They can't say they weren't aware. American voters have knowingly elected a man who prides himself on being a “bloody madman” and who has promised to be a “dictator on day one” of his new administration. This is a man who, mired in legal cases, wants to scrap large sections of the United States Constitution, purge the administration on a massive scale, use the US justice system to settle scores, shut down media outlets, and imprison journalists. A man who plans to deport millions of migrants and, accused of sexual assaults, a man who boasts of “grabbing women by the pussy” while miming fellatio.
With their eyes wide open, they have elected a man who seeks to bring down one of the oldest democracies in the Western world, a democracy whose Founding Fathers themselves feared could be destroyed from within by a tyrant. The people voted this way knowing his character and record, having first brought him to power in 2016.
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How can one help but feel enormous bitterness, or even immense anger, towards those voters who held the fate of the world in their hands and thought they were voting for their wallets, despite Trump advocating drastic cuts to public spending? How can one not blame the Democratic Party for dropping Joe Biden too late, and for ignoring social hardship?
The “republican front” - in the sense of representing the ideals of the American republic - against the Republican Party candidate has failed and Trump, whose party has also seized control of the Senate, and who has the Supreme Court under his thumb, now has free rein to lead the country to ruin.
From fake news to fascist threat
American voters have had their say, but we will all bear the consequences. The Trump avalanche is set to descend upon the world, just as it did in 2016. Eight years ago, his unexpected election ushered in an Orwellian era of “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories.
This wave has reshaped our relationship with reality, elevating lies to the status of truth and pushing verified facts into the background. We remain victims of this still, as evidenced by the decay of the political and media landscape in France, dominated by the propaganda of the media sphere established by French billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
At this major turning point another, even more terrifying, shift has emerged: what began as right-wing populism at odds with the truth has, in recent years, taken on fascist overtones, enough to alarm the remaining democrats on this planet.
With the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th 2021, the Trumpian movement showed it was ready to challenge, with arms if necessary, the rule of law to impose what it sees as a necessary identity-based “regeneration”. Far-right groups, whom historian Robert Paxton has compared to the fascist militias of the 20th century, felt authorised by their leader to attempt, by force, to interrupt the democratic transition of power that was taking place.
The publication last year of 'Project 2025', by a think tank close to the Republican Party, reinforced the idea of a shift in direction. In the hundreds of pages of this infamous manifesto, the need for a “counter-revolution” to restore white, Christian and patriarchal dominance, as well as a takeover of the state apparatus, is unashamedly laid out.
This mission has now been accomplished: the MAGA or 'Make America Great Again' movement, which calls for a new apartheid and openly rejects science, has seized power, drawing not only on the votes of white, disenfranchised Middle America, but also on the ideological and financial support of Silicon Valley’s libertarian techno-solutionists. This is deeply alarming given the colossal power wielded by Elon Musk and his sidekicks, who are capable of conducting surveillance of the masses through their satellites and fascistic robots.
Despots against democracy
This victory, which is dangerous for democracies, women, minorities and the climate, emboldens far-right networks who advocate white supremacism. It equally delights autocrats, from Vladimir Putin to Kim Jong-un and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who - by a quirk of timing - is hosting the 47 nations of the European Political Community in Budapest from November 7th. This gathering includes the European Union's 27 members along with neighbouring states from Turkey to Ukraine.
For these despots, the return of an isolationist and dysfunctional president to the White House is a blessing, allowing them to legitimise their hold on power and manage their affairs without interference. They rightly predict that, under his influence, the international order will increasingly be based on the “right of despots to control the people within their sphere of influence”, as Belgian philosopher Michel Feher wrote on the website AOC.
A similar enthusiasm has been evident from Benjamin Netanyahu: the Israeli war leader knows that Trump will not stand in his way, allowing him to follow through on his genocidal agenda in Gaza and, if he wishes, to “strike” Iran’s nuclear sites. Indeed, Trump recently suggested he do so.
Unlike the Palestinians, who expected little from a Democrat administration that continued funding and supplying arms to Israel, Ukrainians now brace themselves for outright abandonment. This is the final blow for them, given Trump’s repeated assurance that there will be “not one more cent for Ukraine.”
The Europeans are fully aware that if Trump cuts military aid to Kyiv and brokers a peace deal that favours the invader, the Old Continent - weakened in its values and unable to ensure its own defence - will directly suffer the consequences.
The gravedigger of the American Republic, democracy's public enemy number one, is steering his country toward disaster, and taking us with him.
For women worldwide, the victory of this toxic masculinity signals a backlash of brutal proportions, eight years after the beginning of the #MeToo movement. For it is indeed against women that the Republican candidate has been elected, with Kamala Harris’s defeat proving that, even today, a woman cannot be elected in the United States when faced with the worst kind of machismo.
Women have got the message loud and clear: two years after the conservative-majority US Supreme Court eliminated federal abortion rights, their bodies remain the focus of every fantasy of fanatical puritanism. Similarly, the very ways of life of all sexual and racial minorities have been destabilised; the signals given out in this regard by the world’s leading power inevitably produce ripple effects everywhere else.
Finally, it is the climate, and thus all living things, that will bear the brunt of American voters’ choices. By placing petrol prices above all else, they have effectively granted carte blanche to one of the most fervent opponents of the energy transition. Trump has promised to withdraw the country from the Paris Agreement on the climate, as he did in 2017, and declared his intention not only to reverse directives aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but also to lift restrictions on the production of oil, coal and gas.
This unfettered extractivism, combined with a commitment to a 1950s-style production model, completes the portrait of a Trump veering towards fascism: the gravedigger of the American Republic, democracy's public enemy number one, is steering his country toward disaster, and dragging us along with him. “Fascism is not the opposite of democracy but its evolution in times of crisis,” the German playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote.
As the American election adds yet more chaos amid the disintegration of capitalism and horrific wars, all we can do, wherever we may be, is organise the means of resistance and strengthen counter-powers as bulwarks in defence of democracy.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter