Trump Wins: a thought experiment

The United States are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time. — Walt Whitman, 1871

EMOTIONLESS HERE.

If Trump wins fair and square in November—wins the most votes, without cheating or coups—it will not immediately be the end of democracy in America. 

But it will be the instant end of liberal democracy here. We will become like modern-day Hungary or perhaps a Confucianist society—an illiberal democracy. 

That’s a discordant place to be for an American. In fact, it doesn’t compute. We’d have no civil rights or civil liberties but we’d retain the vote.

The vote wouldn’t last, of course. Under Trump, we’d first lose liberal institutions, and then, after an interval, electoral democracy would vaporize too. But for a few interesting and terrifying months we’d have to come to terms with the fact that Americans had voted down…America.

As neocon Robert Kagan points out in his new book Rebellion, MAGA voters clearly see the risk Trump poses to our fundamental human rights, and support him anyway.  Indeed, they support him precisely because he brazenly rejects human rights—and, along with those rights he, like Alexander Dugin, he rejects humanity itself as conceived of during the Enlightenment, and as enshrined in America’s founding documents.

Trump has thus come to embody the legal, economic, cultural, and political customs of medieval feudalism in the way Whitman used the word: a system in which disenfranchised masses labor for an elite few with an inherited title. In this case that title is Trump.

It was clear from the earliest days of American democracy that no government by the people could be sustained if we lost our commitment to the liberal ideals of the Declaration of Independence. We’d have to love liberty—and not just for ourselves and our running buddies, but as an abstract ideal for all humans. 

We the people are losing hold of that ideal. And if Trump wins fair and square, it will be clear that Americans have rejected the American experiment and have voted to overthrow it. And we will have to proceed from there.