His re-election sets off many alarms in the precarious North American democracy and around the world. Apprehension about inequality, plutocratic hegemony, multilateral global governance and humanitarian decency has reached another level.
If the democratic credentials were already doubtful in a country with an electoral system that suppresses the vote of part of the people and unlimited corporate power to influence elections and public policies (financing both sides), now political science can feel more comfortable classifying the regime as “competitive authoritarianism”.
The last question is knowing how the “checks and balances” will work. It is known that Trump today has more capacity for barbarism. It has a majority in both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court was converted to anti-constitutional servility in its first term and takes pains to revoke its civil liberties jurisprudence.
There remains some autonomy in the state and federal judiciaries, and in subnational governments. There remains hope that history and chance will come up with something good, that pessimistic determinism may fail this time.
The literary imagination about the authoritarian spectrum has us in Sinclair Lewis’s book, “It can’t happen here”, from 1935, a landmark. In times of the Great Depression and the rise of , he imagined a president elected on the basis of fear, hatred and great patriotic solutions. In a self-coup, he installs a totalitarian regime.
Lewis inspired a lineage: “It Happened Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America”, 1989; “It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in America,” 2001; “It Could Happen Here: The Authoritarian Danger in the Bush Era”, 2007; “It Happened Here: A Popular Anti-Fascist History”, 2023, among others.
It was enacted in 1949, which stated “never again” for the . He placed in the constitutional court and the idea of militant democracy the expectation of neutralizing extremist movements and majorities in tachycardia. Post-authoritarian constitutions of the period tried their “never again” remedies.
Today Germany lives under two alarms: the prospect of war with Germany and the risk of electoral victory for the AfD, a neo-Nazi party. It adopts two preventive measures: re-arms itself, contrary to the post-war security arrangement, and amends the Constitution so that the court cannot easily be co-opted by an occasional majority, as in neighboring countries.
One of the indicators of the capacity for democratic resistance to the autocratic onslaught is the autonomy of State institutions. Public functions designed to operate impartially require protection from capture. Especially the institutions of Justice, especially the higher courts and the leadership of the .
But legal protection is not enough. The mission also depends on the institutional ethos and individual willingness not to allow oneself to be captured. A question of culture and character. Of intellectual and moral competence to be impartial (and also appear impartial, convincingly).
In Brazil, the political horizon raises alarm bells. The must do more and better, but not alone. Much less monocratically. I return to the topic next week.
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