Dancing on the Precipice

The United States, and more particularly United States democracy, is entering a particularly fraught and challenging period for many reasons. I highlight three of those here. When I say “fraught,” I mean to suggest it is now unclear whether our country’s democratic institutions will survive the coming national election, just 125 days away as I write. The first concern is the wholesale capture of a major political party, the GOP, by anti-democratic and authoritarian partisans. The second is the failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to ensure the continued accountability of the nation’s chief executive to the rule of law. And the third turn concerns the apparent inability of mainstream media recently to act with prudence and care in its reporting, and instead to descend into a sort of willful hysteria, with major implications for popular democratic deliberation.

First, as New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote recently, one great truth,

 . … is that the great divide of European and American politics is no longer between left and right—as it was first symbolized in the French hémicycle at the time of the Revolution—but between authoritarian, antidemocratic demagogues of both sides and those who represent, however uncertainly, the upholding of liberal democracy, pluralism and tolerance.¹

        Regardless of whether one sees the far American Left as Gopnik describes it, it seems incontrovertible that the nation’s traditional Right, in the guise of the Republican Party, and surely its radical fringe, is now actively supporting an authoritarian antidemocratic demagogue in former president Donald Trump. GOP officials have countenanced and often formally championed his constantly changing stream of hate, lies and wild and frequently incomprehensible assertions. In doing so, the preponderance of the Party’s leaders has chosen to support an outlandish barrage of conspiracy claims without evidence, including that the 2020 election was “stolen” by a mysterious cabal led by “enemies” of the nation, that those who murdered and committed mayhem in the U.S. Capitol were not misguided misanthropes, thugs and worse but, perversely, “heroes,” and anyone who might criticize the general ignorance, cruelty and criminality of the Party’s leader, Trump, is in fact a member of an all-powerful and extremely well-hidden conspiracy designed to punish him for his supposed truth-telling, wisdom and innocence.

        Ironically, there is nothing new in this trope. Trump and the GOP are rallying the willing to an anti-democratic authoritarian banner based on racism, nationalism, gender and gender-roles absolutism, and impassioned calls to “save” the Nation from a very vaguely identified, but actively vilified, group supposedly working assiduously under-cover, but nonetheless all powerfully, to undermine the country for never articulated reasons except “they hate us.” Authoritarian rulers during the 20^th century relied on virtually identical narratives, lies and baseless conspiracy appeals. What is new here is that nationalist, racist and othering tropes have captured one of this country’s major political parties and that a shocking cross-sectional minority of Americans have shown themselves willing to accept, even to cherish, such hate and resentment, and to cheer their “Great Leader” on in his ignominy.

        The political thinker Hannah Arendt captured the mindset underpinning this estranged population when she observed that “Nothing, perhaps illustrates the general disintegration of political life better than a vague pervasive hatred of everyone and everything.”² Arendt wrote that this directionless hate was irredeemably stupid in the sense that it was unreasoned or willfully uninformed. Then, as now, those in its thrall were willing to believe virtually anything in its name. QAnon and the revival of the long discredited anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as widely circulated and believed conspiracies among current adherents of the MAGA Trump Right, represent especially outlandish examples of this phenomenon. But the Republican Party’s official acceptance of Trump’s no less fanciful and cruel lies concerning the 2020 election, immigration and the supposed Hellscape of the U.S. economy at the hands of Communists and Socialists are no less contemptible. By way of illustration of this perspective, and as Arendt noted of the 20^th century’s authoritarian followers:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (1.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.³

        To fuel this resentment, Trump like other autocrats before him, must continually up the ante and offer ever more bizarre conspiracy scenarios designed to foment the self-righteous fury of his followers. Left unchallenged, those lies have created a mad logic of their own among many GOP partisans. That fact, coupled with Trump’s constant assertion that he will punish the evil doers responsible for this imagined narrative of woe when he regains power, is signally dangerous in a nominally democratic society. If Trump does again gain power, and acts as he suggests he will, many innocents will suffer.

        It should surprise no one that GOP followers in this disoriented and hate-infused state have shown themselves willing increasingly to follow leaders seeking to criminalize free speech and thought and, more generally, to demand that intellectuals hew to specific ideological views or risk punishment. What seems to fuel this effort to convince people of an alternative reality that defies common sense and works to undermine any modicum of deliberation is age old: a combination of greed, lust for power and an unwillingness to tolerate difference. Those accepting Trump’s assertions concerning these matters would do well to recall the emptiness of the Nazi architect of the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann, who, finally, could not articulate why he had behaved so monstrously, other than to comment that he could not countenance the difference represented by those whom he worked so doggedly and systematically to dehumanize and murder.

