the way on the thorny path of world history and realize an age-old dream of mankind, the dream of freedom and equality. “We the people.”
America was to be a role model for the whole world, a beacon of democracy. Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, even attached a warning to the promise: If the experiment failed, it would be “a calamity for all mankind.”
The world, says Trump, is an “arena.”
Quite a few presidents distanced themselves from this sense of mission. But as Hitler’s Germany waged war on the European continent, Franklin D. Roosevelt renewed America’s founding promise. In 1941, the U.S. president said that future world was to be built on four universal freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom “each to serve God in his own way,” freedom from want and freedom from fear. America, it was clear, was to be the driving force.
One has to recall Roosevelt’s phrases to realize how radically the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) Republicans have transformed the sacred beliefs of the Founding Fathers into an ugly, deeply self-serving nationalism. This is what “America First” means to them: America knows only itself, only its naked interests. The world, says Trump, is an “arena.” Everyone is out for themselves and the strongest are most powerful if alone. Whoever wins is right.
The Founding Fathers’ dream
It is true that America’s moral universalism has an extremely dishonest side. “All men are created equal” is the legendary second sentence of the Declaration of Independence of 1776. But the Founding Fathers wanted to keep their slaves; They were a human commodity that could be sold at any time for a profit.
In any case, the bourgeois revolutionaries — all wealthy white men — believed in the beneficial effects of free markets. Only the agrarian-state romantic Thomas Jefferson feared that capitalism would corrupt character.
In short, America’s large landowners, manufacturers and merchants were to go about their business with maximum legroom and minimum constraints. They were to trade with the whole known world and increase their wealth for the good of the people.
The United States not only promoted democracy and the rule of law but also economic liberalism.
For America’s Founding Fathers, the concept of property was sacrosanct. They were convinced that economic freedom and political equality could be reconciled: If every person, and not just in the U.S., followed their own best interests in freedom, then general prosperity would magically result.
In this way, the United States not only promoted democracy and the rule of law but also economic liberalism, in which the common good emerges from the assertion of private interests. With its economic liberalism, America became an important driver of globalization, and when the communist rival system fell in 1989, the path seemed to be mapped out.
Liberalism had triumphed and the whole world would now copy the model. America had reached its goal. And so had humanity.
The rise of MAGA
It turned out differently.
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a group of radicalized conservatives in the U.S. wanted nothing more to do with the “sweet fruits of globalization.” The Tea Party movement hated “homeless” cosmopolitans, insulted migrants, differentiated between “real and fake Americans.” denied climate change, fought for tax cuts and wanted to close all borders.
“We want our country back!” That was in 2009, a year after Wall Street gamblers had brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse. The Tea Party movement siphoned off the anger of the population, poured it into a nationalist program and prepared an elixir that later gave rise to the MAGA movement. “Make America Great Again!”
It is obvious why liberal cosmopolitans in particular were hit by this anger. They had underestimated the force of economic globalization and did not see — or did not want to see — how much the global market dynamic was also shaking up the countries that had unleashed it.
As the lawyer Katharina Pistor was able to show in a groundbreaking study, U.S. financial capitalism in particular exploited the lack of regulation and used private law to insulate its profits from democratic influence. If there is a crash, the one who has previously been kept out of the business with every trick in the book has to bleed: the state.
Global issues create insecurity
It is not just brutal economic competition that is putting governments under dramatic pressure. It is global problems — such as global warming, migration pressure, inflation or the horrendous costs of the delayed restructuring of fossil capitalism — that go beyond their ability to act.
Globalization is blackmailing its children, and it is also blackmailing those who did not want it in the first place. Now the individual states must see how they cope — they have to prevent powerful companies from relocating, they have to comply with debt brakes, reduce taxes, roll out the red carpet to investors, calm social fears and distribute the burden fairly.
But both Republicans and Democrats, writes the American philosopher Michael Sandel, pushed the neoliberal globalization project so far forward that by 2016, income and wealth inequalities were greater than they had been since the 1920s.
Coincidence or not, it was exactly the year in which Donald Trump won the presidential election. He instinctively sided with the culturally and economically insecure and staged himself as a strongman, a tough guy who would not give in to globalization but protect people from it.
Predicting authoritarian trends
Could we have guessed that globalization would make liberal societies susceptible to authoritarian leaders? Yes, absolutely.
The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf and the American investor George Soros, to name just two, warned back in the late 1990s of the social consequences of the shift from a nationally regulated affluent society to a deregulated competitive society.
Dahrendorf, by no means an alarmist, even predicted a “century of authoritarianism”; globalization was “not conducive to democracy” because it forced countries to “emphasize competition and minimize solidarity.” And Soros feared that governments were only “concerned with their competitiveness and are not prepared to make sacrifices for the common good.” In order to keep the population at bay, they would become autocratic.
A labor leader?
The authoritarian megatrend has also taken root in the heartland of democracy. It is one of the ironies of American history that Trump’s success is largely due to a rallying cry of the populist parties from the late 19th century: “The elites are betraying the people.”
With his own diabolical charisma, Trump adopted the left-wing slogan and staged himself as the new labor leader (“I am your warrior. I am your retribution”). Of course, he is not fighting for higher minimum wages, wealth taxes or tougher anti-trust laws. Trump is fighting for those who have always benefited from the system, while the “hard workers” are being fobbed off.
Certainly, the authors of the U.S. Constitution were also friendly to the upper class. But apart from their class interest, they had an interesting motive for doing so: If the wealthy benefited from democracy in the long term, the Founders hoped, they would do everything they could to ensure its continuation. That was naive.
Their imagination was insufficient to envision the type of ultra-rich person who believes he can — like Elon Musk — simply buy an election result.
North-South divide no more
Trump’s victory should trigger a tremor in the transatlantic West: The global right will triumph, it will put all blame on the ideal of equality and look forward to terminating it.
The situation is different for countries in the Global South. In particular, those who still have a score to settle with the colonial West will feel vindicated by Trump’s election. They have long since stopped believing in the miracle mixture of the market and human rights, and you can already sense their derision: If even a comparatively left-wing president like Joe Biden did not succeed in preventing the re-election of an autocrat, then good old liberalism really is dead, deceased at the place of its historical emergence.
Liberalism divides society into hate zones and enemy lines, into top and bottom, into arrogant winners and humiliated losers. No wonder then that in the end, at the moment of disintegration, a real estate shark appears in the liberal heartland, the incarnation of capital. He disguises himself as a false prophet — and wins.
If Trump makes good on his promises, the U.S. would once again be the scene of a historic experiment.
It is often claimed that the old West-East divide in the world has been replaced by a new North-South divide — here the liberal camp, there the authoritarian camp. Trump’s election shows something different. It shows that the West is once again fighting the divide within itself and that the authoritarian temptation is not just lurking “outside.”
In other words, if Trump makes good on his promises, the U.S. would once again be the scene of a historic experiment, the implementation of a new political order. The future president is burying liberalism, cutting — America First! — the bond of transnational obligations, and is restructuring democracy in an authoritarian manner.
As planned long in advance, he is filling the institutions with like-minded people and swearing civil servants in not to uphold the law, but to his own person. Because he finds democratic procedures inconvenient, he transforms the state into a partisan instrument and undermines checks and balances. He will also know how to satisfy his extraordinary thirst for revenge. Old “enemies” are to be harassed by the law enforcement agencies and the “entire Joe Biden crime family” is to be put behind bars.
End of democracy?
All in all, that would be “Orbanism” made in the USA, secured with high fences and high tariffs. The aforementioned Musk would be ready to take over the spiritual direction of the country. As the new Minister of Truth, he will replace the corpse of the bourgeois public sphere with a post-truth nihilism and create a reality free of reason in Twitter format.
Intellectuals such as Hegel, Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber and Theodor W. Adorno have always regarded the United States as a test case for the fate of Western freedom. For Hegel, America was the “land of longing,” because the world spirit was at home there. Tocqueville and Adorno were more skeptical. Today, they would be astonished at the rapid destruction of what was once called “bourgeois culture” by conservatives.
And Weber wrote as early as 1904 that it was quite possible that America’s cultural spirit was “escaping” from society, because “victorious capitalism no longer needs this support. Even the rosy mood of its laughing heir: the Enlightenment seems to be fading for good.”
It is Trump who comes closest to Weber’s premonition, as his “America First” signals to the world that a society is emerging in God’s own country that may still be called a democracy — but may soon no longer be one.
