Threats To Or The End Of Democracy 🪶 The Election Of Donald Trump As The President Of The United States And Farewell To The Post – 1945 Order (For Good Or Ill)

By AM Tuesday, November 12, 2024

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Barry Gilheany ✍ The head has been bowed, the shoulders slumped and the eyes sunken (through lack of sleep not the effect of tears, I hasten to add). 

The hollow, air sucking, spirit eviscerating sense of defeat. More than even shock, disbelief, and sorrow. This is the reaction and processing of one liberal left leaning person (myself in case you haven’t worked out) to the election (or re-election second time around) of Donald John Trump as President of the United States of America. An event so shocking with potentially cataclysmic and domestic effects yet one which became so sadly believable as the political anoraks, psephological nerds and those with existential concerns for humanity’s future sat into the wee small hours and began to face the reality that the Democrats were not going to take the necessary plurality of the “seven swing seats” in order to maintain residence in the White House. By 11 am GMT what we all feared going to our beds was confirmed by the declaration from Wisconsin that its four electoral college votes had taken Trump over the winning threshold of 270 votes. 

At time of writing, it has yet to be confirmed but it is very likely that it has been a clean sweep of the Seven for Trump. Not even close in the end and he also took the popular vote competing triple crown of Presidency, Senate and Supreme Court and is on the way towards completing the quadruple by taking the House of Representatives. Whither separation of powers, checks and balances and guardrails that feature in the scholarly works of democracy theorists and that the Founding Fathers so carefully constructed for the House on the Hill now so facing condemnation for the dry rot and sewage ingress that will seep from its returning guests.

Truth, Whole Truth, Nothing but The Truth

Let us agree on two things. First, The Democrats were convincingly beaten in a free and fairly contested election. The defeated candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the person she replaced as the Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden, have graciously and with dignity accepted defeat and have pledged to fully cooperate in the transitional arrangements to the new Presidency. Something which the holder of the office from January 20, 2017, to January 20, 2021 – namely Donald J. Trump flagrantly refused to do.

And that defiance of one of the foundational pillars of a functioning democracy, that the losers in elections accept defeat and, concomitantly, do not obstruct the peaceful transition to power, makes Donald Trump an illegitimate President in the eyes of those who uphold and defend the norms and values of democracy. The failure of the US Senate to convict Trump in his impeachment for his role in “The Stop the Steal” campaign after the 2020 Presidential election and the violent insurrection at Capitol Hill on 6th January 2021 represents a gross dereliction of duty by US democracy’s gatekeepers; in this case the then Senate Republican House Leader Mitch McConnell who in an act of craven cowardice instructed his party colleagues to vote for Trump’s acquittal thereby ensuring it and the weakening of perhaps the most important guardrail in US democracy. It is for that reason, on top of his multiple other malfeasances that Trump’s name should not have appeared on any ballot paper. Period.

But blame also lies with a major Democrat appointee – Attorney General Merrick Garland. In the words of fellow TPQ contributor Christy Walsh, his “spineless” decision not to prosecute Trump two years ago when such an action could have had maximum chance of success, on the grounds, presumably, that he did not want to be the first AG to prosecute a President is of greater import than any policy misstep, imagined or otherwise, by the Biden administration or even Joe’s stubborn refusal to step down as Democrat candidate until it was effectively too late. The Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution states quite clearly that no person who has engaged in insurrection against the government and institutions of the US can be eligible to be President of the US. No law officer who fails in their duty to enforce the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment when the necessity calls should be eligible to discharge the functions of their office.

It is because of that simple ethical truth I give short shrift to any of the multiple explanations that have been offered for the Democrats’ defeat. Trump should not have been on the pitch in the first place because he cheated democracy and justice. He did not accept the rules of the game in 2020, tried to violently thwart the will of the electorate and so should have been disqualified (and jailed) from the competition. Football supporters often complain about unfairness and anomalies of the rules that govern the sport. I may well feel that it was grossly unjust that Leeds United having achieved ninety points in the 2023-24 Championship campaign did not achieve the automatic promotion that this tally often achieves and that we had to settle for participation in a play-off round in which we predictably failed to succeed. But there was no legal Electoral College target to pass. The points bar became particularly high that season, we didn’t make but we accepted that those are the rules. Trump did not accept the rules of his competition in 2020 and should have been barred from competing in 2024.