        A second major factor presently challenging the nation’s free and democratic way of life is the recent willingness of the U.S. Supreme Court to assign nearly unlimited power and authority to the president. In its decision in a suit brought by the former president to avoid legal accountability for his effort to overthrow a legitimate national election in Trump Vs. United States, the Court’s majority found the following:

A federal grand jury indicted former President Donald J. Trump on four counts for conduct that occurred during his Presidency following the November 2020 election. The indictment alleged that after losing that election, Trump conspired to overturn it by spreading knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the collecting, counting, and certifying of the election results. Trump moved to dismiss the indictment based on Presidential immunity, arguing that a President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities, and that the indictment’s allegations fell within the core of his official duties.

Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.⁴

        With this decision, unprecedented in American history, the Court held the President can effectively do whatever he likes and not be held legally accountable for his/her actions, assuming they can be construed as having occurred “officially.” The lone arbiter to prevent the president from choosing to behave as, for example, an absolute monarch, would be the 6-3 majority on the Court, which granted Trump and presidents this broad immunity in the first instance. Placing the president largely above the law and arguing he is immune from responsibility for a wide swathe of his acts is profoundly anti-democratic and innately undermines the rule of law. It also removes an important safeguard for the preservation of free institutions at a time when the GOP is already actively working to undermine the legitimacy of elections, striving to gain power by embracing a “leader” who routinely calls those who do not support him “scum” and who has, as a central feature of his rhetoric, threatened to jail or “punish “countless innocents on no evidence whatsoever. This Court action has profoundly imperiled the Republic at an already troubled moment.

        Finally, the last week of June witnessed the start of another deeply concerning phenomenon in U.S. politics, as the media have relentlessly pursued the idea that President Joe Biden is unfit for office based on a few minutes of an event with former President Trump. Whatever the motives of the torrent of journalism, op-eds, punditry and more calling on Biden to step aside, I have been struck that Trump’s narcissism, incoherence and stream of lies at that same event have been otherwise deemed acceptable or ignored because he was supposedly “vigorous” in asserting them. To say this is ridiculous is simply to state the obvious. In its new issue, The Economist, for example, has called on Biden to depart the race noting that in its editors’ view, he is “incapable.”⁵ Interestingly, there is nothing in Biden’s record to date to suggest he has governed incapably and much to suggest the contrary, but the British newsweekly, like many other mainstream media outlets, has now added its voice to those seeking to push Biden from the race. Whatever the outcome of the present hue and cry, it bespeaks a media increasingly incapable of monitoring itself and one that has also lost a sense of balance and deliberation in its editorial choice-making. One might legitimately ask why no similar single-minded effort has been mounted to force Trump, a convicted felon and worse and just three years younger than the President, from the race, despite his frequent and manic incoherence and confusion at public and private events. But nothing of the kind has occurred. In any case, it is very difficult to imagine, following this scenario, how the mainstream media can reassert its traditional claim to ensuring that voters receive thoughtfully framed and fair coverage of news events, rather than hysterical lemming-like rushes to pillory based on scant evidence. More generally, and like the Court and the Republican Party, it is hard not to conclude that another major institutional guardrail of democracy has failed in its role at a critical moment and failed profoundly.

        In sum, given the decision among GOP officials to bow to Trump and his followers (always a minority of Americans) in the name of the pursuit of power, and the similar choice among some major actors in industry to do so out of greed and the unwillingness of the media and the Supreme Court to hold him accountable, only one important guardrail can now ensure against Trump’s possible election and the nation’s potential descent into autocratic rule: the people at the ballot box. While I do not know as I write who voters will have to choose in lieu of Trump, and I am more skeptical now than I have ever been that major shares of the electorate can or will choose to act deliberatively in any case, collectively they now constitute the lone bulwark to ensure the Republic continues. Everything now depends on the good sense of the majority of the American people and only time will tell whether they can meet that standard.

        For our part here at the Institute, we will continue to conduct research that sheds light on our governance processes, politics and predicaments in the hope that those analyses can provoke and inform. That role is a time-honored one for the academy in our democracy and, we will hope that it emerges as a vital one in this dangerous time and that we will be permitted to continue to pursue it in an unfettered fashion in the future.

Notes

¹ Gopnik, Adam. “Comment: Right Turns,” The New Yorker, June 24, 2024, 9-10, 10.                                                       

² Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Shocken Books, 1951, 2004, 342.

³ Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism, 474.

⁴ Supreme Court of the United States, Trump v United States, 23-939, July 1, 2024, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf, Accessed July 1, 2024.

⁵ Beddoes, Zanny Minton. “Why Biden Must Withdraw,” The Economist, July 4, 2024, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2024/07/04/why-biden-must-withdraw?utm_campaign=r.the-economist-this-week&utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_term=7/4/2024&utm_id=1901832, Accessed July 4, 2024.