For digital autocrats, freedom is the absence of law. They do not allow market regulations to guarantee the rights of users, protect children, hinder hate speech or limit the abuses of their monopolies. They do not allow it in the United States, but they do not intend to tolerate it in Europe, where any initiative that limits the margins of action of their companies and even an interference in the sovereignty of the American superpower.
Their freedom is not for citizens, but for billionaires. To Lenin’s famous and insidious question, they respond in unison with similar totalitarian cynicism. Freedom for what? For unlimited economic profit, to put Donald Trump in the White House or to prevent the united European liberal democracies from setting limits on their greed.
The offensive has been fully deployed with the second and most rampaging Trump presidency, but the pernicious ideas that have fueled it come from afar and explain its rise in the last decade. 15 years ago, the ultimate arbiter of the United States Constitution, which is the Supreme Court, based the right of companies to finance electoral campaigns on the incredible argument of the protection of freedom of expression. If in a country like the United States, founded on the principle of equality between citizens, a few billionaires can form parliaments and governments or place the most clown, famous and liar of their own as president, we should not be surprised that they now want to do the same in Europe, an annoying territory with sovereign claims to resist their authoritarian claims.
This monstrous concept of freedom is understood only as a procedure to achieve power and in no case as a representative government of the majority, organized with the rules of the rule of law and the division of powers, which is both a pluralistic and tolerant way of life. Trump only recognizes the electoral results when they are favorable to him and denounces the system every time he suffers a defeat. He wants freedom for himself and his people, for his businesses and to break the law, but he denies it to his adversaries to exercise their rights. That democracy and that freedom of Trumpism, incompatible with the European order based on rules, are divisive and exclusive, a mere facade that differs little from Bolshevik concepts.
The convergence of methods between the now-defunct Bolshevism and the Trumpist extreme right has its correlation in the grip on the European Union exercised by Putin, the heir of Soviet totalitarianism, and Trump, the last avatar of the extreme right that ascended in Europe a hundred years ago. For both, the improbable dream of a united and strategically independent European continent is an unbearable nightmare.
