At least the hoping is over. This morning the United States of America, the most advanced and successful nation our world has ever seen, has re-elected an authoritarian demagogue who admires dictators, demonises minorities, promotes fear and hate, and already once tried to overthrow democracy in an election he lost.
And not just by a small margin. Trump won handily, in almost all the so-called ‘swing’ states. If the Republicans hold the House, this puts the political Right – arguably the far Right – in charge of all parts of US government: presidency, Congress and Supreme Court. There are no checks and balances with the same party, now controlled by one man, in charge of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches at once.
There will be plenty of time for post mortems. How could American citizens vote for a sex-abuser felon con-man with no political programme to speak of other than his own narcicissm and petty grievances? Not once, but twice? The answer is the one that those of us who believe in science, democracy, truth and rule of law are most reluctant to face: that in much of the world ordinary people have lost trust in the very institutions that we most value.
To make smart choices we need an evidence-based worldview. What could be further from the Trump mentality? He lies constantly, and the authenticity he radiates is wrapped up with his determined and proud ignorance: he is a perennial anti-elitist because he knows nothing and cares less. For voters alienated by modernity, this toxic and reactionary worldview has enduring appeal. But it’s the opposite of everything we are working for.
Whether Trump is a capital ‘F’ fascist is arguable; a debate that will likely be resolved one way or another by events over the next four years. But his schtick is very much ‘triumph of the will’, belief over evidence, feeling over reason, and distrust in any notion of objective, observable truth. Trump says you can’t trust the media, the scientists, the government – anyone but him. And when he changes his mind from one day to the next, and spouts random nonsense, you must do likewise if you are not to become the enemy within. You must follow the Leader.
There have been lots of pronouncements about what Trump might mean for clean energy or the climate. I feel these are missing the point. Trump is only pro-fossil fuels because the elites are green, and renewables are woke. His acolyte Elon Musk made his name with Tesla after all, and certainly did more to advance the EV revolution than any environmental NGO, whatever he now seems to have become. The issue with Trump is something deeper and darker than merely his stance on the environment, and we need to understand what that is.
Yes Trump is a danger to the climate, but more importantly in the short term he is a danger to freedom. He does not value democracy, except where it can provide him with a path to power. He is a true authoritarian, and has never made any effort to disguise this: he sided openly with Putin from the get-go, and has managed to get the entire Republican party to fall in line. If American institutions allow it, he would doubtless prefer not hold another free and fair election in four years.
This should remind us that freedom is never a given. It always has to be fought for. Once taken for granted for long enough, it ebbs away like water through sand. Trump is a disruptor, but only against institutions that constrain his power and act to protect the rule of law. Authoritarian populists can be defeated at the ballot box, as we have seen in Poland and Brazil. They can be defeated on the streets too, as pro-democracy revolutions have shown. People will fight and die to defend their freedom, as the Ukrainians do every day. Freedom isn’t granted from above, it’s seized from below and once won must be perenially renewed and defended.
But freedom depends on truth. How can you hold free elections if there is no truth and you don’t know who to believe? Trump has vowed to put anti-vaccine quack Robert Kennedy Jnr in charge of America’s health service. There could be no better emblem of what he represents than that. RFKJr opposes all evidence-based medicine. But remember where he came from – the environmental movement. With post-modernism and later wokery it was the Left that began the attack on institutional trust that the Right is now taking to a destructive extreme. We must look in the mirror too when we seek to analyse what Trump represents and where he came from.
There have been periods of darkness before in human history, sometimes very long ones. Absent a nuclear war – and Trump will, from 20 January next year, have sole launch authority over America’s nuclear missiles – there will be an end to this nightmare. Our task is not to despair, and not to give in to hopelessness or nihilist extremism of our own. We must keep the light burning. Objective reality cannot simply be wished out of existence, and sooner or later science will win out and truth will return.
When that day dawns is not up to Trump, it is up to us.