How Progressives Should Game the Future

So how should the Democrats in the US and the centre left across the extant liberal democratic world respond to Trump in office (again) and to the possibility of more pseudo-democratic populist figures of the alt-right coming to power and filleting out the carapace of democracy in the manner of a Victor Orban in Hungary, Georgia Meloni in Italy and Erdogan in Turkey? Do they take on board the concerns of those “hard working families” who cannot see beyond the rising grocery and gasoline pump prices to comprehend the tyranny which will subtly, stealthily but steadily envelop them? When I hear economically pressed Trump supporters saying that the above is the reason for voting for him, I am reminded of the comment by Gene Hackman in the film Mississippi Burning when he acts the bad Southern cop to Willian Dafoe’s good Northern cop in the FBI investigation of the 1964 murders of three Civil Rights workers in that then (if not now) swamp segregationist state of racial hatred; recalling the raw racism of his father – “He was so poor that he could not see beyond it”. The poor, working, MAGA voting whites of today similarly cannot see (not their fault) beyond their poverty stressors; sadly, they do not question why they have to work at two or three jobs to pay the bills, rent or mortgage. A capacity to question the economic structures and the associated possessive individualist ideology is lacking due to the absence of the ethos of solidarity that a labour and trade union movement would provide or civic education.

So when I read Peter Hyman in the Observer counselling progressives to be ‘curious’ about why Trump ‘appealed to so many’ and relating an anecdote about “Bill, a lifelong Democrat and local organiser” who after attending a fundraising event where, he complains ‘”there was a programme aimed at everyone – those on benefits, single mothers, new immigrants – but nothing of and kind at me – a dad of two children, trying to pay the mortgage, working hard to get on” and then realises “the Democrats were no longer for me.”,[1] my reaction is WTF.

Weep for the Wretched of a Trumpian World

For rather than the moans of the supposedly “hard working,” regular guy majority, I listen to the visceral fears of the minorities who stand to suffer so grievously under Trump 2.0. Like Carol Miller who died at home with bed with her three-year-old daughter beside her after being too afraid to seek medical care because of Georgia’s abortion ban. Like Amber Nicole Thurman, also of Georgia, died after taking abortion pills at home for the dilation and curettage procedure that would have saved her life. And Josseli Barnica, who died when seventeen weeks pregnant after doctors in Texas delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours.[2] Such stories which are such a horrific part of the recent history of another of God’s own countries Ireland (although the Republic has rapidly shed that unwelcome accolade) look set to multiply exponentially in the post-Roe v Wade era; entries into the feminist anthologies of patriarchal tyranny of the future. And while we are on the subject of women’s rights to bodily integrity, spare a thought for all the victims of sexual assault, like the columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cossett[3] as the “Pussy Grabber” in Chief, adjudicated rapist and client of Jeffrey Epstein returns to his lair to stalk the women of the USA in the guise of being their protector with or without their consent.

Or cease tying ourselves around the definitions of what exactly constitutes a man or a woman, step back from the toxic debate that flows from it and spare a thought for the young transgender person and others negotiating their gender identity and sexuality in the gender totalitarianism of Dominion Christianity that looks set to envelop them. One source says that calls to LTGBT+ helplines in the US have increased by 125% since Trump’s election. The distress and suicidal ideation behind these calls can only be imagined.

Or think of the US born 4.4m children living with an undocumented immigrant parent (as of 2022) who face the prospect of arrest, detention in internment camps and likely separation from parents again as Trump promises the biggest ever deportation (ethnic cleansing, anyone?) campaign in US history. Feel the fear of Areli Hernandez volunteer with the undocumented having been of that demographic herself who remembers on the first election of Trump the fear of every immigrant in her community of “being picked up by immigration officials”.[4] 

Imagine the scale of the anxiety and distress that the threat Trump’s mass deportation programme is bringing to the mixed status families in the communities served by Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of the Immigrant Defenders Law Centre, a Los Angeles based social justice law serving people facing deportation. The UK has had a preview of this potential horror movie in the then Home Secretary Theresa May’s infamous Hostile Environment campaign against illegal immigration in 2013 which swept up in its train perfectly legal UK residents of the Afro-Caribbean Windrush Generations but who unfortunately lacked the requisite documentary evidence such as UK passports. Beware the Law of Intended Consequences.

