So, there we have it. The President of the United States wants to bypass state governors and deploy the National Guard and the US Marine Corps against his own citizens. This comes after Donald Trump’s administration, apparently impatient with the existing legal immigration process, started bundling black and brown people into vans with a view to summary deportation.
Trump wants to be king. He doesn’t even slightly attempt to conceal it
Is there some point at which those who like to sneer at the “orange man bad” school of thought will swallow their pride and come round to the realisation that the orange man is, in fact, bad? Come on, my chickadees. We can call bygones on all the warning signs that were so easy to miss: the criminal record, the sucking up to tyrants, and the pardoning of the insurrectionists. We should now, surely, be on the same page. It would be nice to think that what happens in the US is their own affair, on which outsiders should reserve judgment, but like it or not, what happens in the US is the world’s affair.
Look, I get it. Mr Trump, at least for a bit, seemed attractive because he “owned the libs”. He was lively. He drove dreary centre-left technocrats and blue-haired progressives alike into conniptions of rage and despair. This struck folk who despise both those categories of person as a result to be savoured. On a my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend basis, a callow and frivolous, or at least a short-sighted, faction of the British right gave him a welcome. He was sticking it to the “smug liberal establishment” and he was “shaking things up” and he was speaking for the left-behind.
But it is now as plain as any pikestaff that the only “establishment” the Trump administration is seeking to destroy is the established constitution of the United States, its rule of law and its norms and decencies. In doing so, he goes to war on the whole American idea – which, however imperfectly it has been instantiated through that country’s history, remains one of most compelling and beautiful ideas in politics: government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Everything about the US constitution is geared to the rejection of the arbitrary power of a monarchical state. Its separation of powers, its checks and balances, its emphasis on states’ rights, its two-term limit on the top job, its unequivocal assertion of the inalienable rights of citizens to free speech, freedom of assembly, and due process; even the roots of the much-contested right to bear arms are in the service of an idea that can be summed up as “no more kings”.
Trump wants to be king. He doesn’t even slightly attempt to conceal it. Underlying the soap-opera melodrama of his exchange of insults with Elon Musk was a shared worldview. Musk insisted that Trump owed him for swinging the election in his favour. Trump threatened to unilaterally remove government contracts for Musk’s companies. Musk threatened to unilaterally cancel a keystone of the US space programme. Trump threatened that there would be “consequences” if Musk switched his support to the Democrats. The framing presumption in both cases was that power is arbitrary and personal, and that clientilism is the natural order of things.
So the divide in our politics should not be one between right and left when it comes to Trumpism. I hope that I can find myself in common cause in this respect with colleagues such as Douglas Murray or Rod Liddle or Toby Young with many of whose views on more or less everything I’ll tend to respectfully disagree. That couldn’t matter less. This isn’t about the content of political disagreement: it’s about the forms and structures that make political disagreement possible in the first place. Even our fiercest culture-war spats in the UK are still, thank goodness, about such issues as how the law should be applied and how democracy should represent public opinion rather than about whether the law should be applied and whether democracy should continue to exist.
Whether you’re a command-and-control socialist or an Ayn Rand libertarian, a United Colours of Benetton multiculturalist or an enthusiast for an autarkic ethnostate, if you believe in some version of democracy or the rule of law – rather than the absolute personal power of a tyrant – Trump and Trumpism are your enemy.
What’s happening in the US should terrify us all – not least because it shows how fragile liberal democracy is even in the country that has been its global torchbearer since the middle of the last century.
I repeat: it’s a matter of form rather than of content. It doesn’t matter if Trump, or any leader, gives perfect voice to the desires of his country’s silent majority: the important thing is that his authority proceeds, temporarily and as it were on loan, from his being in tune with his countrymen; rather than his views being an accident of his disposition and his authority being the defining fact. It’s a dangerous fool who thinks the form of politics doesn’t matter as long as the content seems agreeable to them. Democracy, as has been said, is less valuable for what it enables than for what it prevents.
The line from Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons also comes to mind. When one character declares that he’d gladly “cut down every law in England” to get at the Devil, Thomas More retorts: “This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
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