In Donald and me (1) I admitted to an obsession with Trump that probably bordered on the unhealthy. I think I went down swinging by suggesting that we all ought to be a little obsessed with the old crazy, or we might be blindsided by his craziness. In Donald and me (2) I rationalised my obsession by reference to an article in the Guardian by Martin Kettle. Mr Kettle attempted to soothe his readers by reasoning that no matter how bad things seemed now, we had been here before in the eighties and nineties and come through it. I said the world had never been where it is now and that no-one really knows whether we can recover from the current crisis.
I suggested that the main reason for the state we are in was the presidency of Donald Trump. I said that what set him apart from every other US president was his capacity to seek revenge at any cost on anyone he thinks has wronged him and his willingness to use the apparatus of the US state to do it. I concluded that the greatest danger he posed to the world might not be his ability to derange the political arrangements of other states, but that he might destroy them in his own, by bringing down the oldest continuous republic in the world.
Around this time I identified a thread in the coverage of the young vloggers I follow, mainly in the US, hinting that Trump might impose martial law or some other emergency legislation and actually postpone or cancel elections in the US. In other words, dictatorship was now the reality for the US, rather than some possibility that lay at the bottom of a slippery political slope.
Today there is an article in the Guardian, discussing exactly this issue. Well, it’s only three weeks behind the curve. This being the Guardian, the article is serious and judicious in tone. “American democracy on the brink a year after Trump’s election, experts say” is the headline, followed by “Scale and speed of president’s moves have stunned observers of authoritarian regimes – is the US in democratic peril?” Blimey.
It starts by listing what Trump has done in his first year to “consolidate his authority” – in other words, to lay waste the institutions that all US citizens take for granted, many of them intertwined with the political checks and balances provided under the constitution.
The article is at pains to be fair. There is no definition of a democracy, it says, reasonably. Views like those hinted at by my vloggers might be partisan, and unreliable. Maybe, the US is just a “flawed” or “illiberal” democracy and there is no need for panic. The article asked us to accept this because a lot of academics say it. These scholars are quoted liberally throughout the piece. The gist is that some say that the US has undergone a democratic collapse in the last year, but others say this is too pessimistic a view.
To digress, these people are referred to as ‘political scientists’ for want of a better term. Political science, eh. I’m just a dumb old man, but when it comes to science, it seems to me you’ve got your science, and then you’ve got your everything else. Science depends on the scientific method and absolute rigour. One instance of a case that disproves your theory, and that’s it, out of the window. Politics is mainly what people do when they don’t have any other choice or have found a compromise that will keep their electorate happy. It has nothing to do with science.
You can be a scholar of politics, which would take in history and other disciplines, like philosophy and so on, but science is science, and politics is politics. We have all lived in recent times through a global upheaval in which science really did collide with politics. In the UK it did not end well because our spoilt child of a prime minister was a scientific dunce, argued the toss with his scientific advisers and then did what he thought was politically expedient.
To expand the argument, some of my vloggers keep referring to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) under its hilarious little popinjay leader Gregory Bovino as a Gestapo. I don’t know why they do this; maybe it is the only arm of the Nazi state apparatus they know about. ICE is actually more like the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA), which was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, often called the Brownshirts.
The head of the SA was Ernst Julius Günther Röhm. If ICE resembles anything from Nazi Germany, it is this lot. But you need to know some history to know about them, which would be better than parroting the word Gestapo because other people have said it.
To show how little politics is bound by anything approaching a scientific analysis, poor old Ernst Julius was a big buddy of Adolf in the beginning and had a good run as a political thug capo. Then he got a bit cocky and started to throw his weight around. Adolf decided he had become inconvenient and Ernst was scooped up with other inconvenients in a purge called The Night of The Long Knives and shot at Stadelheim prison on 1 July 1934.
Maybe the preposterous Bovino should read up a bit about Röhm; “you’re ridin’ high in April, shot down in May”, as ol’ Blue Eyes put it, so well. No law of any science could have predicted the ruthless caprice of Adolf Hitler and his willingness to eradicate all his opposition, using the state apparatus to do it. But wait, a bit of history, maybe…
The Guardian has at least arrived at a story admitting the possibility that US democracy is dead or is circling the drain. It’s only taken three weeks to catch up.
In the meantime, the old maniac has arrived in Davos, where he will doubtless harangue all the rich people from other countries about what a bunch of freeloaders they all are on the US dime, before again reprising all his many achievements since taking office, despite being wronged by everyone. There will be articles in the Guardian and the other heavyweight papers interpreting his ravings, as though they were something with which rational beings can engage on an intellectual level.
I revert to my argument that there is nothing with which to engage. He is a vengeful, narcissistic old man, who wasn’t brought up properly. He will ruin us all unless he is removed from office. No amount of pontification by political scientists will change that simple fact. We should not dignify the foolishness of those who let him get away with it by millions of column inches pretending to take it all seriously.
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