As someone from a minority group, namely adults on the neuro-diverse spectrum (developmental dyspraxia and high functioning autistic spectrum in my case ) which scores low in employment participation but high in indices of social exclusion due to ignorance of the condition by the neurotypical mainstream (an ignorance which can seep into outright hostility as illustrated by the remarks of the new British Tory leader Kemi Badenoch Powell that autism diagnosis guarantees economic privilege), I ask for forbearance in my identification with minorities rather than the concerns of the mainstream majority like our friend, Bill the former Democratic organiser (I do not give a flying fuck if readers don’t). As someone not in the first flush of youth, I come from a place of almost perpetual frustration with trying “to get a job”; with the lack of appropriate support arrangements at key transitional moments in life (school – university, university – world of work), dismissal from jobs due to lack of diagnosis and the gross shitshows that are welfare and adult guidance services. Because I am not now (if ever I was) in the race to ascend the ladder of privilege into NGO world, state bureaucracy or tenured academia using the language of “social justice” in the manner of “symbolic capitalists” – the cadre of “professionals” who in the words of Musa al-Garbi in his forthcoming book We Have Never Been Woke “who traffic in ideas, symbols, abstractions, data and narratives.” In other words, writers, academics, artists, and other curatorial functionaries.[5]

Amorality Tales

Because the stark truth is that the majority the US electorate took a conscious decision to vote back into office a man whose gross unfitness for office, criminal record and ambitions for untrammelled power was evident to them. It’s the economy stupid arguments just do not hold water here. Those Americans knew him for the malignant narcissist that he is and still suspended their moral and ethical judgement capacities (that’s if some of them had any to begin with) to elect him. It is as if Adolf Hitler had decided to hold a confirmatory ballot in Germany in the 1930s in the aftermath of, say, the Night of the Long Knives and the Nuremberg Laws and a majority of the German people (remember the Nazis came to power on a minority plurality of the vote in 1932 and only assumed power thanks to a failure, similar to that today’s American holders, of Germany’s then democracy gatekeepers to protect it) voted for the him and his Nazi party despite being in full knowledge of his character and political direction of travel.

For whatever reason, genuine racism and/or misogyny; being sucked into the self-affirming silos of one’s preferred bubble of partisan media and political echo chambers; worse the descent into the rabbit hole of social media, post truth Q Anon conspiracism; simple ignorance of the world beyond the US or simple complacency about their future; America has voted to embark on a process which will likely end functioning democracy in the land of the free (have a look at the Lincoln Project of 2025 which Trump, having eschewed for tactical reasons on the stump, now proclaims undimmed enthusiasm for). Ultimately that is their choice, the consequences of which at some indeterminate point in the future they will have to reckon with. But, as the old saying goes, when America sneezes the world catches cold. Only this time, the Trump 2.0 variant of the Triple P virus (Populism, Polarisation and Post-Truth) that has been released onto a world that is dealing with the Trump 1.0 and Brexit variants and did succeed in curing infected areas such as the Poland during its rule by the Law and Justice Party and Brazil under Latin America’s Trump, Jair Bolonisario. Far right populist acolytes of Trump have been emboldened by and sickeningly triumphalist about his victory; from the Britain’s street fighting, grifting, anti-Islam thug Tommy Robinson (now serving another spell as the Alt-Right’s pin up “political prisoner)”, Victor Orban of Hungary (Putin’s chief European sycophant and whose nation is probably lost to democracy beyond recall) and Benjamin Netanyahu (another crook who seems determined to continue to spill the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians as well as that of the hostages taken on 7th October and of his own soldiers in a war that Israel has in Gaza achieved its objectives according to, Gallant his sacked defence minister, simply to say out of the claws of justices: something which not even The Donald has tried – his country is in democratic peril but can still be saved from itself).

