by HAMID DABASHI
From Tocqueville to today, the real danger lies not in Trump’s vulgarity but in the tyranny masked as democracy – built on illusion, repression, and majority rule without dissent
Liberal imperialists, who would have been delighted with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris as president in the last US election, are now up in arms, mourning the global embarrassment Donald Trump has caused them on the pages of The New York Times and beyond.
Trump is too obvious, too crass, too vulgar an imperialist. Their first instinct is to disown him as an anomaly. He looks like a Latin American dictator, an African despot, an Oriental tyrant, or a Russian czar.
He is cast as the American version of Erdogan, Putin, Sisi, Xi – anything, anywhere, so long as it seems far from the US of A. He cannot possibly be American. Except he is – more than any of them – representing 77,284,118 Americans just like him, who eagerly rushed to vote him into power.
This is a bizarre intellectual malady on full display in the US, where badly defeated and demoralised liberals refuse to acknowledge that Trump is a 100 percent American phenomenon.
He is a homegrown dictator with unabashed fascistic proclivities, barely able to contain his urges, and surrounded by equally 100 percent American sycophants – worse than any clown or court jester ever conjured from their Orientalist imagination.
Just summon your courage and look at his cabinet: doormat lickspittles, competing in barefaced sycophancy.
This is all American. “Made in America.” It is not an import. They are making America great again!
Without owning up to Trump as a homegrown crook with a crown on his head, this country will never have a snowball’s chance in hell of disentangling itself from this murderous mess.
From Mussolini to MAGA
If there is any context for Trump, it is the long and recent history of European fascism – from Hitler and Mussolini to Franco, and now all their heir-apparent lookalikes: Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, ad nauseam.
Go to the roots of America’s claim to democracy, and you will see fascism staring you down
Columnists at The Times are now fond of comparing Trump to a Mafia boss, or else to their favourite villain, “Soviet-style” Putin.
But Mafia is an aberration, and Putin is a scapegoat. Much closer to Trump are Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – even closer still are the exposed fascistic roots of American so-called democracy.
Go there: go to the roots of America’s claim to democracy, and you will see fascism staring you down.
This is Trump doing exactly what he always said he would. And what he does is backed by his claim to represent the will of the American majority.
But here is the heart of the paradox: this is not merely the rule of the majority, but the tyranny of the majority – a term made potently insightful by Alexis de Tocqueville in his two-volume diagnosis of the malice and maladies of American democracy, Democracy in America (1835-1840).
Tyranny
Trump’s barefaced vulgarity – his outright disregard for even the most basic norms of human decency – is, in its own way, refreshing.
I much prefer it to Obama’s sleek duplicities and fake sincerity, beneath which he advanced some of the most vicious imperial designs imaginable – including the hyper-militarisation of the Israeli settler colony – far more effectively than Trump ever could.
Trump’s thuggish demeanour is, in fact, quite liberating.
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