The Old World Order: What We Have We Hold?

So what more powerful antidotes can be found to inoculate the world’s remaining democracies in a world where so many certainties have melted or will melt away such as Francis Fukuyama’s self-abnegated hubris about the eternal present of liberal democracy and free markets in the End of History Anthropocene and the much vaunted post – 1945 rules based international order meant to underpin that utopia?

Let us start with the nation on the critical if not terminally ill list – the United States. The Democrats have the 2026 mid-term elections to regroup for – possibly the last competitive election before MAGA complete their short march through the institutions and then neuter them to produce a Putinesque pseudo-democracy or, more likely and frighteningly, a Dominion style Christian Nationalist theo state[6] which if not quite the hideous Republic of Gilead of Margaret Attwood’s literary creation in The Handmaid’s Tale or the real life Gender Apartheid nightmare of Afghanistan under the Taliban (thank you very much, Donald for the return of that horrible regime), will certainly represent a roll back of everything achieved by the women’s movement since the Seneca Falls convention in the 1840s. If the domestic dimension of the post-1945 liberal order can be seen to encompass at least a safety net of social welfare; the securing of full women’s reproductive rights to which the right to choose abortion is central, full LTGBT+ rights; the humanising of the justice system including the abolition of capital and corporal punishment; extension of the franchise to all competent adults (as well as to 16 and 17 year olds in some polities); separation of religion from state and civil society and full political and artistic freedom of expression (including the abolition of censorship mechanisms such as the UK’s Lord Chamberlain obscenity and blasphemous laws – though serious work has still to be done in the latter two areas, the US risks plummeting further down the Freedom Index on most of those areas.

If any good news emerged from last week it was the votes by Missouri and Arizona to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada all passing measures to protect them.[7] A possible signpost for progressives is provided by the convening of the Californian legislature by Governor Gavin Newsom for the purpose of defending from the incoming Trump regime in Washington the state's legislative protections of reproductive rights, environmental regulations, voting rights and labour rights. Could there be other states’ rights initiatives by other Democrat gubernatorial and legislative authorities to turn this doctrinal nostrum of the Right on its head? What scope of resistance could Democrat mayors of major cities like New York and Chicago utilise against an attempt by Washington to enforce mass deportations and to use the National Guard to impose its diktats? But it is at such junctures that really dark and irreversible possibilities emerge; cessation of Democrat run states, cities, and counties from a future or near future Trumpian dystopia leading to Civil War. Not for nothing did many commentators describe the election gone past as the most consequential since 1865.

No progressive or indeed any human being with a modicum of conscience could welcome the outbreak of civil war across the Atlantic. But since ultimately we cannot influence what happens in what could be the dying throes of the preeminent Republican Empire since the collapse of the other one – the USSR, we have to look at how we deal with the fallout of Trump now and in the future in these islands and on our continent. The post-1945 liberal international order is conceptualised as resting on intergovernmental institutions dealing with and promoting free trade such as IMF, World Bank, GATT and latterly World Bank and NAFTA; political associations such as the EU, defensive alliances such as NATO and underpinning this architecture is the United Stations. Judicial bodies such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and, post-Cold War, supplemented by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and conventions such as those prohibiting genocide in 1948, use of biological and chemical weapons, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) other regional human and civil rights bodies plus the Responsibility to Protect (RTP) doctrine promulgated in 2005. The frequent invocations of the ethics and validity of the “rules based international order” are equally frequently rebutted by sceptics who view the order as a smokescreen to protect US trading interests and to prevent accountability for the US and its allies in relation to the many military and other types of surreptitious interventions made by the US since 1945. Such accusations of double standards have been forcefully articulated in relation to the bloody Israeli onslaught on Gaza in the aftermath of the Hamas atrocities of 7th October 2023; the US supply to Israel of lethal weapons used in its campaign and the alleged obstruction by the US of the ICC warrants for war crimes to the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant.

An alternative version of the shortcomings of the post-1945 and especially post-1989 global security and justice order would analyse the failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and Darfur genocide of 2003 when the military capability of the major powers to prevent their occurrence existed but not the political will. Another gross failure would be the failure to punish the egregious use of banned sarin gas on the Damascus district of Eastern Gouta in August 2013 by the regime of President Assad during the civil war causing the death of 1,400 civilians (many more were to follow) in very excruciating painful circumstances despite President Obama’s proclamation that such actions would constitute “red lines”. That the requisite course of action was not followed was largely due to a vote in a recalled session of the UK parliament against the participation of UK forces in any military engagement in Syria on 31st August 2013 in the first ever refusal of the House of Commons to authorise military action. A decisive factor in the vote of many MPs was the memory a decade previous of the disastrous US/UK led invasion of Iraq on the pretext of what proved to be duff evidence of Iraqi possession of WND capacity supported by a dubiously framed UN Security Council resolution. This sorry episode provided the critics of the post-war rules-based order with powerful ammunition. It did not help that in 2011 a NATO intervention to prevent a massacre of the residents of the Libyan city of Benghazi by the regime of Colonel Gaddafi during the Arab Spring uprisings of that year later became a pretext for regime change and the subsequent descent of Libya into essentially a failed state racked by a tribal civil war and entrepot for “people smuggling” of European bound sub Saharan refugees.

Tomorrow is Another Day

But all that is yesterday’s news. We now have to embrace the strong possibility of the division of the world into autarkic zones as a result of whatever level of tariff Trump imposes on imported goods. The willingness of Trump and his tech bro partners to contemplate the development of a crypto block chain type of currency such as bitcoin as an international payments system (perhaps not coincidentally similar plans are on the agenda of the BRICS group of nations). Whither then the role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. How then can the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and the new Labour government continue to eschew any possibility of rejoining the European Single Market and Customs Union and regain the benefits of participation in the world’s biggest single trading bloc? For is Trump seriously going to consider a preferential trade deal with a government led by what he considers to be a “dangerous left winger.” If the EU is to become a major global player; the biggest democratic bloc in the world (sans Victor Orban’s Hungary hopefully) then making the Euro, the world’s new reserve currency has to be an objective.

Regarding the other major geo-political issue confronting Europe, Ukraine, the early vibes from a putative Trump administration are not propitious unsurprisingly with Trump officials warning that Ukraine must resign itself to the loss of Crimea and Donald Junior saying that “the taps will be turned off” in thirty days. Now is the time to expedite Ukraine’s admission to the EU and NATO. Now is the time to integrate or at least dovetail the diplomatic and military capital of both. More defence spending granted. But the defence of democracy can never be cheap.

To head off a Trumpian style insurgency from Reform UK led by its articulate, respectable and dangerously ambitious leader Nigel Farage, Labour has the chance to put into practice the redistributionist but growth orientated economic and social programmes which were in Kamala Harris’ manifestoes only they were not heard over all the celebrity endorsement noise. Nor were the consequential achievements of the outgoing US administration in its green industrial New Deal, post- Covid regeneration packages and protection of the pristine beauty of Alaska from the “drill baby drill” ecocidaires. Shout everything from the rooftops!

To round off, enjoy the Christmas and New Year period before girding one’s loins for whatever Executive Orders are signed by the Predator in Chief on 21st January 2025 and in the Ninety-Nine Day period afterwards. Turn anger and grief to proper use in your personal, social, and political circles and commitments. Good Luck Everybody.

[1] Peter Hyman We can rage about Trump. Or we can be curious about why he appealed to so many Observer Comment and Analysis 10th November 2024.

[2] Rhiannon Lucy Cossett For women, a visceral horror has returned. Guardian Opinion 8th November 2024.

[3] Ibid

[4] Justo Robles “What will I do!” Fear of deportation grips undocumented immigrants. Guardian 8th November 2024.

[5] Kenan Malik, Cosplaying social justice is the new elitist way of elbowing out the working-class Observer Comment & Analysis 10th November 2024.

[6] The agenda of the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement that rejects “Christian dominionism;” the idea that Christians are tasked by God to rule over society and government. Alice Hernan ‘Mandate from God’ Trump’s victory fuels the ascendant Christian far right The Guardian 8th November 2024

[7] Lucy Cossett, op cit

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.